Beowulf, Starring Angelina Jolie as "Mom"

A very well done comic-book movie. An excellent story. But it is not the story of Beowulf. It is a different story.

"The Thirteenth Warrior" is a better Beowulf. It may or may not be a better movie. I am not sure.

Comments

[John Emerson]

I'm even more cranky about Beowulf movies than I am about economics, except that I understand Beowulf better. "The Thirteenth Warrior" not only garbles Beowulf, it also garbles Ibn Fadlan's report. I even had a theatre-of-cruelty Ibn Fadlan screenplay sketched out in my mind, with the prissy Koranic scholar from Baghdad licking his lips nervously while he watched the Vikings' orgy/human sacrifice funeral in Volga Bulgaria.

Angela Jolie naked is a wonderful thing, but not as Grendel's mother.

Frye has translated Ibn Fadlan into English. Told straight it's still an amazing story.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/155876366X/ref=nosim/bookfindercom0e

[sm]

Whether you prefer the 13th Warrior to Beowulf depends on how keen you are on show-off, lookit-me-Mom special effects.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/heaney-beowulf.html

February 27, 2000

Beowulf
A New Verse Translation
By SEAMUS HEANEY

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.

Afterwards a boy-child was born to Shield,
a cub in the yard, a comfort sent
by God to that nation. He knew what they had tholed,
the long times and troubles they'd come through
without a leader; so the Lord of Life,
the glorious Almighty, made this man renowned.
Shield had fathered a famous son:
Beow's name was known through the north.
And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards in age when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line. Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.

Shield was still thriving when his time came
and he crossed over into the Lord's keeping.
His warrior band did what he bade them
when he laid down the law among the Danes:
they shouldered him out to the sea's flood,
the chief they revered who had long ruled them.
A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,
ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.
They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,
laid out by the mast, amidships,
the great ring-giver. Far-fetched treasures
were piled upon him, and precious gear
I never heard before of a ship so well furbished
with battle tackle, bladed weapons
and coats of mail. The massed treasure
was loaded on top of him: it would travel far
on out into the ocean's sway.
They decked his body no less bountifully
with offerings than those first ones did
who cast him away when he was a child
and launched him alone out over the waves.
And they set a gold standard up
high above his head and let him drift
to wind and tide, bewailing him
and mourning their loss. No man can tell,
no wise man in hall or weathered veteran
knows for certain who salvaged that load.

Then it fell to Beow to keep the forts.
He was well regarded and ruled the Danes
for a long time after his father took leave
of his life on earth. And then his heir,
the great Halfdane, held sway
for as long as he lived, their elder and warlord.
He was four times a father, this fighter prince:
one by one they entered the world,
Heorogar, Hrothgar, the good Halga
and a daughter, I have heard, who was Onela's queen,
a balm in bed to the battle-scarred Swede.

The fortunes of war favoured Hrothgar.
Friends and kinsmen flocked to his ranks,
young followers, a force that grew
to be a mighty army. So his mind turned
to hall-building: he handed down orders
for men to work on a great mead-hall
meant to be a wonder of the world forever;
it would be his throne-room and there he would dispense
his God-given goods to young and old—but
not the common land or people's lives.
Far and wide through the world, I have heard,
orders for work to adorn that wallstead
were sent to many peoples. And soon it stood there,
finished and ready, in full view,
the hall of halls. Heorot was the name
he had settled on it, whose utterance was law.
Nor did he renege, but doled out rings
and torques at the table. The hall towered,
its gables wide and high and awaiting
a barbarous burning. That doom abided,
but in time it would come: the killer instinct
unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/27/reviews/000227.27shapirt.html

February 27, 2000

A Better 'Beowulf'
By JAMES SHAPIRO

BEOWULF
A New Verse Translation.
By Seamus Heaney.

