Beowulf's Popular Afterlife in Literature, Comic Books, and Film

Kathleen Forni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429880353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Beowulf's presence on the popular cultural radar has increased in the past two decades, coincident with cultural crisis and change. Why? By way of a fusion of cultural studies, adaptation theory, and monster theory, Beowulf's Popular Afterlife examines a wide range of Anglo-American retellings and appropriations found in literary texts, comic books, and film. The most remarkable feature of popular adaptations of the poem is that its monsters, frequently victims of organized militarism, male aggression, or social injustice, are provided with strong motives for their retaliatory brutality. Popular adaptations invert the heroic ideology of the poem, and monsters are not only created by powerful men but are projections of their own pathological behavior. At the same time there is no question that the monsters created by human malfeasance must be eradicated.

1 Introduction

Why Beowulf?

A simple question inspired this book: why is Beowulf, of all tales, continuously reinvented, rewritten, and reimagined in Anglo-American popular culture? Beowulf has not only been adapted to film (multiple times), but it has also been transformed into science fiction, historical fantasy, horror, children’s literature, and pornography. It has been rendered into comic book and stage play, and plundered for its insights into contemporary politics and corporate culture. The poem is remolded into mystery and romance, retold from various points of view (human, canine, feline), and extended to include Beowulf’s and Grendel’s childhoods or Wiglaf’s reign. There are rock songs, operas, and board games. Benjamin Bagby has made a lucrative career as an itinerant scop.¹ And in my favorite Beowulfian computer game, Skullgirls, Beowulf is a professional wrestler whose iconic defensive accouterment is a folding lawn chair named “The Hurting.”² Certainly, part of the reason for Beowulf’s afterlife is that the text remains standard fare in literature courses at both the secondary and university levels, providing built-in name recognition for these reinventions. Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s extraordinary epic trilogy Lord of the Rings and Seamus Heaney’s best-selling and award-winning translation of Beowulf (2000), both high-profile cultural phenomena, have probably also contributed to its continued presence in the public consciousness.³ So too, Beowulf’s reproduction in popular culture might be associated with the popularity of superhero films since 9/11, in which villains are motivated by unregenerate evil, and violence is the default approach to conflict management, moralistic and militaristic responses that some might view as escapist, but which provide comfort and clarity in the face of the complexities of terrorism.⁴ And considering more material incentives, one might add that the poem—and the characters of Beowulf and Grendel—are not only presold commodities but are also in the public domain, free of licensing fees.

Beowulf, itself a superannuated heroic epic, is also surprisingly adaptable to contemporary genres. Notwithstanding its “rather odd, highly anti-climactic plot structure,” the poem is highly recommended in Beowulf on the Beach as the prime example of canonical “Man Lit.”⁵ Given its scenes of cannibalism and dismemberment, it has similarities to horror, and its magical elements and dragon suggest the fantasy genre. The lone hero fighting against seemingly impossible odds is a staple of action-adventure, and the outsider fighting in the defense of a threatened community has clear affinities with the Western. As Tolkien observes, Beowulf only lacks “enmeshed loyalties” and “hapless love,” which reinventions frequently ameliorate.⁶ Indeed, Beowulf has elements of five of the “seven basic plots” that Christopher Booker finds common to the “history of storytelling.”⁷ All are variations on the theme of a protagonist “being drawn into a course of action which leads initially to some kind of hectic gratification and dream-like success, but which then darkens inexorably to a climax of nightmare and destruction.”⁸ A hero in conflict with a villain is the most common type of folktale plot, embodying the core of Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth” of the hero’s journey and providing an archetypal paradigm of “male adolescent development.”⁹ But I have to agree with a colleague who suggested (after confessing to never having read the poem) that it is certainly the monsters, being malleable figures for cultural or social fears and desires, that have perennial appeal and that appear to continue to engage modern audiences. For, since almost without fail, the monstrous is mitigated and complicated in adaptations of Beowulf, what is perceived to be a simple moral binary in the original—largely suggested by Grendel’s apparent lack of motivation in his depredations of the Danes—is the chief conundrum that perhaps continues to inspire the poem’s reimagination.

Arguably, Beowulf’s afterlife attests to the vitality of its canonicity and its cultural centrality; that is, it is a myth that remains compelling to a broad sociocultural spectrum of readers. But it remains engaging thanks in part to adaptations, which are, for Deborah Cartmell, “the art form of democracy.”¹⁰ The reinvented Beowulf—the character, text, and narrative—is consequently often fundamentally transformed. It is rarely consumed straight but is rather shaken, or stirred, with popular culture conceits and conventions. Grendel has a bad childhood; his mother is abandoned by her lover; Hrothgar is a tyrant; Beowulf is in love with Hygelac’s wife. What is seen, perhaps, by some as a watering down (to continue the cocktail metaphor) might also be viewed as an accommodation of a text to contemporary literary tastes and to diverse audiences. Translation theory would describe the text as being domesticated, its foreignness made familiar for broad, or targeted, consumption. In comic book parlance, Beowulf itself is not necessarily a privileged source, and it is continuously subjected to retroactive configuration (“retcon”) involving reinterpretation, “reinscription,” and revision.¹¹ And borrowing the evolutionary analogy sometimes utilized by film adaptation theorists, Linda Hutcheon suggests that adaptations variously “adjust,” “alter,” and “make suitable” the prior work for new cultural and social environments.¹² The motivation for both creating and consuming the adaptation is for Julie Sanders an “inherent sense of play, produced in part by the activation of our informed sense of similarity and difference between the texts being invoked, and the connected interplay of expectation and surprise.”¹³ Similarly, John Ellis suggests that “Adaptation into another medium becomes a means of prolonging the pleasure of the original presentation, and repeating the production of a memory.”¹⁴

