Cooper's Claim About Beowulf Part 2
In the next chapter in his After the Flood book, Cooper goes on to fabricate the famous epic poem about a folkloric hero named Beowulf. The explanations Cooper made of the poem is the direct result of him fabricating the poem to fit his idiot beliefs about dinosaurs. None of what he claims is factual and he knows it. Here he gets the translations of many Old English words wrong for the purpose of making them as if they mean one thing while they actually mean another. The poem was written sometime around 1000 AD by a minstrel who wrote the tale as entertainment for the people living at the time when the things we take for granted such as radio and TV were completely unheard of at that time. Yet, Cooper wants us to believe that this epic poem is an historical account of Beowulf fighting and killing dinosaurs while none of the monsters Beowulf saw, fought, and killed were ever dinosaurs at all. According to Beowulf and the Dinosaurs page (shown below), we read at the conclusion of this article that Bill Cooper is not just a so-called "keen student" of Bible history, but he's also a "keen student" of both archeology and paleontology (!) Seriously folks, Cooper is in fact none of it. A true paleontologist, archaeologist, and Bible Historian would never, ever rely on mythology, legends, fairy tales, and folklore and cite them as "historical dinosaur evidence" which is exactly what Cooper is stupidly doing on these 2 pages below.
Beowulf and the Dinosaurs
Beowulf and the Creatures of Denmark
Citing mythology, legends, fairy tales, and folklore as scientific and archaeological evidence is, without question, the most worthless form of science ever. All these things, hands down, has proven nothing of what YECs like Cooper claim about dinosaurs.
Cooper's Claim about Grendel
In the Beowulf and the Dinosaurs article, Cooper wishes to dispel the notion of Grendel and his mother being trolls. He's right. Neither Grendel nor his mother were neither dragons or trolls. Nor were they dinosaurs either. They were in fact ogres, hideous human-like monsters who are said to be direct descendants of Cain, the one who murdered Abel out of jealousy according Genesis 4 of the Bible. However, Cooper absent-mindedly makes it as if the monsters Beowulf has slain were indeed dinosaurs, while they were not. Grendel and his mother being direct descendants of Cain is what Cooper deliberately leaves out in his explanations of what Grendel and his mother were like. Cooper regards Beowulf to be a so-called "seasonal dinosaur hunter" while there were no dinosaurs around to hunt for. Much of what Cooper made-up and fabricates is told about Grendel and his mother claiming they were part of a "reptilian" race that lived in the swamp right near where Grendel and his mother lived.
Now, does this sound like dinosaurs to you according to this actual description of these giants told in the actual poem?
"Hrothgar's people lived in joy, happy until that wanderer of the wasteland, Grendel the demon, possessor of the moors, began his crimes. He was of a race of monsters exiled from mankind by God— He was of the race of Cain, that man punished for murdering his brother. From that family comes all evil beings— monsters, elves, zombies. Also the giants who fought with God and got repaid with the flood."
It's obvious this poem become a victim of Cooper's quote mining of the ancient text. No dinosaur was a descendant of Cain.
Cooper's Claim about the Knucker
Cooper throws in more fabrications that will never be seen in the actual epic tale of Beowulf; the killings of wyrm dragons Cooper falsely and stupidly calls "dinosaurs" while wyrms are in fact everything dinosaurs are not (i.e. snake-like bodies, poison venom, etc.). One of the dragons Cooper mentions about is a dragon known as the Knucker, a dragon that is said to have many heads (no dinosaur has many heads) according to this page, 4 limbs, and wings, that lives in a lake known as the Knucker Hole. Although it was a water serpent, it can fly. When it does fly, it has been known to devour many people and animals until the king decrees that anyone who kills the dragon will marry his daughter. There are 3 versions of the story. One of them features a young boy named Jim Pulk, who baked a pie made of poison and offered it to the dragon. The dragon ate the pie and dies shortly afterwords. Jim also dies afterwords, possibly from the same poison he put in the pie.
