So earlier tonight I found myself reading poetry to Mrs. BookFox, only it wasn’t exactly love poetry:
Unhallowed wight,
grim and greedy, he grasped betimes,
wrathful, reckless, from resting-places,
thirty of the thanes, and thence he rushed
fain of his fell spoil, faring homeward,
laden with slaughter, his lair to seek.
Then at the dawning, as day was breaking,
the might of Grendel to men was known;
then after wassail was wail uplifted.
We had gone to see Beowulf – and in 3-D, no less, with those fancy glasses, which I wore on top of my regular glasses – and I just had to separate the fanciful Hollywood tale from the original. So that was how I found myself reading forty-three chapters of Beowulf until after midnight (only excerpts of which I read out loud to Mrs. BookFox).
The movie holds rather true to the original – at least through the first half. Then it devolves into a soap opera connection between the Kings, Grendel/mother and the dragon. It does keep in some of the religious references that the Christian poet overlaid on the pagan tale (albeit heavyhandedly and somewhat anachronistically). And it creates ex nihilo a part for Beowulf’s wife, who isn’t even mentioned in the poem (obviously in order to hook the female demographic). But completely gone is the complex inter-relationship between the two clans, the Geats and the Thanes.
I’m not complaining, mind you. Because I know that staying true to the original would not make it a decent movie – I had no expectation that it should or would follow the original, I just enjoy knowing the difference and analyzing the difference. After all, the copy we have now was viewed through the lens of a Christian writing to Christian contemporaries, which obviously affected how the pagan tale was told, so I find it completely appropriate that this third degree away from the “original” (which was what? oral or written?) is changed once again to conform to the time and audience.
All that said, while I enjoyed the 3-D effects, that was probably the best part of the film. The use of live-action actors transformed into animation is a poor technique if actors don’t want to look like they’re acting through a bad plastic mask. Grendel looked like a pumpkin head at Halloween put on a child’s body and Angelina Jolie looked too much like Angelina Jolie. It took a lot more brain power to read the poem, but I derived pleasures from it that I certainly couldn’t get through a theater experience with the smell of fake butter in my nostrils and the grandfather behind me gasping every time a sword or severed limb protruded from the screen. One of those pleasures is feeling smarter, I admit. Another is discussing the poem with my brother, a Beowulf purist who harbors a penchant for ridiculously masculine tales that involve strong men defeating giants (he treats stories like Beowulf as instruction manuals for life).
I admit: in writing for this site and completing an MFA program, I’m often focused on the books coming out this year, a focus eliding even 20th century classics, much less the geriatric members of the canon (sorry King of the Geats – you’re a geriatric now). So I suppose it’s nice to have an excuse to go back and read Beowulf, which I haven’t read since high school or college, I forget which. I’m reminded of an interview with a professor who argued we’re almost doing a disservice to youths to make them read classics at such an early age, because there is so much that they can’t connect to yet. Give them a decade, have them come back and read it on their own, and it will resonate with the force of an earthquake. I think I agree with that. I have no memory of reading Beowulf the first time, but this time around I love it, hyphenated metonyms and all. It’s just so nice to hear the language as I read it, to hear the alliterative translation and the rhythm. No word yet on how Mrs. BookFox took it, but I enjoyed myself quite a bit.
