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.