Cooper's Claim about Old English Names
And then, there are other pseudo-dinosaurs Cooper mentions to which he claims Beowulf and his men killed and dragged onto the shore for examination, Nuckelavee, ythgewinnes, wyrmas, wildeor, niceras nigne and Nykir. Humph! Some dinosaurs he mentions here, isn't it? It's too bad these "dinosaurs" are not what Cooper claims to be. When examined more closely, we find that Nuckelavee was an evil dwarf of Celtic Mythology who lived in the sea, ythgewinnes something the YEEs made up that they claim to mean "wave thrasher" that turns out to be a mis-usage of the words "laguflód" which means "wave" and "winnan" which means "fight" or "war", wyrmas is a "purple fish" or "plant used for dyeing", wildeor means "wild beast" or "wild deer", niceras translate as "sea monster","walrus", or "hippopotamus", the actual old English word for nine is not "nigne" but "nigon" and finally Nykir is a place located on the Lofoten Islands right near where the Vaeroy tourist office is located at. Thus, it is apparent that this notion of beowulf and his army killing all those so-called "dinosaurs" are completely nothing but an outright lie.
Cooper's Geneology Fables
Next, he gives out 2 Genealogy charts he made up himself featuring Beowulf as part of a lineage of kings that don't even exist, including the Danish King Hrothgar.
Cooper's List of the various names of Grendel
Then, Cooper, switching back to the subject of Grendel, gives out a list of made-up terms and his false belief of what the terms mean.
All above mean nothing of what Cooper claims about them. Grendel was in fact none of above.
Cooper's claim about Beowulf's Dragon
Just like the old English terms mentioned, the terms, "reptile" and "reptilian" doesn't necessary refer to as "dinosaur," "pterosaur" or "Mesozoic marine reptile." Cooper asserts all this only because they're are large, reptilian, and monstrous. In Cooper's delusional eyes, if it looks like a dinosaur, pterosaur, or Mesozoic marine reptile, it is one. Never mind their gross inaccuracies which clearly tells him they're clearly not what he asserts they are.
Like all YECs, Cooper would use the term "reptile" or "reptilian" to make the deceived think that the dragons they are describing in the fabricated tales are actually dinosaurs while dinosaurs in fact are far from being "reptiles" or "reptilian". They are all nothing more than birds.
The last monster to be destroyed by Beowulf (and from which encounter Beowulf also died in the year AD 583) was a flying reptile which lived on a promontory overlooking the sea at Hronesness on the southern coast of Sweden. Now, the Saxons (and presumably the Danes) knew flying reptiles in general as lyftlogas (air-fliers,) but this particular species of flying reptile, the specimen from Hronesnes, was known to them as a widfloga, literally, a wide (or far-ranging) flyer, and the description that they have left us fits that of a giant Pteranodon. Interestingly, the Saxons also described this creature a ligdraca, literally fire-dragon, and he is described as fifty feet in length (or perhaps wing-span?) and about 300 years of age. (Great age is a common feature even among todays's non-giant reptiles.) Moreover, and of particular interest to us, the name widfloga would have distinguished this particular species of flying reptile from another similar species which was capable of making only short flights. Modern palaeontologists have named such a creature Pterodactyl.
Rebuttal: The claim is nothing more than a direct, blatant fabrication of Beowulf's encounter with a gold-hording fire drake who had a coiling snake-like body that's everything Pteranodon is not despite Cooper's crackpot assertion of it. By the way, the word "Hronesnes" is spelled as Hronesness, a place in Sweden.
As part of his false claim about a Pterosaur being the dragon Beowulf killed, Cooper shows an image of what appears to be a Saxon Shield (It's a Shield mount to be exact found among the relics fished up from an unusual buried ship located in the Sutton Hoo grave site near Woodbridge, Suffolk, England.) depicting what he falsely thinks is a pterosaur at rest on his Beowulf and the Creatures of Denmark page.
