Nov

9

Beowulf.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 9, 2007 |

In an interview on G4 television’s Attack Of The Show, scriptwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary said they’d never heard that Beowulf is a kind of Hollywood joke until they’d started working on a script. Other filmmakers have tried to bring Beowulf to the big screen, one of the most recent efforts being director Sturla Gunnarsson’s dull and slow Beowulf And Grendel, but, with a highly stylized format reminiscent of the extremely successful 300, Gaiman, Avary, and director Robert Zemeckis may pull it off. Of course I don’t know movies–at least not as well as The Movie Maven–but I do know books and I certainly know Beowulf. Even though a lot of English majors laughed at Woody Allen’s line “Don’t take any class where you have to read Beowulf” in Annie Hall I’ve always loved the poem, and I’ve always been as fascinated by its history as much as its story.

Beowulf is an epic poem, more than three-thousand lines long, written some time between the seventh and ninth centuries. It’s the only surviving major work of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and it survives in only one manuscript currently housed in the British Library, having passed through various hands and was once, in the eighteenth century, almost lost in a fire.

A lot of early Beowulf scholarship centered around the poem’s language, its time, and its history. That changed with a lecture delivered before the British Academy on November 25, 1936, by J.R.R. Tolkien. In addition to being inspired by Beowulf and other medieval epics when writing The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings Tolkien was one of few scholars to consider the epic as literature. He considered it great literature, and helped give the poem a place in the literary canon. Tolkien asked critics–whom he considered the real monsters–to enjoy Beowulf as a work of literature, warning that, “myth is alive at once and in all its parts and dies before it can be dissected”.

And yet Tolkien wasn’t opposed to analysis of the poem; he did find meaning in it. His main problem was with critics who skimmed the surface, reading the poem but never really listening to it. The author of Beowulf was a Christian, and there are numerous Christian references throughout the poem. Grendel, we’re told, is a descendant of Cain, and, in the end, Beowulf goes to meet his destiny with eleven other men: twelve disciples. It was written in a transitional time, which is interesting; the heroes are pagans, but the story, like many pagan traditions, is adapted to serve a Christian purpose. And the poet significantly finds a lot to admire in his pagan ancestors: bravery, goodness, and wisdom. Tolkien, and others, also found that there’s a very purposeful three-part structure to the poem, a trinity in which evil rises up and is overcome. Regardless of whether or not we, the readers, are Christians, the poem is powerful and moving; at its heart it’s about overcoming the worst in ourselves.

In the first part we’re introduced to the world of Beowulf. It opens with the story of Scyld Scefing, a good king who founded the Danish royal line. The poem then moves to King Hrothgar and his mighty hall Heorot. Hrothgar has trouble, though: after long nights of celebrating when his men have passed out the monster Grendel comes in and kills and eats several of Hrothgar’s men. The hero Beowulf, a Geat, comes across the sea to fight the monster. In this first section Beowulf can be seen as a person fighting the monster within himself. The Danes, Geats, and Swedes of the poem were warriors, but they seem to have understood that if they didn’t temper their bloodthirst they could easily wipe out each other and themselves. There’s a curious parallel between Beowulf’s fight with Grendel, which is large and dramatic, and a quieter moment before the fight when Beowulf is challenged by Unferth, one of Hrothgar’s men. Unferth brings up a swimming match between Beowulf and another hero, Breca. Even though Beowulf is a warrior and a man of action, he doesn’t answer with his fists or sword. He says that Unferth is drunk and has gotten the story wrong. Beowulf first explains that he’s not proud of the swimming match which was a silly act of boyish bravado. He then tells Unferth that he not only won the swimming match but killed nine sea monsters who were trying to drag him under. Unferth concedes he’s misheard the story, and later on expresses his support and admiration for Beowulf, seeming to say, “Hey, no hard feelings.” Grendel is the personification of festering resentment and anger; he comes and kills when the men are drunk and sleepy. Unferth is as much his opposite as Beowulf.

After defeating Grendel Beowulf has to fight an uglier monster: Grendel’s mother, played in the film, by the way, by Angelina Jolie. In the poem Grendel’s mother is not a temptress, but but this is a significant bit of creativity on the part of Gaiman and Avary, and it fits with the theme. In Grendel’s mother Beowulf is now taking on the demons of domestic violence, of intra-family anger, of lust and rape. He swims down through snake-infested water to fight her in a cave, almost like returning to the womb. In another parallel the calmness and wisdom of Hrothgar’s wife Wealhtheow are a perfect counter to the viciousness of Grendel’s mother.

Beowulf returns to his home and becomes a good king, ruling for fifty years. Not even the best king can have peace forever, though, and just as there’s evil in our selves there’s an evil in civilization as well. A dragon has found a treasure horde in Geatland and is now killing Beowulf’s people to protect it. Beowulf sets out with eleven companions, but when they come to fight the dragon all but one, a young man named Wiglaf, back down. Greed and cowardice have gotten the upper hand, but only temporarily. Beowulf kills the dragon, but he’s mortally wounded. His bravery will stand as an example even though the poet says that the days of the Geats’ greatness are over; slavery, exile, and death are all that wait for them. The treasure is cursed. Gold inspires greed, after all, and Wiglaf even suggests that Beowulf was responsible for his own death by trying to take the treasure. Even the best of us have moments of weakness. In the end the treasure is put on Beowulf’s funeral pyre.

It’s a powerful, dramatic story full of big battle scenes and magnificent speeches. In other words it’s the ideal Hollywood epic. In their interview Gaiman and Avery, jokingly, I think, said that their adaptation meant no one would ever have to read the book again. And yet, no matter how good the movie is, like most epics, like most great works of literature, for that matter, Beowulf can never really be replaced by any cinematic adaptation. It’s written in a dead language, but, fortunately, we have numerous translations, including Seamus Heaney’s, which is one of the best, to make Beowulf as alive as it was to its original audience.

John Gardner, who wrote the novel Grendel, described epics as being like cathedrals or temples. Epics are literary monuments built to last. Movie theaters, with their high ceilings and long rows of seats, are like modern cathedrals. Whether the film Beowulf, or any other film, for that matter, will last remains to be seen. The written epic, though, creates a cathedral of its own in our imaginations, and has stood for at least a thousand years. Here’s hoping it’ll stand for a thousand more.


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