BEOWULF
Various cinemas

Dick Ringler, translator
BEOWULF
A new translation for oral delivery
304pp. Indianapolis: Hackett. $27.50 (paperback, $9.95).
978 0 87220 894 0

The Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf has been filmed more often and more variously than the ordinary cinema-goer might think. A fellow-reviewer tipped me off to the Australian Grendel, Grendel, Grendel of 1981, an animation film narrated by the monster Grendel himself, voiced by Peter Ustinov. Yuri Kulakov directed an animated short for television in 1998 with an impressive range of British acting talent doing the voices. Aimed at children, this version told the story straightforwardly, from the arrival of the hero Beowulf to help King Hrothgar of Denmark deal with the demonic monster who attacks his hall and thegns, through the climactic fight of hero and monster in the hall Heorot; the surprise emergence of Grendel’s mother as avenger for her son; Beowulf’s later rise to the throne of Geatland and his death in battle against a dragon. It did not concern itself with contemporary relevance, psychological motivation, sexuality, paternity, embodiedness or any of the other issues which later live-action versions have uncovered in the basic three-monster-fight structure. Roger Avary, the co-writer with Neil Gaiman of the new Beowulf, claims to have “solved” the problem of Grendel’s mysterious paternity by foisting him on king Hrothgar, but this was the plot twist of the perhaps underrated Beowulf of 1999, directed by Graham Baker, starring a dead-eyed Christopher Lambert as the eponymous hero and with a post-apocalyptic setting. Unlike Hrothgar, Lambert’s Beowulf has the good sense not to be taken in by the foxy blonde stalking Hrothgar’s hall; cornered in the building’s flooded cellar, she reveals herself as a monstrous spider and is dealt with in summary fashion. The menace of Grendel’s mother is eliminated once and for all. Following some recent critical paradigms, Lambert’s Beowulf explains that he, too, is monstrous, fathered by an unknown supernatural figure; this affinity with the Other gives him the power to vanquish Grendel and his mother.

The Icelandic-Canadian co-production Beowulf and Grendel, from 2005, directed by Sturla Gunnarsson and starring Gerard Butler, had only one UK showing to my knowledge, and no US cinema release at all. In this, Grendel’s enmity against Hrothgar is driven by feud – the fundamental impetus in Icelandic saga narrative – for Hrothgar has killed Grendel’s troll-father, apparently for being bulky, ugly and Icelandic-speaking. Hrothgar is highly evasive about Grendel’s motivations, and Beowulf begins to develop some sympathy with the unloved troll. Eventually, however, he finishes him off and then quickly disposes of the mother.

Before he leaves “Daneland”, a mysterious witch-figure, largely responsible for exposition in the film, intimates that she is pregnant with the next generation of Grendelkin: the feud is set to continue. Neither of these films dealt with Beowulf’s rise to kingship and the coming of the dragon which the old warrior dies fighting. J. R. R. Tolkien’s hugely influential article “Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics”, published in 1936, persuaded many readers that the poem has a dual structure, contrasting movements of rising and falling, youth and age, but film-makers have been reluctant to skip ahead fifty years for the last third of the film – and, of course, dragons are expensive to depict. Avary and Gaiman, however, link the three monsters together through a chain of fathers and sons, and thus solve some longstanding problems of unity, though their inventions are bound to outrage some of their audience.

Robert Zemeckis uses performance capture – where movements in three dimensions are captured through digital sensors on a body-suit worn by the actor and reworked on computer; a technique familiar from Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The effect is more natural than CGI – though the characters’ eyes remain rather glassy – and it retains the likeness of the actor, while permitting considerable enhancement or uglification. Ray Winstone (Beowulf) loses twenty-five years in the first half of the film, and gains a superbly sculpted body. Sir Anthony Hopkins as Hrothgar becomes a paunchy, debauched Welsh sot, and Angelina Jolie, a surprise casting for Grendel’s Mother, is a slinky seductress whose other-worldly curves exploit the lust for sex and power in generations of local kings. The writers have taken considerable liberties with both plot and characterization: Hrothgar presides over a Heorot reminiscent of a rugby club in the heart of the Valleys (it takes about a minute and a half for the first ripe belch of the film to be heard); Wiglaf is Beowulf’s faithful right-hand man throughout, rather than his youthful companion in the final battle, and is consequently rather grizzled when his turn for kingship comes. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy in the noisy, action-packed spectacular effects of the fights. Grendel in particular, half-foetus, half-corpse with the flayed skin of a Gunther von Hagen figure, is both grotesquely terrifying and pitiable; the fear evoked in the poem when the monster realizes that he has met his match, and his miserable death in the mere are brilliantly realized. The dragon, too, has a splendid golden hide, as if crusted with lumps of ore, while the Scandinavian skaldic term for gold as “fire in the water” underlies the aesthetic of the haunted mere where Grendel and his mother live.

