To be clear, I mean the epic poem (whether in the original Old English or one of the many translations), not the movie from a few years back. I don’t object to talking about the latter as well, but I won’t participate in that part of the discussion, as I watched only a little of the DVD, liked little of it, and remember none of it.
Anyway … Beowulf. By Pallas, how I love that poem. I can still remember the first time I read it and where I was. Senior year in high school, Brother Vincent’s AP English class. We weren’t actually reading it. But Brother Vincent decided early on in the class that I (a) didn’t actually need any help to pass the AP English exam, and (b) was annoying, so he gave me a reading list, told me to write him a couple of papers every six weeks, and told me to get lost. On the list was the Donaldson translation, and opening it randomly, I saw these words:
I was hooked.
Anyway … that’s just me. Anybody else hereabouts love Beowulf–or even John Gardner’s Grendel? If so, tell us about it!
Was totally blown away by Seamus Heaney’s (Irish poet, Nobel laureate) translation.
I was hooked from the account of Beowulf’s early life, with such details as that when he and friends would go swimming, they wore nothing, but strapped on their swords, in case they encountered “the fierce sea-fishes”.
And it never lets up, right up to the end with the sadness of his people at the death of their king.
The movie is a different animal, driven partly by the need to invent a character who could be played by Angelina Jolie, and partly by an attempt to retrofit political correctness onto a Dark Age epic.
Yes! I love it, and I have the Seamus Heaney version, too. It’s such a universal theme, used more than ever today: the monster who comes and picks off people when they let down their guard inside their claustrophobic structure. My least favorite part: When Beowulf gets so long-winded about how macho and tough he is.
I had never read about Tolkien deriving The Hobbit from a part of Beowulf, but I sure recognized it the second I read it.
The Hobbit is Tolkien’s perspective-flip of the last section of Beowulf, in which a thief steals a golden up from a dragon’s hoard. Thought of that way, Hobbit is not unlike John Gardner’s Grendel.
Read it in two different AP English classes in HS. Freshman year and Junior year. Different HSs, though.
Excellent epic. And I liked the movie, too. At least I liked it more than I thought I would. Yeah, the Angelina Jolie part was contrived, but it did sort of work, in it’s own way.
In my sophomore year of college, I took The Best English Literature Class Ever. The teacher was a wizard with the material selection and the handling of it; the whole semester’s experience was almost mystical, everything made so much sense. We worked through:
The bog body poems by Seamus Heaney
Beowulf trans. by Seamus Heaney
The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkein
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
I’ve been a huge fan of Seamus Heaney, especially those two works, ever since.
Beowulf was the subject of the best exam paper I ever wrote in college. I enjoyed the poem very much. It’s a shame, though, that all most people know of it is the Grendel (and, to a lesser extent, Grendel’s mother) passages. The end, the dragon and cup sequence, is all the more poignant for the contrast with Beowulf’s glory days in Heorot.
My Medieval Lit professor taught us that the real hero of the poem is Hrothgar, because he fills his role exactly as a king should. Beowulf falls because he failed as a king; his responsibility was to send a hero out after the dragon, not go out himself.
The Dream of the Rood was another great Old English poem I read in that class.
Thanks. It seems to be out of stock in the UK, but I can always order from the US if needs be. One for my my Christmas wish-list maybe.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t familiar with the story, I guess I must have read some version at school. The film was also better than I expected, but Beowulf stripping naked for the fight was a little strange. It appears that not only can man evolve from an ape without showing his genitals, he can wrestle a giant monster without doing so.
I truly enjoy it…Ever since I first read it, I could imagine a (not the) bard telling the story as men with mead in hand hang on every word. At the same time I could imagine Beowulf, Grendel, Hrothgar (the Dane), and the great mead-hall Herot.
I was broken hearted when I heard it was to be made into a movie. It could not and should not be made into a film.
