I tend to avoid describing battles too often. When I was younger, I thought they made for the most interesting writing, but having aged a bit I find that it can be distasteful if the only content to a story is fighting. That being said, I want to write about Bhima's fight with Hidimba.
In the story, Hidimba is a rakshasa who lives in a forrest and likes to eat people. When the Pandavas brothers come to the forrest, he smells them, and wants to eat them. He sends his sister, Hidimbi, to find them, but when she does, she see's Bhima and falls immediately in love. Instead of bringing the humans back to her brother, she declares her love for Bhima. After growing impatient, Hidimba comes to kill the humans himself. Bhima drags him off into the heart of the forrest to fight him, intending to take the fight away from his sleeping brothers so they wouldn't wake. But they do, so that was unfortunate... Arjuna mentions that the demon will get stronger in the sunlight. This sends Bhima into a rage, and he becomes very strong. He grabs the demon by the hair and the waist and breaks the demon's back over his knee.
One of the reasons I liked the (short) description of this fight was that Bhima was using his bare hands to fight a supernatural creature which should be able to beat him. This reminded me very much of Beowulf, one of my favorite epics of all time. In Beowulf, the protagonist hears about a monster named Grendel who has been eating warriors in a kingdom. Beowulf decides to fight the creature unarmed (and in the story, naked) and tears the monster's arm off with his bare strength. I thought this might bring me some inspiration in my descriptions.
Image Info:
Beowulf and Grendel - Deviant Art
No comments:
Post a Comment