“Iam ripper !... tearer !... slasher !...” is how the hero Beowulf says hello in the current movie version of the ancient poem.
“Beowulf,” the poem, is the first epic work in the history of English literature. Beowulf, the movie, adds to the warrior’s resume: Soundtrack CD !... movie tie-in comic book !... video game ! And question ! How else will a computer-animated movie affect one of the English language’s oldest stories ? High schools and universities teach the 1, 300- (or so ) -year- (or so ) year-old poem as a cultural history lesson, a translation challenge, and for the rough beauties of the Anglo-Saxon language. Uh-huhhh. Or as Woody Allen says to Diane Keaton in Annie Hall: “Just don’t take any class where you have to read Beowulf.” The movie is the latest of Hollywood’s several tries at hacking through a legendarily tough read to pry loose the story — about a big guy who rips the arm off a monster. It’s Superman meets Friday the 13 th, baby. Ow !
The movie, Beowulf, comes from almost 3, 200 lines of Old English. Nobody knows who penned the original manuscript, but the latest screenplay credit goes to Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction ) and fantasy writer Neil Gaiman.
Gaiman spoke at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway in November 2006. In fact, he wrote some of the movie in his motel room in North Little Rock, according to UCA creative writing professor Terry Wright.
“The film was in production when he was here. He had to finish X-amount of scenes every day,” Wright says. “He did say it was one of the more challenging things he’d ever had to do.”
Wright tells the brawny saga of Gaiman’s appearance at UCA. The visiting author gave a talk about his novels (American Gods, Anansi Boys ), graphic novels (Sandman ) and other movies (Stardust, MirrorMask ). Gaiman attracted such a crowd of fans that he signed books for hours into the rainy night.
Finally, he asked where he could find a steak — at 1: 30 in the morning, as if it were an easy question. He is a traveler, born in England, moved to Minneapolis, stopped in Conway in between engagements in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and used to finding restaurants open. “I said, uh... Denny’s,” Wright recounts. “So we went to Denny’s.” The late hour, the storm, the waiter with the bad wig, the celebrity writer sawing into a Denny’s steak like Beowulf in Denmark — “it was just surreal,” Wright says. Naturally, he saw the movie. “I thought it was an interesting action picture,” Wright says. “Was it Beowulf ? Probably not.”
GEAT DOWN ! The poem describes Beowulf’s three mightiest accomplishments. He rips a scaly arm off the monster Grendel; he kills Grendel’s swamp-thing of a mother; and, late in life when it really hurts, he snuffs out a dragon. Whereas — the movie makes Grendel’s mom such a hottie, even Beowulf falls for her. Angelina Jolie lends shimmery gold shape to the evil siren, whose demonic powers include the ability to generate stiletto heels as if she had Jimmy Choo tucked between her toes.
“Some of my colleagues in English are freaked out over Grendel’s mother having high heels,” Wright says.
But then, he asks, “what do you want ?” It’s a movie.
Want the real thing ? Read the poem.
Or try.
“It’s not an easy read, obviously,” he says. Here, for example, is how the warrior Beowulf talks in the new movie version:
“They say you have a monster. They say your lands are cursed. I am Beowulf, and I will kill your monster.” Here’s the same scrapper in the Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s translation of the ancient manuscript (Beowulf, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000 ):
“I had a fixed purpose when I put to sea.
As I sat in the boat with my band of men,
I meant to perform to the uttermost
what your people wanted or perish in the attempt,
in the fiend’s clutches. And here’s the text in Old English as it lay for Heaney to untangle — the unlikely makings of a best-seller the year Heaney’s translation came out:
“ Ic paet hogode, pa ic on holm gestah,
sae-bat gesaet mid minra secga gedriht...”
And so on, as best a modern newspaper’s typeface can accommodate the poem’s old spellings, and alphabetic characters and accents, which aren’t so easy as they look.
No wonder it takes a determined scholar to meet the real Beowulf — the version of him that survives from a single manuscript, a tale from so long-long ago that the wording looks like Grendel’s mutters and groans.
J. R. R. Tolkien’s study of Beowulf shaped his own fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien summed up years of research in a paper he presented to The British Academy, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936 ). He favored the monsters.
Better to read Beowulf just for its fiends and terrors, he argued, than to wring the poem dry for whatever it teaches about Nordic culture and religion. He took his own advice, too, starting with a children’s story, The Hobbit.
UCA English professor and Assistant Provost Jonathan Glenn tracks the connection in his article, “To Translate a Hero: The Hobbit as Beowulf Retold” (1991 ) for the Arkansas Philological Association. Here is one of the similarities Glenn points out:
Tolkien’s little adventurer, Bilbo Baggins, takes a page from Beowulf ’s book — or scroll — and kills a dragon. Readers quickly detected a familiar scent to the dragon’s breath. Tolkien agreed: “Beowulf is among my most valued sources.” But Tolkien insisted he had to write the story the way he did. “I fancy,” he added, “the author of Beowulf would say much the same.”
“I’m very alive to the importance Beowulf had for J. R. R. Tolkien,” Glenn says, recalling his own tackling of the poem.
“I read a translation of it in a high school [literature ] class,” he says. “All I remember of that reading is the phrase, ‘the grim and gruesome Grendel. ’”
In time, he learned Old English in order to set sail in Beowulf’s long ship.
“I think it’s worth it, but that’s because I enjoy the taste of the language,” he says. “It’s ‘ chewy,’ I think, if you can imagine what I mean.
“ I suspect that a lot of people will at least begin the poem as a result of the movie.”
Those who venture into Grendel’s realm without an advanced English degree are going to want the poem in translation, “and there are many to choose from,” Glenn says.
“My favorite is Stanley Greenfield’s A Readable Beowulf, but many people will like Seamus Heaney’s translation. Others will profit from the facing page Old English-Modern English of Howell Chickering’s Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition.
Readers who stick with it may not find the same, cinematic Beowulf who not only slew the dragon, but also sold them popcorn. But Glenn imagines they’ll find a surprisingly relevant hero:
“ Today, humanity still has to decide how to face overwhelming dangers, how to deal with large-scale catastrophe, whether hope is possible, what it means to be heroic in response to the world, and how temporary heroism is.”
DRAGON’S HOARD The new Beowulf is a digital 3-D, special-effects blowout that gives the hero a kind of arm-twisting clout he never had before — movie merchandising. The trove includes: Beowulf: The Script Book by Gaiman and Avary. Beowulf the graphic novel, based on the script. The Art of Beowulf, the coffee-table book. Beowulf the soundtrack by Alan Silvestri, featuring “What We Need Is a Hero” and “I’m Here to Slay Your Monster.” Beowulf: The Game for PlayStation 3. And toy action figures of Beowulf, Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon.
Chances are the old Beowulf will keep sailing for Denmark the same as always, to rid the land of evil, long after the last toy dragon goes to the closet. There will be more flagons raised in triumph in the majestic mead hall of Heorot. And there will be more English classes, and more heads scratched over what it all means.
But the movie could make at least one lasting difference.
“Now, I’m going to see Angelina Jolie,” Wright says, “every time I think of Grendel’s mother.”
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