Letters to the Editor
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Yay!
I have a degree in Old English literature and language, and I couldn't have said it better. I very much enjoyed this article. It isn't often I read anything I agree with 100%!
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The British Library: Holder of "Beowulf"
If anyone wants to get some more history on the physical copy of "Beowulf" and see an enlargeable photo of a page of it, check out: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/themes/englishlit/beowulf.html
It narrowly escaped being burned into ashes in 1731, and now has survived to be posted on the Internet... It's even now available, restored, on 2 CD-ROMs through the British Library's "Electronic Beowulf" project of 1993, complete with glossary and full search capabilities. It's strange how the world develops, eh?
Also... It's funny, and I'm sure no accident, but Tolkien's "Elvish" looks very similar to the lettering on the ancient page shown ;-)
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@ Rupert_C
Actually the Divine Comedy did have fart jokes. If I remember correctly the level of hell where the forgers were kept was guarded by demons called the malebranche (I think the spelling was something like that) who played trumpets with their butts. Now if they could only replace that stupid Virgil guy with one of those, now that would be a movie!
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dreaming
The days Hollywood dreams are the best days to stumble into a movie theatre. "Beowulf", unfortunately was not one of those days. I loved how this article underscored the loss of dreaming in Hollywood's vision. Or, at least, it's scarcity.
Carl Jung gave us the science of what dreams and myth mean to us in our human psyches. Joseph Campbell collected the treasure trove of human archetypes and how they echo throughout our culture. If only our most popular story-tellers paid more attention to their lessons.
I have avoided seeing "Beowulf" so far... likely I will continue to do so. I would rather feed my soul in other genres and wait for a good dream to come around.
dakinigrl
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Mistake
Kamiya suggests that the Beowulf film reinterprets the poetry of the "ur-language", and thus ends up in a bit of a mess. Kamiya himself goes one better by reinterpreting the history of Western literacy and making a rather glaring error by stating that Beowulf is the oldest piece of European vernacular literature. The evidence he gives for this is the 11th-century manuscript of a purportedly 8th-C text of a story set a few centuries earlier.
To claim this as the oldest vernacular literature surely overstates the case and (as is often the case) ignores the vernacular prose and poetry of Ireland and Wales.
From these two cultures, vernacular literature (i.e. in the Celtic languages of Irish and Welsh) is extant in manuscripts centuries older than Beowulf, arguably dating from as early as the 6th century, and set centuries before the Christian era.
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I! Am! Beowulf!
That! Is! Stupid!
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Couldn't agree more with "Needs Context"
Ever since Star Wars, which truthfully should have been an animated film given the depth those actors put into their characters, we are stuck in this steady stream of drivel. Rings might have been a cut above, but I won't grant it much more. Troy was laughable - can't believe I let my wife talk me into that one!
Ha Ha joke is on us.
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Myths: Ossified scripture, or living interlocutors?
Beowulf - probably in a version redacted for young readers - was one of two books (Of Mice and Men, the other) that made me a reader in my pre- and early teens. I just finished reading Seamus Heaney's esteemed translation today. The book remains, for me, viscerally alluring, a conundrum, a mystery. Those here who have referred to it as inaccessible to the lay reader have not given it a fair chance. 8th graders can read it and be transformed, and PhD candidates can fruitfully butt their heads against it. If it was so inaccessible and hidden, it wouldn't have become a NY Times bestseller when Heaney's translation came out.
After finishing the book I went to see Gaiman's and Zemeckis' film in 3-D. The visual effects are, mostly, quite wonderful, and well used. The scene near the end - this is not a spoiler, unlike much of Kamiya's article - with Beowulf standing at the entrance to the cave, was breathtaking. There is, of course, a certain amount of time spent playing frivolously with the new "toy" of the 3-D effects. And there are, certainly, some of the kind of liberties taken that one would expect from Hollywood: Grendel's mother is Angelina Jolie, there is a love story inserted, and a couple of characters and scenes are melded into one. Oh, well. How long will we continue to go to movies and expect them to be the same, or as good as, the original book? Where, after all, is Tom Bombadil in LOTR?
Beowulf has its awkward moments, especially if you are familiar with the original story. It also has very interesting moments, such as how Gaiman and Avary deal with the original story's very Christian element (I'd forgotten about this element, and now know why the nuns had Beowulf in their great books program), and how they deal with Beowulf's story about his swimming competition with Breca, which turns out to be a departure point, where you realize that the film makers have decided to depart from the holy writ.
The question for Kamiya is, do they have the right? He seems to think they do, but doesn't like what they do with their rights. That's his right. The comparison with Tolkien and with LOTR, in spite of Tolkien's interest in Beowulf, seems incidental, if not irrelevant.
The story is different. And there are techno-trinkets and tits and off-color humor about which to object. Okay. But the story Gaiman and Avary construct on the scaffolding of the original myth is, itself, mythic, albeit a different myth. I found the warnings given, and the observation about heroes and their (forgive me) Achilles' heels, worth the telling. And while I would love to see a faithful telling of Beowulf, I was pleased not to know the ending of this version when I went in. A familiarity with the story of the Minotaur may be instructive when chewing over the myth evoked by the screenwriters.
One quibble. While I have not read all of the comments on this article, it pains me to see that the author of one of the Editors' Picks comments admits to only having seen the trailer for the film. A more full and discerning perspective would be required if I were an editor.