"Beowulf" vs. "The Lord of the Rings"

Nov. 20, 2007 | Robert Zemeckis' new film "Beowulf" gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "the sublime and the ridiculous." Zemeckis took the oldest and most important text of our ur-language, and turned it into a 3-D Disneyland ride so cheesy he should have called it "Anglo-Saxons of the Caribbean." Of course, there's nothing new or surprising about this. Hollywood has been profaning history and literature since long before Cecil B. DeMille cast Charlton Heston as Moses. If the Bible isn't sacred, why should the oldest poem in our ancestral language be?

But the "Beowulf" travesty is especially glaring, because of the obvious contrast with another work that mined the same ancient field: J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." "Beowulf" isn't just a bad, although visually spectacular, movie, it's a huge missed opportunity. With enough imaginative audacity, Zemeckis could have created a mythical universe, one that finds the mysterious threads that connect the distant past to our time. Instead, he turned our shared cultural heritage into a cartoon. (This hasn't hurt "Beowulf" at the box office: It was the highest-grossing movie in the country after its first weekend.)

Comparing "Beowulf" to Tolkien's masterpiece is setting the bar high, but Zemeckis' choice of "Beowulf" made that inevitable. There's no real reason to take on "Beowulf" unless you want to go all the way. That's true not just because it's a canonical text, but because there's no way to make a movie out of it. When you're faced with the impossible, you'd better bring some magic to the undertaking. You need more than 3-D special effects -- you need a 3-D imagination.

"Beowulf" is the earliest piece of vernacular European literature, and it remains perhaps the most unfathomable one, an uncanny visitation from a dark lost corner of our history, an era caught between paganism and Christianity. The inscrutability of "Beowulf" has made it contested ground for scholars for over a century. Since even experts cannot agree on what it means, how should a modern artist approach it?

Of course, there is no right or wrong answer to this question. Zemeckis had the right to choose any source material he wanted, and do whatever he wanted with it. And perhaps his high-tech extravanganza will awaken interest not just in one ancient poem, but even our forgotten Germanic heritage -- even, perhaps, history itself. But if it does, it won't be because of his artistic vision.

For those readers who heeded Woody Allen's words in "Annie Hall" and gave a wide berth to all classes that included "Beowulf," here's a crib sheet. "Beowulf" is a 3,183-line poem, written by an unknown poet in Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon, the Germanic language spoken in England before the Norman Conquest), probably in the 8th century, but possibly as much as several hundred years later. The poem survives only in a single manuscript, a copy made around 1,000 A.D. that is now in the British Museum. The events it relates take place in what is now Denmark around 500 A.D., so the author is already looking back at a distant time. Crucially, he is a Christian, who has a highly ambiguous relation to the pagan hero he celebrates. Scholars continue to debate the exact nature of his, his poem's, and his audience's Christianity and attitude to paganism -- as well as just about everything else about the poem.

The story is stark and strange. A monster named Grendel, a descendant of the biblical Cain, has been terrorizing the kingdom of Denmark for 12 years. A great warrior named Beowulf vows to kill Grendel. He and 14 men sail from their home in Geatland (southern Sweden) to Denmark, where Beowulf kills the monster and then the monster's horrible mother. He receives gifts and honor from the aging Danish king and sails back home, where he rules for 50 years. When a dragon rampages through his kingdom, Beowulf seeks out the monster and kills it, but is himself mortally wounded. After his death he is remembered by his people as the kindest of kings and the most eager for fame.

Whatever its historical and literary virtues, this is not a story that is going to pack them in at the local multiplex. Any faithful film adaptation of "Beowulf" would almost certainly be a commercial failure, because the poem's essence is mythical. Its characters are one-dimensional, and it has only one plot development: The hero gets old and dies. Its greatness lies in its language, not its story. "Beowulf" is a hard and haunted poem, one that evokes what the "Cambridge History of English Literature" called "the dim, palpable unknown." Old English is a foreign language, but if you read a bilingual edition, like Seamus Heaney's fine translation, every now and then a familiar word appears, like a grim rock thrusting out of a turbulent sea. For Tolkien, a philologist who as a child was as preternaturally sensitive to the sound of language as the young Mozart was to music, the very sound of Old English was revelatory. As professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, Tolkien would electrify his classes with his dramatic recitation of "Beowulf's" opening. (In a letter to Tolkien, W.H. Auden wrote reverently, "[Your] voice was the voice of Gandalf.")

There is one film version of "Beowulf" that is literally true to the original: Actor Benjamin Bagby recites the entire poem in the original Old English, accompanying himself on the Anglo-Saxon harp. It's a remarkable performance, but the film seems unlikely to ever be shown in places where they charge money for admission.

Aspiring to a larger audience, Zemeckis' film and the three previous film versions of "Beowulf" have radically altered the story. Two of the earlier films take a demythologizing approach, attempting to imagine what real events might have given rise to the supernatural tale. "Beowulf and Grendel," made in 2005 and shot in Iceland, makes Grendel a sympathetic Bigfoot, a vaguely Neanderthal loner who is taking vengeance on the Danes after they killed his father. "The Thirteenth Warrior" (1999), based on a Michael Crichton novel, also eschews the supernatural: The monsters are humans clad in bearskins. In a further wrinkle, it is told from the perspective of an Arab diplomat who finds himself unwillingly in Beowulf's band. Both are worthy efforts, and the eccentric "Beowulf and Grendel" rises at times to heights of hypnotic intensity, although it's painfully uneven. The 1999 "Beowulf," starring Christopher Lambert, is hilariously dreadful, a fine candidate to be made into a Mystery Science Theater episode. It is set in a post-apocalyptic future, with Beowulf as a dark and obsessed hero. The big plot innovation is Grendel's mother, who becomes a hot babe/horrific monster, played by a blond Playboy model in a net, who previously seduced the old king (from which unholy union Grendel emerged) and tries to work her evil wiles on Beowulf by caressing his nether sword. When that fails, she turns into a multiwinged, Pterodactyl-like harpy.

Next page: Grendel's mother is upgraded from a mere Bunny to Angelina Jolie...