Beowulf himself retains the South London hard-man persona of Winstone, whose recognizable growl issues from the new hairless, muscular torso. John Malkovich gives a controlled performance as the reptilian Unferth, choosing his insults to Beowulf with the over-precision of the habitual drunk. Robin Penn Wright makes a winsome young Wealtheow, Hrothgar’s queen who is repelled by her husband’s fleshliness, and she brings an icy dignity to the later scenes. And Angelina Jolie’s Grendel’s Mother is all too tempting; her inner hag only appears when she invades Beowulf’s dreams as she exacts her revenge on his warriors.

Zemeckis’s Beowulf is in touch with critical debate about the poem. The clash between paganism and Christianity is there: Hrothgar’s land is teetering on the edge of conversion to Christianity, a creed attractive to Unferth, who seems by the end to have become a priest. Wealtheow, too, is working on a half-finished tapestry showing an Odinic figure surrounded by angels, though the other unregenerates, Danes and Geats alike, keep right on swearing by Odin. Grendel has language, speaking a kind of pidgin Old English and the ascription of human and monstrous characteristics to both protagonists inflects their characterization in interesting ways. Modern preoccupations: a Freudian anxiety about fathers and sons, and concerns about inheritance and power-broking shape the dynamics of plot. Kingship is particularly at issue; Hrothgar’s style of leadership is that of the old rugby captain presiding over one last Saturday night; Beowulf, as in the poem, falls to self-scrutiny when the dragon comes, though, since he has made a Faustian pact for power and has come to resemble Hrothgar, he has much more to work on than his blameless predecessor, that “god cyning”. The homosocial bonds of the comitatus remain powerful, but the erotic cannot be contained.

Wealtheow and Grendel’s Mother function in part as doubles of one another; Germanic lust for treasure fuses with the lust for the golden-skinned female monster and her promise of power. Fame – having a tale which will be retold when all men living are dust, as one character puts it – is not the primary motivation for the hero that it was in Beowulf and Grendel, or as frequently invoked as it was by Mr Jolie (Brad Pitt) as Achilles in the highly self-conscious epic Troy. Although Beowulf shows mercy to a defeated Frisian in order to feature in the tale he will tell back at home, the hero’s funeral takes place on a fiery ship; there’s no memorializing grave-mound in the landscape to remind future generations of his story, and Wiglaf’s elegy for the fallen king dwells only on his friend’s strength and courage.

Beowulf tells us quite a lot about twenty-first-century anxieties about masculinity and power, and about the ways in which we reframe stories from our national past, but it is also rip-roaring fun. Purists, however, might prefer to stay at home with Dick Ringler’s new translation of Beowulf, intended for oral delivery, and perform the story for themselves. Ringler has produced a really good translation of the poem, free of Seamus Heaney’s quirks and Irishisms, keeping the rhythm and alliteration, and retaining a simplicity which demonstrates how otiose film effects are when the poem is both powerful and moving. The translation is accompanied by a marvellously straightforward introduction, eschewing all modish modern criticism and thus a useful corrective for those student-readers confused by the liberties taken by Beowulf and its writers. Tolkien would have been pleased by Ringler’s version. I am not so sure that he would have enjoyed the film.

Carolyne Larrington is Tutor in Old and Middle English Literature at St John's College, Oxford. Her most recent book is King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and her sisters in Arthurian tradition, published last year.

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