We were introduced to Beowulf in grade 12, but the version in our text was only excerpts and not the entire poen, so I really only got the gist. Nevertheless, I found it to be thouroughly engaging and entertaining. One of these days, I have to get a copy of the complete poem and get to reading it front-to-back.
The movie lost me completely during the big, naked fight with Grendel. The obsessive technique used to hide Beowulf’s junk was entirely too reminiscent of the “Son of the Invisible Man” scene from “Amazon Women On The Moon” and after that, I really couldn’t take any of the rest of the film seriously. I mean, c’mon – either have your naked characters be naked or don’t even go there – let’s not stick candlesticks in odd places to hide the naughty bits. It’s just stupid.
I think the best part of the film was the songs that Robin Wright-Penn sang.
That said, I LOVE the poem! Beowulf, the Scottish Play, and a wild day at a local Renaissance Festival contributed to me getting my absolutely worthless-anywhere-but-in-my-own-mind degree in medieval and Renaissance lit. Which I loved every minute of getting.
I first discovered Beowulf because of ‘Silverlock’ by John Myers Myers and the Victor Davies’ musical version from 1974. (The former can be considered a recommendation; the second, not so much.) Then, a while later, I discovered Tolkien and his work on Beowulf. Love, love, love it.
My current translation is the Michael Alexander; I don’t know where my copy of the Seamus Heaney has wandered off to. Loved the Heaney translation.
I’ve only read it once, but I really ought to re-read it one of these times. When I read it, my immediate response was “Wow, so this is where Tolkien got his style!”. Anyone who likes Tolkien, you’ll probably also like Beowulf.
Speaking of which, I’ve heard that Tolkien did a translation of it, too. Is it as good as one might expect?
Oh, and for the movie, the way I understood it is that the conceit is that the movie shows what “really” happened, while the epic poem is Beowulf’s own rendition of the events, made to make him look good. We see some of this on screen: His narration of the swimming contest doesn’t match what’s actually shown, and then of course there’s his claim about having slain Grendel’s mother. Viewed that way, it’s not bad.
My problem with the movie wasn’t its lack of fidelity to the poem; I’d have had to watch it all the way through to make such a judgment. I was simply bored. But that’s not saying much; I have little patience for movies these days. I didn’t make it through THOR either.
I love Beowulf. I read a lot of Old English in college, though probably more prose than poetry. I have seen Benjamin Bagby perform 1200 or so lines several times. Babgy is well worth seeing if you ever get the chance. His DVD is nicely produced; his talent for storytelling really comes through.
The best thing about the Heaney translation is that the Old English is on facing pages. Heaney doesn’t know any Old English at all, and it shows. It’s an interesting piece and Heaney takes some real risks, but it’s just not Beowulf. It’s closer to some of Pound’s poetic interpretations than it is to an actual translation.
Tolkien did indeed translate Beowulf, and more importantly, gives an immense commentary on the text. The manuscript was “found” about ten years ago in the Bodleian, and after a year or two of puttering around with it, the Estate decided not to move the project forward. It is pretty disappointing. Michael Drout was able to publish Tolkien’s manuscript notes in a volume called Beowulf and the Critics.
I love Beowulf. I have a stack of translations (although not Heaney’s), and one audio recording. I’ve also collected movie versions of the story. I actually like the Zemeckis film, although recognizing that it’s a modern interpretation (heavy on “interpretation”). The version called “Beowulf and Grendel” starring Gerard Butler, filmed in Iceland, is pretty interesting, too. Ignore the Christopher Lambert and the SyFy channel versions. I have a soft spot for Eaters of the Dead/13th Warrior.
As for translations, I like the Edwin Morgan (Univ. of California press) translation best. It preserves the metric feel and is comprehensible, and doesn’t read like the translations I used to do in high school. I have to admit to a prejudice against tolkein’s translations. I really didn’t care for his translation of Sir Gawaine and the Grene Knight, and the others of his I read are even less palatable to me.
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