Beowulf (18 page)

The
Beowulf
story has also proved to be fruitful source material for fiction and fantasy writing. W. H. Canaway made use of the poem in his historical novel
The Ring-Givers
(1958). John Gardner’s
Grendel
(1971), a narrative told in the first person by Beowulf’s monstrous adversary, is probably the best-loved fictional adaptation of the poem. In Australia, the book was made into an animated musical film,
Grendel, Grendel, Grendel
(1981). Popular science-fiction author Michael Crichton invoked
Beowulf
in
Eaters of the Dead
(1971), a thriller that describes the journey a young Arab man takes with a group of Vikings through Northern Europe in the year 922. The book was later filmed as
The Thirteenth Warrior
(1999), starring Antonio Banderas, and has been reissued under that title.

Noted science-fiction authors Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes co-wrote
The Legacy of Heorot
(1987), a gory retelling of
Beowulf
set on the planet Tau Ceti Four. Tom Holt’s witty novel
Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?
(1988) takes characters from several Viking romances and transports them to modern-day Scotland in an amusing slapstick adventure story. The book was later republished as
Expecting Beowulf
(2002). Fantasy writer Parke Godwin published a novelistic retelling of the poem, called
The Tower of Beowulf
(1995), that vividly imagines the history of Grendel and Grendel’s mother. Frank Schaefer’s
Whose Song Is Sung
(1996) tells the story of Beowulf through the eyes of Musculus, a worldly but jaded dwarf who survives his warrior friend and recounts their times together in tough, compelling prose.

Beowulf
also inspired works in many other media throughout the twentieth century. In 1925 distinguished American composer Howard Hanson (1896-1981), the son of Swedish immigrants, wrote “Lament for Beowulf,” a piece for chorus and orchestra. The rock opera
Beowulf
appeared in 1977, with lyrics by Betty Jane Wylie and music by Victor Davies. In film, a post-apocalyptic, science-fiction
Beowulf
debuted in 1999, starring Christopher Lambert. Comic books inspired by the poem include
Beowulf: The Dragon Slayer
(1975-1996), by Michael Uslan, and
Beowulf, Adapted from
the
8th Century Epic Poem
(1984), by Jerry Bingham. Matt Wagner’s
Grendel—a
mainstay in the underground comics arena since it was first published in the 1980s—darkly chronicles a number of worlds in which Grendel-like monsters abound. Finally, the book
Beowulf: A Likeness
(1990), a collaboration between a poet, a historian, and a designer, features photographs of Germanic archeological sites and artifacts alongside interpretive commentary, and a translation that adds new scenes and backgrounds to the poem.

 

This singular production [Beowulf], independently of its value as ranking among the most perfect specimens of the language and versification of our ancestors, offers an interest exclusively its own. It is unquestionably the earliest composition of the heroic kind extant in any language of modern, or rather of barbarous, Europe.

—from
Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry
(1826)

 

The poem of
Beowulf
is a magnificent and accurate picture of life in the heroic ages. Its plot is simple; a few striking instances, grandly traced, and casting strong and broad shadows, form the picture. It is a story of open, single-handed warfare, where love is never introduced as a motive of action, or stratagem as an instrument. Beowulf, like Hercules, seeks glory only by clearing the world of monsters and oppressors.

—from
Fraser’s Magazine
(July 1835)

 

One of the oldest and most important remains of Anglo-Saxon literature is the epic poem of Beowulf. Its age is unknown; but it comes from a very distant and hoar antiquity; somewhere between the seventh and tenth centuries. It is like a piece of ancient armour; rusty and battered, and yet strong. From within comes a voice sepulchral, as if the ancient armour spoke, telling a simple, straightforward narrative; with here and there the boastful speech of a rough, old Dane, reminding one of those made by the heroes of Homer. The style, likewise is simple,—perhaps we should say, austere. The bold metaphors, which characterize nearly all the Anglo-Saxon poems we have read, are for the most part wanting in this. The author seems mainly bent upon telling us how his Sea-Goth slew the Grendel and the Fire-drake.

—from the
North American Review
(1838)

 

Beowulf, a chieftain of the Western Danes, was the Achilles of the North.... We first view him with his followers landing on the shores of a Danish kingling. A single ship with an armed company, in those predatory days, could alarm a whole realm. The petty independent provinces of Greece afford a parallel; for Thucydides has marked this period in society, when plunder well fought for was honoured as an heroic enterprise. When a vessel touched on a strange shore, the adventurers were questioned ‘whether they were thieves?’ a designation which the inquirers did not intend as a term of reproach, nor was it scorned by the valiant; for the spoliation of foreigners at a time when the law of nations had no existence, seemed no disgrace, while it carried with it something of glory, when the chieftain’s sword maintained the swarm of his followers, or acquired for himself an extended dominion....

The exploits of Beowulf are of a supernatural cast; and the circumstance has bewildered his translator amid mythic allusions, and thus the hero sinks into the incarnation of a Saxon idol,—a protector of the human race. It is difficult to decide whether the marvellous incidents be mythical, or merely exaggerations of the northern poetic faculty. We, however, learn by these, that corporeal energies and an indomitable spirit were the glories of the hero-life; and the outbreaks of their self-complacency resulted from their own convictions, after many a fierce trial.

