The Wall Street Journal
NOVEMBER 13, 2007
“Beowulf,” Saved From the Fire
By JOHN J. MILLER
When the heirs of Sir Robert Cotton selected a spot to stash the rare-book collector's priceless library, they probably should have known better than to pick a place called Ashburnham House. In 1731, a fire swept through that ill-named residence in London and forever impoverished our literary heritage.
One manuscript that escaped the blaze -- just barely -- contained an untitled poem of more than 3,000 lines. The flames actually singed its pages and destroyed bits of its unique content. In the centuries to follow, gradual deterioration consumed even more. It's a small miracle that "Beowulf," as the poem came to be called, survived at all.
Nowadays, "Beowulf" has caught fire in a completely different way. High-school English teachers routinely assign the Anglo-Saxon epic to their students. Bookstores carry multiple translations. In 2000, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney's version was a surprise best seller; a new illustrated edition of his modern classic has just come out from W.W. Norton & Co. Several children's publishers have recently issued their own adaptations of this monster-fighting tale. There's even "Beowulf for Business," in which author E.L. Risden claims that by reading the millennium-old story "you can both become a better person and find more success in the working world."
This latest flurry of activity probably owes much to the film that reaches theaters this Friday. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, it features cutting-edge animation and a cast of stars -- Anthony Hopkins as Hrothgar, Crispin Glover as Grendel and, most improbably, Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother. The producers are clearly looking to capture the same market that made "300" a sword-swinging, spear-thrusting smash hit this spring.
The movie already has made waves for its "red band" trailer, available only on the Internet: Ms. Jolie doesn't appear as "that swamp-thing from hell/the tarn-hag" of Heaney's rendering, but rather as a naked femme fatale. That's a radical departure from the poem's actual text, and a racy one that most likely eliminates the prospect of classroom screenings as a reward for ninth-graders who battle their way through the tale.
It's not the first time "Beowulf" has undergone a reimagining. The tongue of the Anglo-Saxons, sometimes called "Old English," is a positively foreign language. Whenever translators try to tackle it, they must make choices about how to interpret a dead language for modern readers. They also have to make up for deficiencies in the charred original manuscript. As fate would have it, several of the lost passages involve a fire-breathing dragon.
Many writers have mined "Beowulf" as a source of material for their own creativity. John Gardner's 1971 novel "Grendel," told from the perspective of the poem's ogre-like antagonist, is a prominent example. So is the work of J.R.R. Tolkien -- he plucked the word "orc," for the sinister race of goblins in "The Lord of the Rings," directly from the original language of "Beowulf."
The poem probably was written down by monks around 1000, and it almost certainly grew out of an older oral tradition. Since scholars rediscovered this masterpiece of alliterative, unrhymed verse in the 18th and 19th centuries, it has flourished in part because it has no rival in the literature of England before the Norman invasion of 1066.
At the same time, "Beowulf" is a familiar story of heroic ideals. The title character is to our Anglo-Saxon forebears as Gilgamesh is to the Sumerians, Odysseus to the ancient Greeks, and Aeneas to the Romans. The poem is both a saga of adventure and a repository of cultural wisdom, Anglo-Saxon style: "Behavior that's admired/is the path to power among people everywhere"; "Whichever one death fells/must deem it a just judgment by God"; and "It is always better/to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning."
A few critics have tried to interpret Beowulf as a Christ-figure because he dies so that others might live. This reading can be pushed too far -- Beowulf is the kind of guy who prefers ripping arms from sockets to turning the other cheek. Yet there's an obvious tension in the poem between the Christian belief of the author and the pagan society he describes with fascination and sympathy.
The tug of war over which faith or people might lay claim to "Beowulf," however, isn't what gives the poem its magnificence. Instead, its enduring power comes from the way it addresses subjects of universal importance -- most notably, the timeless question of what makes a good leader.
Eskimos are said to have a pile of words for "snow." The scholar Howell D. Chickering Jr. has noted that "Beowulf" includes more than 30 synonyms for "king." Over and over, the poem dwells on the duties of rulership, praising qualities such as courage and generosity and condemning cowardice and selfishness.
The moral center of the work comes after Beowulf, as a young warrior, has defended his Danish brethren from the terrorist rampages of Grendel and his mother. Hrothgar, the king whose home Beowulf has just saved, delivers a short sermon on the secrets of successful mead-hall management. He urges Beowulf never to forget his own mortality. That's the most essential ingredient of how a good leader -- "a protector of his people" -- may secure "eternal rewards."
Then the narrative leaps half a century, to a time when Beowulf is a wise old man who has led his people well -- and who must confront a final, fatal challenge. When all is done, the poem offers its verdict: "They said that of all the kings upon the earth/he was the man most gracious and fair-minded/kindest to his people and keenest to win fame."
Through the force of his legend, Beowulf becomes the ultimate survivor -- a paradoxical lesson from a crumbling manuscript that nearly didn't make it.
Mr. Miller writes for National Review.