As an Irish poet and Nobel laureate who is arguably the finest poet now writing in English, Seamus Heaney has never fully reconciled himself to the legacy of English verse. It was, after all, the English who suppressed the rich tradition of Irish poetry, or as Heaney himself put it in an angry early poem, ''Traditions'': ''Our guttural muse / Was bulled long ago / by the alliterative tradition.'' In the mid-1980's, the editors of ''The Norton Anthology of English Literature'' asked Heaney if he would be interested in translating the Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) of ''Beowulf'' into modern English verse. The poem's subject matter was a good match for Heaney's poetic strengths and interests: a hero's victories over inhuman threats to hearth and homeland and the fragility of social bonds in a world riven by violence. But ''Beowulf'' was also the first great poem in English, celebrated as the font of that alliterative tradition.

Unlike the text published by Norton, this handsome edition helpfully provides the Anglo-Saxon original on the pages facing the translation and includes an eloquent introductory essay, in which Heaney describes the circuitous route that brought him to ''Beowulf.'' At the time he was first approached he had been teaching at Harvard, where he found himself exposed to what he describes as ''the untethered music of some contemporary American poetry.'' Translating ''Beowulf,'' he hoped, would serve as ''a kind of aural antidote,'' a way of ensuring that his ''linguistic anchor would stay lodged on the Anglo-Saxon sea-floor.''

But the work soon slowed to a halt. What was lacking was a sense of connection to the work, ''an excitement that would amount to an entitlement.'' This occurred only when Heaney came upon an Anglo-Saxon verb for suffering, ''olian''; while its descendant ''thole'' had dropped out of modern English usage, it was a word that he had learned as a child in Ireland. Heaney's ''right of way'' into the poem was further secured when he realized that his earliest poetry, which broke with the conventional English pentameter line, ''conformed to the requirements of Anglo-Saxon metrics.'' Part of me,'' Heaney saw, ''had been writing Anglo-Saxon from the start.''

The word ''thole'' provided more than an entry into the poem; it also suggested a narrative voice, the forthright and familiar one that had belonged to his father's relatives, Ulstermen he refers to as ''big voiced Scullions.'' It's a voice that feels as unforced and true for descriptions of bloody combat or recitations of lineage as it does for the poem's often brooding proverbial asides. The translation, for Heaney, thus became anchored both in the ''consonantal rock'' of English and in the ''old soft vowel-bog'' of his native Ulster.

At last count some 65 English translations of ''Beowulf'' have been published. The poem's many translators seem to have followed the same logic that drives people to open new restaurants: they're disappointed with what's out there and convinced that they can do better. Only in retrospect do they realize why they were doomed to fail. As generations of students can testify, a phrase-by-phrase rendering of ''Beowulf'' into modern English isn't that hard to manage; in the process, however, the poem's lifeblood is drained, and along with it the qualities that make ''Beowulf'' so remarkable. Paradoxically, the seeming familiarity of the language is part of the problem: you don't need to know a lot of Anglo-Saxon to guess that when the narrator exclaims ''<--t w<--s gRated Rd cyning,'' he is saying ''that was a good king.''

This sense of familiarity, however, is for the most part an illusion, since only the slenderest of threads binds us to the Old English ''word-hoard'' and vision of the ''Beowulf'' poet. Translators (usually scholars) faithful to the poem's complex style -- one that is highly formulaic, rich in compounds, apposition, repetition and parallelism, conveyed in a resounding alliterative line -- end up producing jog-trot verse, of which the following is a painful and typical example: ''What ho! We've heard the glory / of Spear-Danes, clansmen-kings, / Their deeds of olden story, -- - / how fought the aethelings!'' ...

[Bruce Webb]

The problem of a movie Beowulf is inherent in its structure, it is not a story at all, at least if you define story as we do to day with terms like 'line' and 'arc'. Medieval and pre-medieval epic is more episodic ands tend to fall into conventional categories: the Miraculous Birth (or escape from Death), the Entry to Court (often with a Recognition element-sister's unknown son, lost grandson)), the Battle, the Heroic Death.

