A veritable industry of popular Beowulf adaptations and spin-offs has been in evidence in recent years, bringing our hero to life on the page, on the stage, on the cinema/television screen, and on the computer/game-console screen. Beowulf has made it into popular culture at last.1 There is supposed to be no such thing as bad publicity, and so this unprecedented popular attention to the story of Beowulf and its hero should be taken as good news for the poem. The new versions of Beowulf may even eventually bring some people to the poem itself, curious to sample the original.
There have been notable adaptations of the Beowulf story in novelistic form, by Frederick Rebsamen, John Gardner and Michael Crichton, all three of these dating from the 1970s.2 Rebsamen’s Beowulf Is My Name takes the form of a retelling of the story in the voice of Beowulf himself, who speaks from an imagined position outside his life and is thus able to include his own death in the narration; this appropriation fills in details about Beowulf and his story which are not given in the poem and includes additional narrative and descriptive material derived from other sources and from the imagination of the adaptor. Gardner’s Grendel relates the story from the point of view of the monster Grendel, who becomes a conflicted anti-hero, suffering anguish in his hostility to humankind. Crichton in Eaters of the Dead cleverly recasts central elements of the story of Beowulf and combines them with the narrative of a real tenth-century documentary source chronicling the travels of the Arab Ibn Fadlan among the Norse Rus, with non-fiction merging imperceptibly into fiction and the conceit reinforced by the inclusion of a battery of invented (as well as some genuine) scholarly footnotes; Crichton reported his alarm on returning to the novel some years later on finding that he could not be certain whether some passages in it were real or made up.3
These novelistic adaptations are now approaching forty years old, but the latter two are still in print and Eaters of the Dead was given a new lease of life when it was made into a popular film in 1999, one of a number of filmic versions of the Beowulf story to have appeared in recent years.4 The most high profile of the Beowulf films, the 2007 version directed by Robert Zemeckis, also spawned a glossy picture book5 and a computer game (of what is called the ‘hack and slash’ variety, targeted primarily at young males), and indeed in its flattening ‘performance-capture’ animation format Zemeckis’s film itself has something of the appearance of a computer game. Meanwhile, comic-book and graphic novel versions of Beowulf have also been produced6 and there has been a steady flow of prose retellings,7 and at least one verse retelling, aimed at children.8
‘One-man’ stage performances of Beowulf in Modern English verse (presenting abridged versions of the whole poem) were put on in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Julian Glover and in the late 1990s and early 2000s by Felix Nobis,9 and Benjamin Bagsby has produced an original-language performance version of Beowulf’s fight with Grendel and its aftermath, in which Bagsby accompanies himself on Anglo-Saxon harp; on the DVD recording of a 2006 performance of the recitation a serviceable prose subtitle-translation is provided.10 And stage musical adaptations of Beowulf have also appeared, most notably a full-scale opera by Los Angeles Opera (the latter based on Gardner’s Grendel rather than Beowulf itself).11
It is modern verse translations, however, that have been the main focus of attention throughout this book. We noted the beginnings of the verse translation of Beowulf in the period when the poem first came into modern consciousness, the nineteenth century, in which only the version by William Morris stood out from the attempts of scholars and aficionados as a serious poetic engagement with the Anglo-Saxon epic, though Morris’s treatment of the poem was too strange and uncompromising for most readers. We identified the version of Edwin Morgan as the first major poetic translation of the twentieth century and examined a number of important and influential translations produced in the sixty years since Morgan, highlighting particularly those by Burton Raffel, Michael Alexander and Seamus Heaney but surveying also the range of disparate versions produced by other writers in the same period, a range that reflects the enduring artistic appeal of Beowulf and reflects also contending ideas about translation current at the time, and indeed still current today.
In concluding this discussion, it should be observed that Michael Alexander’s Penguin Classics translation was not his only version of Beowulf. To complete my survey of verse versions, I include here the text of Alexander’s ‘Beowulf Reduced’:12
There was once a hero called Scyld
Whose descendant decided to build
A magnificent hall
With seating for all,
But some of his best friends got killed.
A visitor, Beowulf the Geat,
Whose strength was surprisingly great,
De-armed the De-mon,
Then beheaded its Mum,
A yet more remarkable feat.
Much later a dragon awoke,
Sent Beowulf’s hall up in smoke.
So his fifty-not out
Was all up the spout –
But he killed it, then died. What a bloke!
‘Đær wæs Beowulfes / mærðo mæned’ (Beowulf, lines 856b–7a), ‘There Beowulf’s glory was related’.
1 On popular adaptations and appropriations, see George, Beowulf: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, pp. 115–49 (George is particularly interesting on film versions), and Clark and Perkins, ed., Medieval Culture and the Modern Imagination.
2 Rebsamen, Beowulf Is My Name, and Selected Translations of Other Old English Poems; Gardner, Grendel; Crichton, Eaters of the Dead.
3 ‘While I was writing, I felt that I was drawing the line between fact and fiction clearly. […] But within a few years, I could no longer be certain which passages were real, and which were made up’, Crichton, ‘A Factual Note’, p. 185.
4 The 13th Warrior, directed by John McTiernan (1999); note also Beowulf, directed by Graham Baker (1999); Beowulf and Grendel, directed by Sturla Gunnarsson (2005); Beowulf, directed by Robert Zemeckis (2007); Outlander, directed by Howard McCain (2008); and the animated films Grendel Grendel Grendel, directed by Alexander Stitt (1980; based on John Gardner’s novel), and Beowulf, directed by Yuri Kulakov (1998).
5 Vaz and Starkey, The Art of Beowulf.
6 Beowulf, drawn by Michael Uslan and Ricardo Villamonte; Beowulf, drawn by Gerry Bingham; The Collected Beowulf, drawn by Gareth Hinds; Beowulf, written by Stefan Petrucha, drawn by Kody Chamberlain; another spin-off from the Zemeckis movie is the graphic novel Beowulf, written by Chris Ryall, drawn by Gabriel Rodriguez.
7 Of these the most enduring has been Sutcliff, Beowulf: Dragonslayer (first published 1961); see also Morpurgo, Beowulf; Hicks, Beowulf.
8 Serraillier, Beowulf the Warrior.
9 See above, p. 195.
10 Bagsby, Beowulf.
11 See the review of the 2006 Los Angeles Opera production Grendel: Transcendence of the Great Big Bad, by Lisa Oliver, ‘Beyond Beowulf: Los Angeles Opera Brings Grendel to the Stage’ (Oliver also refers to other musical adaptations).
12 Alexander, ‘Beowulf Reduced’. Cf. also the 26-line Maurice Sagoff version in rhyming couplets in his ShrinkLits: Seventy of the World’s Towering Classics Cut Down to Size (pp. 20–1): ‘Monster Grendel’s tastes are plainish, / Breakfast? Just a couple Danish […]’.