An orphaned work. Occasionally, my medievalist past intrudes upon the present. Like today, when I heard that the British Library was putting images of Cotton Nero A.x online - best day of the week. This essay was a super-condensed version of a prefatory chapter for a book that will likely not be written, as it would require archival research in Germany and elsewhere (hey, if you want to fund it, I'll gladly listen to offers). So this essay was intended for Filmstory.org - a great web project that I recommend to all. But they decided not to use it. It's probably for medievalists and people who care about how we read Beowulf (if we read it all). It's too short to fully develop an argument (the editors wanted 1500 words or fewer), but it will fill some space here until I have something more appropriate to put in its place. Personally, I think it's never a bad time to poke holes in myths that have outlived their utility: that Beowulf is a simple-minded story about heroes and monsters, when men were men and women were women (unless they were monsters).
Beowulf, Beowulf (2007), and Millennial Masculinity
If there's such a thing as Man Lit, this is it: a plot-driven, action-brimming, hero-of-heroes story line, man vs. monster, battle to the death—just the thing to get your blood flowing and make you feel a little like a rampaging medieval Viking.1
Jack Murnighan aptly describes Beowulf's status as pop culture artifact in his drive-by tour of fifty works of canonical literature. Along with other medieval texts such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Murnighan surveys Beowulf and pronounces it "the most macho" of all English texts. Murnighan’s emphasis on an uncomplicated medieval masculinity that is the ancestor of its evidently diminished post-modern counterpart reaches for that apparently uncomplicated spectation, if not outright celebration, of violence (“man vs. monster, battle to the death”) that forms the core aesthetic vision of films such as 300, and the 2007 film adaptation of Beowulf. (Curiously, Murnaghan makes no mention of the women of the poem, apart from Grendel's mother, who are politically and socially crucial to the story.)
The investment of Beowulf with machismo is not new; it is reflected in many of the critical commonplaces that have obtained about the poem since at least the 19th century. As well, scholarly research and criticism on Old English literature often discusses the warrior ethos, the lord and thegn, the centrality (and necessity) of war and violence. Beowulf as celebration of the fighting spirit is very much an artifact of Britain’s violent and defensive role in 20th century history. Between the two great wars, J.R.R. Tolkein pronounced it a work of art by an “Englishman” and subsequently wrested control of it from the grip of German-speaking philologists, thus making it safe for England to claim Beowulf as its foundational literary document.2 So the current idea that Beowulf is somehow literature for guys is a post-modern sequel to its long history of being a viewfinder for backward-looking constructions of national identity.
Despite being imbricated in English nationalism and identity, Beowulf (the poem) has been problematical source material for cinema and has suffered a comically low reputation in the late 20th century.3 Now, however, Beowulf is the only medieval English text that can boast several major feature films, an untold number of graphic novels, a video game, and an opera (all between 2000 and 2010), to say nothing of the new translations that appear every year. And all this is all the more curious, as the medieval text is a largely compulsory (read—or not—and promptly forgotten after the test) part of American curriculum simply because it is old. So, why the renewal of interest in the 2000s and why another major Hollywood film? And what does the 2007 film adaptation have to say about our own need for, and lack of, moral certainty in the calculated use of violence? We can only speculate, but it seems to be true that Beowulf’s stock rises in times of war. Post-9/11, and in the midst of a decade of war, English literature’s most macho text seems to resonate more with American audiences than any time in the last half-century.
The 2007 Beowulf film adaptation by Robert Zimeckis (co-written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary) has only a glancing relationship to the poem (in terms of action and plot), but in its ham-handed campy way, it accesses some of the important questions raised by the poem: where do we look for the origins of the violence, feud, and fratricide that plague us—and does knowing those points of origin make us any wiser? What is the difference between heroism and monstrosity if they are only positions on the same continuum? If heroes and monsters are not born but made by narration (Beowulf by the stories of Breca and his own narration; Grendel by the Northern mythologies and stories of giants and floods),4 then when is it time to rethink our investment in heroism and confront our own monstrosity? Unexpectedly, perhaps, Beowulf (2007) forces a reappraisal of the original text’s accretion of mythologies of gender surrounding masculinity, femininity, and the ways that the “monstrous” is created within grey areas surrounding gender and heroism.