—from Amenities of Literature,
Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature
(1841)

 

It is not indeed in Woden-worship or in the worship of the older gods of flood and fell that we must look for the real religion of our fathers. The song of Beowulf, though the earliest of English poems, is as we have it now a poem of the eighth century, the work it may be of some English missionary of the days of Bæda and Boniface who gathered in the very homeland of his race the legends of its earlier prime. But the thin veil of Christianity which he has flung over it fades away as we follow the hero-legend of our fathers; and the secret of their moral temper, of their conception of life breathes through every line. Life was built with them not on the hope of a hereafter, but on the proud self-consciousness of noble souls.

—from
History of the English People
(1877-1880)

 

It is evident that the style of
Beowulf
is not that of a literary poet, but of a minstrel. Had it been a deliberate literary composition, it would have exhibited some traces of central design, and its joints and articulations would have been carefully marked; but the poem as it stands is a medley of heterogeneous materials, singularly wanting in plan and consistency. A literary ‘Demiurgus’ of Anglo-Saxon descent, and separated by a long period from the events which he professed to be recording, would undoubtedly have tried to produce an appearance of order in his creation, by furnishing a clue to his historical allusions. But nothing can be more careless and casual than his references to the heroic exploits, the family relationships, and the tribal feuds of the persons and nations mentioned in the course of the story. This is just what might be expected in the style of oral minstrelsy; it is indeed an exact reproduction of the style of Homer.

—from
A History of English Poetry
(1895-1910)

 

Beowulf
is a complete poem. Its age dignifies it, excuses its want of form, and demands our reverence.

What poetic standard it reaches is another question. It has been called an epic, but it is narrative rather than epic poetry. The subject has not the weight or dignity of an epic poem, nor the mighty fates round which an epic should revolve. Its story is rather personal than national. The one epic quality it has, the purification of the hero, the evolution of his character through trial into perfection—and Beowulf passes from the isolated hero into the image of an heroic king who dies for his people—may belong to a narrative poem.... There is also a force, vitality, clearness, and distinctiveness of portraiture, not only in Beowulf’s personality but in that of the other personages, which raise the poem into a high place, and predict that special excellence of personal portraiture which made the English drama so famous in the world. Great imagination is not one of the excellences of
Beowulf,
but it has pictorial power of a fine kind, and the myth of summer and winter on which it rests is out of the imagination of the natural and early world. It has a clear vision of places and things and persons; it has preserved for us two monstrous types out of the very early world. When we leave out the repetitions which oral poetry created and excuses, it is rapid and direct; and the dialogue is brief, simple and human. Finally, we must not judge it in study. If we wish to feel whether Beowulf is good poetry, we should place ourselves, as evening draws on, in the hall of folk, when the benches are filled with warriors, merchants and seamen, and the Chief sits in the high seat, and the fires flame down the midst, and the cup goes round—and hear the Shaper strike the harp to sing this heroic lay. Then, as he sings of the great fight with Grendel or the dragon, of the treasure-giving of the king, and of the well-known swords, of the sea-rovings and the sea-hunts and the brave death of men, to sailors who knew the storms, to the fierce rovers who fought and died with glee, to great chiefs who led their warriors, and to warriors who never left a shield, we feel how heroic the verse is, how passionate with national feeling, how full of noble pleasure. The poem is great in its own way, and the way is an English way. The men, the women, at home and in war, are one in character with us. It is our Genesis, the book of our origins.

—from English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest (1898)

 

One would like to think of the Anglo-Saxon epic, with
Beowulf
its representative (out of a number of lost heroes), as naturally developing to its full proportions from earlier ruder experimental work, through a course of successive improvements like those that can be traced, for instance, in the growth of the Drama or the Novel. And one wishes there were more left to show how it came about, and also that the process had gone a little further. But not only is there a want of specimens for the literary museum; there is the misgiving that this comparatively well-filled narrative poetry may not be an independent product of the English or the Teutonic genius. There is too much education in
Beowulf,
and it may be that the larger kind of heroic poem was attained in England only through the example of Latin narrative....

The great beauty, the real value, of
Beowulf
is in its dignity of style. In construction it is curiously weak, in a sense preposterous; for while the main story is simplicity itself, the merest commonplace of heroic legend, all about it in the historical allusions, there are revelations of a whole world of tragedy, plots different in import from that of Beowulf, more like the tragic themes of Iceland. Yet with this radical defect, a disproportion that puts the irrelevances in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges, the poem of
Beowulf
is unmistakably heroic and weighty. The thing itself is cheap; the moral and the spirit of it can only be matched among the noblest authors. It is not in the operations against Grendel, but in the humanities of the more leisurely interludes, the conversation of Beowulf and Hrothgar, and such things, that the poet truly asserts his power. It has often been pointed out how like the circumstances are in the welcome of Beowulf at Heorot and the reception of Ulysses in Phœacia. Hrothgar and his queen are not less gentle than Alcinous and Arete. There is nothing to compare with them in the Norse poems: it is not till the prose histories of Iceland appear that one meets with the like temper there. It is not common in any age; it is notably wanting in Middle English literature, because it is an aristocratic temper, secure of itself, and not imitable by the poets of an uncourtly language composing for a simple-minded audience.