The Conflicts in BeowulfBrian Wilkie and James Hurt in Literature of the Western World discuss what is perhaps the main or central conflict in the poem Beowulf, namely the struggle between good and evil, and how monsters are representative of the evil side: Ker was answered in 1936 by the critic and novelist JRR Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings, who argued that “monsters are not an inexplicable error of taste; they are essential, fundamentally linked to the underlying ideas of the poem, which give it its elevated tone and its high seriousness. For Tolkien, monsters were the symbol of the eternal forces of evil while remaining true monsters (1273). The many conflicts within Beowulf are both external and internal. Conflict is how the relationship between the protagonist and antagonist is described in a literary work (Abrams 225). There is also another type of conflict that Clark describes below that takes place in the mind and soul of a given character. George Clark in "The Hero and the Theme" refers to an internal conflict within the hero of Beowulf himself, and how the hero seems to lose this conflict: although a strong critical movement followed Klaeber in considering Beowulf a Christian hero or even a figure of Christ, the largest and most influential group of post-war critics, including Margaret Goldsmith (1960, 1962, 1970), read the poem as accusing the hero of moral shortcomings according to one or another standard of judgment Christian (see also Bolton 1978). The poem became a neo-Aristotelian tragedy in which the hero's flaw could be identified as sin, greed or pride (279).HL Rogers in “The Three Great Fights of Beowulf” expresses his opinion as a literary critic regarding... .. . in the center of the sheet ......is B. Gummere. http://wiretap.area.com/ftp.items/Library/Classic/beowulf.txt George Clark in "The Hero and the Theme" in A Beowulf Handbook, edited by Robert Bjork and John D. Niles. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.Clover, Carol F. “The Unferth Episode.” In the Beowulf Reader, edited by Peter S. Baker. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. Ogilvy, J.D.A., and Donald C. Baker. "The Heroic Death of Beowulf." In Readings on Beowulf, edited by Stephen P. Thompson. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1998.Clark, George. Beowulf. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Rogers, H. L. “The Three Great Fights of Beowulf.” In An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, edited by Lewis E. Nicholson. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963. Wilkie, Brian and James Hurt, editors. "Beowulf." In the literature of the Western world. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1984.