Beowulf

So, there's this new movie coming out and Beowulf has become all the rage again after, oh, about a thousand years give or take. In the midst of all this literary craziness, I decided to read Beowulf with my tenth grade English class. It was completely unplanned, and I had to sneak it in between The Odyssey and The Diary of Anne Frank. But the poem is short, about 80 pages or so, and Seamus Heaney has provided a delightful rendering that is quite a lot better than the version I had to read in high school. We read it aloud in its entirety in about 4 class periods.

The students all liked Beowulf far more than The Odyssey. I can't fathom why, since The Odyssey is really brilliant and source material for nearly every narrative in the Western world, but that's what they said. The action in Beowulf is more clear than The Odyssey, and while it is difficult sometimes to keep characters straight due to the author's tendency to call characters by descriptions and allegiances rather than given names, there are fewer important characters to keep straight. Plus, it's difficult sometimes to see why Odysseus is a hero. He's vain, arrogant, and makes absurd decisions on occasion; whereas Beowulf is your basic badass with a sword, and he knows how to use it.

Odysseus doesn't kill too many enemies one on one. He's the thinking type who strategizes more than acts. Beowulf gives a few speeches, drinks gallons of mead, and then kills Grendel, his mom, and the dragon. And since Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay have determined what a hero is in the 21st century, it is far easier to see the heroism in Beowulf than in Odysseus, and as the narrator says about Beowulf, "he was a good king."

I like to do a bit of feminist rethinking of history in my classes. And in this area, Beowulf falls far short. Hrothgar's wife is the only female character of any significance, and she has just one important speech. Otherwise, she wanders around looking regal and serving meed to the thanes (that's warriors to you unknowing readers). Now The Odyssey, on the other hand, has a plethora of deeply complex female characters. They all take second stage to Odysseus, but combined they far outweigh his page time. There's Athena who ought to be the prototype of feminine slyness; she gets to out-think every mortal man as well as the gods. A bare fraction of a metre behind is Penelope who is perhaps the only woman in literary history to hold off a hoard of under-sexed, over-masculined, bitter, angry suitors for a decade or more. That, my friends, take guile. Not to be outdone is the young Nausika who sneaks the bedragled Odysseus into her father's house from the beach. And of course there are Kirke and Kalypso who ply their own feminine wiles throughout the text. Robert Graves has done an excellent job rethinking the text as the narrative of a young woman. It'll be interesting to see what the new CGI version of Beowulf does with Wealthow and Grendel's mom. Casting Angelina Jolie is certainly an interesting approach.

I took a chance with my class and gave them the standard college-level reading notes: Beowulf is three narratives - killing the monsters, Scandinavian politics, and a Christian conversion text. They grasped this pretty quick, and it made it easier to get through the long dry speeches on ancestral history and political manuevering as well as the frequent Christian theological moments interspersed with criticisms of pagan practices. It was a fun experience. I got to read the text in its entirety with the class, and aside from two students falling asleep on the last day, everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Now we can do what all literati do when we go see the movie - compare it to the text and bemoan its narrative failings. Brilliant!