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The Beo Who Cried Wulf

Misshapen monsters, vengeful mothers, manly men, and a virtually naked Angelina Jolie: It must be Beowulf, Hollywood-style.
Herewith, a five-point primer that might come in handy at any cocktail party or water cooler where the topic is epic poems and their cinematic spawn. 1.    Plot. The film starts off by following the poem: A denuded monster named Grendel attacks the mead hall of Danish King Hrothgar and slaughters those inside. The Geat (that is, Swedish) champion Beowulf travels across the sea to vanquish the fiend, which he does, memorably and bloodily. But then, plotlines diverge. In the poem, Grendel’s mother kills more mead-hall folks. Beowulf tracks her back to her watery lair and slays her, too. He then returns to Geatland, becomes king, and—50 years later—slays a marauding dragon (though his thane Wiglaf does some of the heavy lifting). Beowulf dies in the process and is honored with a pyre, barrow, etc. In the movie, Beowulf kind of falls for the sultry Jolie, er, Grendel’s mom. And together they have a baby … dragon.
2.    Authorship. No one really knows. Scholars used to think the work was passed down by storytellers, tale singers, and the like—and eventually transcribed, probably by a monk. These days, the conventional wisdom is that a single poet synthesized strains of history, religion, and myth to concoct the tale. As for the movie version? Well, that’s easy: Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary.
3.    Language. The poem is somewhat typical of Old English, meaning it’s rife with alliterative verse, caesuras, and kennings. The film is somewhat typical of Hollywood, meaning it serves up an alphabet soup of dialects, speech patterns, and manners of address. The title character growls his lines in a burry brogue; Grendel shrieks and mews in Old English babyspeak; and Grendel’s mother appears to have learned her accent from her adopted children.
4.    Religion. The poem has a split spiritual personality. The people are pagans, and the time is pre-Christian, yet the narrator drops biblical references, and his characters pray to one God. That’s probably because the poem was written in the 8th century, when Christianity was ascendant. The movie interprets that split in a way that doesn’t quite make sense: There are heroes, who are good, and there are Christians, who are sometimes not so good. When Hrothgar’s courtier Unferth wonders whether Christianity might deliver them from Grendel, the king says, “No, we need a hero.” When an older Beowulf is taking stock of his life, he concludes, “The Christ God has killed heroes.”
5.    Footwear. One theory holds that Grendel’s mother—whom scholars have called everything from a magical Valkyrie to a marked woman carrying the curse of Cain—had hand-like feet. But in the movie … holy Steve Madden: Her feet appear to have transformed into stiletto heels! The better to negotiate dank caves, we guess. -Jeremy Berlin
 

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