The artifact above do not depict a pterosaur. It depicts the dragon Beowulf killed just before he dies from the wounds coming from the creature. Plus, pterosaurs never had such tails as shown at the bottom of the artifact. And did the artifact show any traces hair on its body like pterosaurs have? No, it doesn't. It only bore scales on its body. Nothing else. And no pterosaur ever rested the way Cooper asserts according to what he thinks the shield represents.
Pterosaurs in reality rested like this:
And Pteranodon, unlike the dragon in the poem, is measured in wingspan about 25-27 feet, weigh about 35 pounds, have hair and a body like a gorilla, and is about 6 ft. tall, about as tall as an average man. Pteranodon had no teeth unlike the dragon Beowulf killed which had teeth like the fangs of a cobra that secretes venom into Beowulf when it bit him in battle. Pteranodon, along with all other Pterosaurs, never had a life span of 300 years or more, nor did it guard gold either. Pteranodon is a pterosaur that lived in the Late Cretaceous Period about 70 million years ago in North America. Although Pterosaurs are sometimes nicknamed as "flying dragons" for they remind people of wing dragons of ancient folklore, all Pterosaurs, in fact, are everything "widfloga" (wide flier of a dragon), "ligdraca" (fiery dragon), and "lyftfloga" (flier in the air, a dragon) are not (i.e. Poisonous, fire breathers, coiling bodies, etc.) and vice versa. Cooper, in the last part of his fabrication concerning about a so-called "pterodactyl", is actually referring to Pterodactylus, a tiny Late Jurassic pterosaur that can make much longer flights despite Cooper's laughable, crackpot assumptions about it.
The dragon Beowulf fought and slain was a 50ft long fire drake with a fiery breath, coiling body, bat wings with 4 elongated bony rods supporting a sheet of skin and a spike on top, a poisonous bite, and a strong lust for gold. This dragon was guarding its own horde of gold when a servant, in trouble with his master, stole a gold chalice from the horde, enraging the dragon, and cause it to go on a rampage destroying villages and killing off anyone it believes to be the one responsible for the theft. When Beowulf learns of this, he went and fought and killed the dragon, but the wounds and the poison the dragon that inflicted Beowulf took a fatal toll on him and he died shortly afterwords.
Cooper's Claim about Grendel Again!
Ironically, even though Cooper does admit that the poem clearly mentioned Grendel being described a monstrous human who was Cain's descendant, Cooper still wrongly and stupidly insists on regarding this monster as a dinosaur. Hands down one of stupidest lies ever came out of his mouth and one of the best examples of how creationists abricate tales and twisted them to fit in with their beliefs, never getting in their heads that creatures like Grendel were ogres and Beowulf was a fictional character made up by a Minstrel a millennia ago at the time where the only form of entertainment people had is watching heretics get burned at the stake.
For twelve years, the Danes had themselves attempted to kill Grendel with conventional weapons - knives, swords, arrows and the like. Yet his impenetrable hide had defied them all, and Grendel was able to attack the Danes with impunity. Beowulf considered all this and decided that the only way to tackle the monster was to get to grips with him at close quarters. The monster's forelimbs, which the Saxons called eorms (arms) and which some translate as claws, were small and comparatively puny. They were the monster's one weak spot, and Beowulf went straight for them. He was already renowned for his prodigious strength of grip, and he used this to literally tear off one of Grendel's small arms. Grendel, however, is also described, in line 2079 of the poem, as a muthbona, that is, one who slays with his mouth or jaws, and the speed with which he was able to devour his human prey tells us something of the size of his jaws and teeth. Yet, it is the very size of Grendel's jaws that would have aided Beowulf in going for the forelimbs, because pushing himself hard into the animal's chest between those forelimbs would have placed Beowulf tightly underneath those jaws and would thus have sheltered him from Grendel's terrible teeth. We are told that as soon as Beowulf gripped the monster's claws (and we must remember that Grendel was only a youngster, and not by all accounts a fully mature adult male of his species), the startled animal tried to pull away instead of attacking Beowulf. The animal instinctively knew the danger he was now in, and he wanted to escape the clutches of the man who now posed such an unexpected threat and who was inflicting such alarming pain. However, it was this action of trying to pull away that left Grendel wide open to Beowulf's strategy. Thus, Beowulf was able in the ensuing struggle eventually to wrench off one of the animal's arms, as so graphically described in the poem. As a result of this appalling injury, the young dinosaur returned to his lair and simply bled to death.