I haven't read Beowulf for a while and my copy is in storage but my recollection is that the first half is a somewhat compressed Entry to Court/Battle narrative and the second half a narratively distinct Heroic Death. Contemporary listeners/readers would have not been thrown by the disconnect, moderns would be more likely to look at each other and ask "Who's the old guy?".

You could write and film a compelling telling of the Beowulf/Grendel/Grendel's Mother story. The problem is that it would come in at under an hour. Which is why pretty much all filming (and for that matter novelizations) of early medieval epic is so unsatisfying to people who know the actual material. Whether it is various adaptations of Arthurian materials or versions of the Welsh Mabinogi, they have to be stretched and embellished to fit the frame of a feature film or novel, with the result that actual specialists simply close their eyes and moan when they see the extraneous elements.

There are genres that would handle Beowulf well. But commercially there is no existing broad market for the short film or the novella, they just don't fit into current theatre or publishing modes. The combination of the internet/iPod could change that, conceivably you could develop a real market for these in-between products 'on demand'. But they won't be coming to a 'theatre near you' or featured at Border's. It is just the nature of the beast.

[Bernard Yomtov]

"There are genres that would handle Beowulf well."

Indeed, Bruce. You have one such in storage. :-)

[Barkley Rosser]

It is certainly true that these old myths get redone with all kinds of revisions. Just how many versions of the Arthur story are there out there? Can't even count. As it is, Beowulf has many fewer versions.

I saw the movie a few nights ago and agree with critics who are somewhat unhappy with the cartoonishness of the characters, although the technique does allow for some pretty spectacular "cinematography."

As for the plot, the more I think about it, the more it has an interesting and relevant logic to the period. Thus, the business of Hrothgar and Beowulf spawning these monsters with the beautiful demon becomes a way of concretizing the struggle between Christianity and paganism. They are going with paganism when they do so, which becomes the curse of their society, only curable in the end by the Christian-style self-sacrifice of Beowulf.

BTW, anybody want to comment on the old controversy about whether the historical Geats were the same as the historical Goths?

[John Emerson]

Neither Wolfram nor Heather mentions the Geats, so I conclude that the answer is that they were not related. One or the other argues persuasively that the Goths on the border of Rome were a newly formed nation partly descended from the original Goths on the Baltic, and that the supposed Scandinavian origins of the Baltic Goths was more like an origin myth than a verifiable fact of history or prehistory. The Goths were not nomadic but they did shift according to opportunity, and political entities formed and dissolved according to circumstances. For example, there were as many as seven groups of Goths who did not join either the Visigiths or the Ostrogoths.

Beowulf does mention the Gothic king Eormanric, and Hrothgar has been identified with a raider killed by the Merovingians in 521 A.D. (as recorded by Gregory of Tours; the Merovingians are in turn mentioned in Beowulf).

http://www.ldolphin.org/cooper/appen9.html

[John Emerson]

I should say that the link goes a bit overboard on the historicity of Beowulf, though the 521 date for Hygelac's death (not Hrothgar's, sorry) is the consensus, I think.

Some of the confusion about the Goths traces to Karl XII's attempt to create an origin myth for the short-lived Swedish Empire.

[Ken Houghton]

At least anne didn't post the NYT review of the movie, which I stopped reading at the end of the first paragraph, in which the reviewer admitted fearing Angelina Jolie's breasts.

If you can't deal with the spawn of Jon Voight, how would you expect to make sense of Grendel?

[Barkley Rosser]

Well, the Geats do appear to have existed, although of course they are forecast to be wiped out by the Swedes at the end of the actual Beowulf. Much of the debate turns around spellings and misspellings in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and some other sources from back then, with the evidence on their relation mixed. A piece of archaeological evidence in support of their identity is that about the time the first Gothic culture appeared on the Baltic shore of Poland in terms of implements coincides with an apparent outmigration of people with similar artifacts from the province of southern Sweden now known as Ostergotland (from which supposedly came the Osgrogoths). Besides Ostergotland there is to its west, Vastargotland, and then there is the current city of Goteborg (aka Gothenburg), second largest in Sweden, where Volvos are made, in between the two reputed sites of the ancient capital of the Geats, with island of Gotland off of southern Sweden to its east.

