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Alan Schmidt's avatar

I got so pissed off after watching that movie. Read Beowulf in sixth grade and had a hard time with the prose. Came back to it and felt an inner viking rising.

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Chivalry Guild's avatar

Have you read Tolkien’s essay on it?

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Alan Schmidt's avatar

On my list now.

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Chivalry Guild's avatar

Is very good, as one would expect

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Jack Laurel's avatar

I'm glad I was never tempted by curiosity into watching such ressentimental dreck. As John Dolan said of Peter Jackson's LOTR, films have a way of overriding and desecrating your imaginative picture of a story. Perhaps that effect is lessened here, by the fact that Gaiman and Avery's bugman vomit is so utterly different from the epic poem onto which they projected it.

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Daniel Kennedy's avatar

We were assigned the poem in 7th or 8th grade (yeah, I’m old). We were all too young to understand it. When I read it years later, I started to understand it. Like most great works, it rewards multiple readings.

I’m glad I didn’t see this movie.

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Astral's avatar

That Roger Avery quote just blew my mind. I’ve never thought of that or seen anyone talk about it that way. He has an excellent point….like now I can’t unsee it.

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Chivalry Guild's avatar

This is actually worth reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_(2007_film)

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Jack Laurel's avatar

If I remember rightly, some scholars have speculated (based on a notoriously ambiguous line in the 2nd chapter of the original text) that Grendel was unable to attack Hrothgar because of the sacrality of his kingship. Might have been the sort of thing that the Christian poet would have wanted to smooth over in the transition from traditional tale to literary work.

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