Rebuttal: The claim is all the result of Cooper fabricating the fight between a grown up ogre and a brave strong warrior outright. Note in the Creatures of Denmark page there is a Babylonian image of a cylinder depiction of what Cooper thinks it's a warrior tearing at a so-called Grendel-like bipedial monster. This is false. The image actually depicts the Babylonian deity Marduk battling Tiamat, a monstrous goddess whom Marduk used her body to create the Heavens and the Earth after he killed her in Babylonian mythology.
The arms of Grendel is anything but small. The arms of the ogre was huge and muscular. In the poem, we read that the ogre was protected by a magic spell. That's why the people wasn't able to kill him with a sword or any other man-made weapon. Beowulf had to engage in hand to hand combat against Grendel. With all of his strength he tore off one of the ogre's arms leaving the monster to scream, curse, and bleed in pain. The ogre staggered back into his cave where he died from loss of blood.
The word "eorms" is a misusage of either the word "eorns" which means "anger" or "eormen" which means "universal" or "general".
The old English word for "múthbona" actually translate as "devourer" which is what the ogre in fact was.
The rest of the page tells about Grendel being a silent hunter who hunts quietly in the cover of the night. Cooper never mentions to his followers the real reason to why the ogre would attack the Danish at night which is because he could no longer stand the noise and the revelry going on at a party that took place right near where his cave is located at on the outskirts of Denmark. Grendel was a party crasher. For 12 years, he went about crashing parties by going in when the revelers fell into a drunken type sleep and snatches them up to devour.
Cooper's Conclusions
Cooper then concludes the article by by first saying,
"The study of living dinosaurs from the ancient records is a fascinating one, and we have here examined only a few of the surviving examples. One or two of the accounts (not dealt with here) that have come down to us could, arguably, be dismissed either on the grounds that they are plainly fanciful or that they are so hopelessly muddled that no accurate knowledge can be gleaned from them. But the vast majority of the accounts, such as these that we have examined, are sober and detailed reports of the not always malevolent creatures that our forebears encountered. "The flying reptiles of Wales"(1) that survived until very recent times are just one further example. Those of the North American Indians are another. The reports are surprisingly consistent, and together they give the lie to those scurrilous charges that are so often laid by modernist scholars at our ancestors' proverbial door. You can only say so often that records and traditions are fake, and that their authors are either habitual and unscrupulous liars and fraudsters, or else the most gullible fools in history. There comes a point when either it has to be acknowledged that there is substance to the reports, or the reports themselves are ignored. Modernists have chosen the latter course."
In other words, Cooper claims that all of these "sightings" were written by authors to whom he claims were telling the "truth" all along despite efforts by the so-called modernists to discredit them. That statement is a lie itself. These what Cooper have "examined" are all nothing but outright, fabrications made by taking mythology and folklore written by poets, musicians, and storytellers to entertain people out of context and change them to make them say what the creationists themselves want them to say. They are distorted in every way by the likes of Cooper so they can fit them in with their false beliefs and paint false images of what they thinks to be dinosaurs while being blatantly ignorant of the fact that none of the dinosaurs have what dragons have as described in ancient folklore. None of them are reports of people living with dinosaurs. If they were, then that will not explain how come we find no traces of human and dinosaur remains mixed together in the fossil record.
See Part 2 of Cooper's Pseudo-History of Dinosaurs for the rebuttal of the so-called flying reptiles of Wales.
Dragon References
Old English Dictionary This is the Old English Dictionary one can look up and find what certain words mean in Old English.
The Adventures of Beowulf The original adaptation to the Old English version of the epic poem of Beowulf.
Celtic Dragon tales. The page is part of The Reptilian Research Archive website.