The following is a single sentence from the 1936 essay by J.R.R. Tolkien, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," summarizing views of the (monstrous?) critics prior to his essay on the saga.

"Beowulf is a half-baked native epic the development of which was killed by Latin learning; it was inspired by emulation of Virgil, and is a product of the education that came in with Christianity; it is feeble and incompetent as a narrative; the rules of narrative are cleverly observed in the manner of the learned epic; it is the confused product of a committee of muddle-headed and probably beer-bemused Anglo-Saxons (this is a Gallic voice); it is astring of pagan lays edited by monks; it is the work of a learned but inaccurate Christian antiquarian; it is a work of genius, rare and surprising in the period, though the genius seems to have been shown principally in doing something much better left undone (this is a very recent voice); it is a wild folk-tale (general chorus); it is a poem of an aristocratic and courtly tradition (same voices); it is a hotchpotch; it is a sociological, anthropological, archaeological document; it is a mythical allegory (very old voices these and generally shouted down, but not so far out as some of the newer cries); it is rude and rough; it is a masterpiece of metrical art; it has no shape at all; it is singularly weak in construction; it is a clever allegory of contemporary politics (old John Earle with some slight support from Mr. Girvan, only they look to different periods); its architecture is solid; it is thin and cheap (a solemn voice); it is undeniably weighty (the same voice); it is a national epic; it is a translation from the Danish; it was imported by Frisian traders; it is a burden to English syllabuses; and (final universal chorus of all voices) it is worth studying."

Proceeding of the British Academy, 1936, vol. 22, 245-295, originally presented as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture of 1936, reprinted in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. by Lewis A. Nicholson, University of Notre Dame Press, 1963.

I note that 1936 was the year prior to the publication of Tolkien's first novel, The Hobbit, and also that Tolkien was a Professor of Philology at Oxford and a widely recognized Beowulf scholar.

[John Emerson]

Basically Heather and Wolfram even doubt that the Goths of Rome were actually the same people as the Goths of the Baltic, even though they were descended partly from them. They'd been transformed by Hunnishness and Romaniization, intermarriage, etc.

There's also a time discrepancy, since Beowulf's Geats lives around 500 AD.

Tolkien himself claimed at one point that "Beowulf" was deeply Christian and probably of clerical origin, something I doubt. From what I've seen the language is very elaborately worked and it seems like a court poem. By contrast, later epics (Beowulf, the Cid, the Nibelungenlied) seem crude.

[Wayne]

The version with Gerard Butler as Beowulf-- before he did the unfortunate "300"-- was actually quite good. I strongly recommend it.

[Barkley Rosser]

John,

Certainly the Goths who invaded the Roman territories had lots of influences.

At least in the 1936 essay Tolkien does not say that Beowulf was written by a cleric. He does say that it was written by someone well informed about both the ancient lays and Christianity, even as there are no references to New Testament material in it, only Old Testament stuff about Grendel and his mother being descendants of Cain and stuff about Giants.

Rather he makes the point that while Hrothgar invokes God a lot, Beowulf barely does. Indeed, he notes that both the ancient gods and Chrisitanity per se are largely absent from Beowulf. This rather interestingly corresponds to the absence of any direct references to Christianity or deities in the Lord of the Rings, although a creator deity, Iluvatar, does appear at the beginning of The Silmarillion, even though Tolkien himself was a devout Roman Catholic.

[c.l. ball]

"Beowulf and Grendel" (with G. Butler as Beo) is quite good at de-mythologizing "Beowulf" (setting aside the miscast Sarah Polley. Don't get me wrong; I like her acting and directing, but she plays too modern here).

"The 13th Warrior" is under-rated; I saw it on cable and enjoyed it.

[Paul]

I didn't like "Beowulf and Grendel" precisely because it was demythologized. I want Grendel to be a monster, not a brutish aborigine.

And I like Sarah Polley...but I have no idea what she was doing in that movie.