In this supposedly most macho of all source material, the filmmakers take a number of thematic risks and plot liberties that paradoxically (but not subtly) push to the surface the Old English poem’s subtexts of gender, sexuality, and identity. Beowulf (2007) takes perhaps the least erotic of all medieval epics and infuses it with digitally enhanced sexual brio in the character of Grendel’s mother, acted and voiced by Angelina Jolie. Mom’s ferocious maternal attachment to her misunderstood son is certainly present in the original—as in the Old English text, she kicks the most ass in taking revenge for Grendel, and her violence is all the more understandable and sympathetic because it is maternal, not monstrous. Indeed, what kind of mother would she be if she did not take revenge? The semi-mythical world of Beowulf, as we are constantly reminded in the poem and its surrounding critical discourses—including this 2007 adaptation, is one of violent feuds, where the death of kinsmen must be avenged.
Of course, the film’s major deviation from the plot and the “heroic ethos” of the text would appear to be Beowulf’s liaison with the aggrieved mother, impregnating her to give her another son in exchange for kingship and heroic status, and his subsequent deception about his dispatching of her. So in the poem they fight, not the other thing, right? Yes, but as Dana Oswald points out, the text deliberately shows their battle in somewhat sexualized terms, noting that as they fight Beowulf “falls on his back, while Grendel’s mother sits astride him, having pulled her short sword” (‘Ofsæt þa þone selegyst/ ond hyre seax geteah. . .’).5 This passage, having caused scholars a bit of embarrassment in the past, often finds its translation neutered. The fury of the battle between Boeowulf and Grendel's mother in the poem is of a greater intensity and degree than the struggle between Beowulf and Grendel, and Beowulf (2007) exaggerates that erotic subtext and elevates it to text—in this case, visual.
The final sequence of the poem and film, in which Beowulf must rescue his tribe (the Geats) from a marauding dragon, is, only connected in the poem to the sequence of events concerning Grendel by a short transitional passage that basically says that fifty years have passed and Beowulf is now king of the Geats through an unlikely series of events (he was not in line to inherit the throne initially). The film’s major adjustment to the Grendel/Mother story (Beowulf’s impregnation of the mother) leads to its other major shift: the dragon that menaces Geatland is in fact her child and Beowulf’s child. This connection between Beowulf and the dragon clumsily literalizes the nagging subtextual doubt the poem raises about the value and unintended consequences of violence-driven heroism. The dragon awakened in the poem is guardian of a war-hoard of treasure and a single cup of that treasure has been stolen by a greedy or desperate servant. Beowulf, now aged, decides to tackle the dragon alone rather than with a retinue of soldiers; it is a fatal mistake.
Beowulf has been a hero so long, he does not know how to lead or follow when necessary. No longer superhuman, his fate is foreordained. Now sitting ducks, the Geats foretell their own demise not by monsters, but by neighboring tribes who have been at bay, waiting for the moment when Beowulf (who has no heir in the poem) would die, and leave the Geats hero-less. Although Beowulf was a great hero, the poem leaves no doubt as to the Geats’ ultimate doom and Beowulf’s lack of foresight and vision in the difference between leadership and heroism. The film’s attempt to dramatize the unexpected wages and unexamined bases of heroism -- just as the poem did -- make it more than a violent video game spectacle based on a thousand year old poem. In making literal Beowulf's own investment in creating a mythology of heroism, the film sends a clear message about the need for collective action -- leadership and collaboration-- rather than go-it-alone macho heroism.
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[1] Jack Murnighan, Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature’s 50 Greatest Hits (New York: Three Rivers, 2009) 58.
[2] J.R.R. Tolkein, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Proceedings of the British Academy, 22 (1936), 245–95. The essay has been anthologized many times and is available online as well.
[3] Annie Hall (1977): “Just don’t take any class where they make you read Beowulf” (writer and director: Woody Allen).
[4] Jeffery J. Cohen. Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: U Minnesota, 1999).
[5] Dana Oswald, Monsters, Gender, and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2009) 95.
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