One might assume that a translation of the poem, available in scores of versions, might provide the desired pleasure of the “cultural recycling” that for Hutcheon too arises from “repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise.”¹⁵ Contemporary translation theory has tried to disabuse us of the assumption that translations deliver a close imitation of the source, given the impossibility of finding cultural and linguistic equivalencies, and given the desire to tailor the source text to different target cultures. Indeed, Andre Lefevere maintains that the translation, or what he terms the “rewrite,” constitutes “the adaptation of a work of literature to a different audience, with the intention of influencing the way in which that audience reads the work.”¹⁶ But notwithstanding the conceptual blurring between translation and adaptation, most use a translation with the assumption that the translator has made some effort at linguistic and substantive equivalency. The critical controversy over the postcolonial tenor of Heaney’s translation of Beowulf—which for many in our generation is the “original” text—suggests that fidelity is often assumed to be the primary function of a translation.¹⁷

For those who seek out the adaptation, however, the most interesting aspect of such reinventions is their infidelity to the original text. John Fiske maintains that in popular culture, the text is not an object of reverence to be understood or deciphered but a product to be used:

In popular culture the text is a cultural resource to be plundered or used in ways that are determined by the social interests of the reader/user not by the structure of the text itself, nor by the intentions (however we may discern them) of its author.¹⁸

Rather than decoding authorial intention, audience desires—frequently associated with relevance and social empowerment—are projected into the text.¹⁹ Accessibility is certainly desirable, and one motivation for the adaptation is aesthetic adjustment in an effort to ameliorate perceived artistic deficiencies that an aficionado might overlook. In the case of Beowulf, these might include the highly allusive and apparently inapposite digressions, and the absence of modern narrative practices, such as complex characterization or the stylistic conventions of literary realism. Fiske asserts that the pleasure of popular culture also derives from the accessibility found in conventional forms (romance, Western, mystery, adventure, sci-fi) that yield the comfort of narrative ritual. Rather than being simply predictable, popular genres provide a standard template upon which a variety of topical interpretations can be projected. And the relevance of popular texts comes from “interconnections between a text and the immediate social situation of its readers.”²⁰ Thus, the text’s usefulness derives from its contemporary resonance rather than its historical significance, its familiarity rather than its alterity. That is, the adaptation is a cultural commodity that is borrowed from high culture and made accessible, enjoyable, and significant to a wide array of audiences: “Like a piece of clothing, Beowulf is customized out of the canon to fit the producer/audience’s fancy.”²¹ It remains a seminal cultural text in part because it accommodates and inspires such popular reconstructions.

While Beowulf often is made accessible by being refashioned into narrative forms more familiar than the heroic epic, by virtue of the impossible monsters, the tale remains in the genre of fantasy. In imagining an alternative world, especially one in the past, and frequently providing resolutions that restore familiar hierarchies, fantasy can be conservative in outlook, serving to maintain the status quo.²² Peter Hunt finds a “regressive element”—for an earlier innocence, a simpler, less complex time when good and evil are polarized and sexuality absent—in some fantasy worlds that “exploit pseudo-medieval settings.”²³ Nonetheless, he maintains that “alternative worlds must necessarily be related to, and comment on, the real world” (7), and as such, they have latent political significance, exploring what is accepted as natural or common sense in the social order. In Brian M. Thomsen’s edited collection of stories The Further Adventures of Beowulf, Champion of Middle Earth (2006), for instance, Beowulf is an establishment figure who battles a series of elves, trolls, and wraiths as he goes about the more mundane tasks of tax collection, reconciling trade disagreements, vanquishing pagans, and navigating the complexities of international relations created by the imperialistic visions of his king.²⁴ Loyalty to authority, regardless of its dubious ambitions, appears to be the refrain throughout, and Beowulf’s patriotism is manifested in his zeal to demonstrate his unblinking allegiance. The problem is that while he is perhaps intended to be a heroic figure, this reader, at least, finds Beowulf’s blinkered obedience irksome, and he clearly receives scant rewards for his officious servility. Moreover, the ruler he serves is characterized as grasping and small-minded, little deserving the devotion and talents of his underling. Beowulf’s Further Adventures (and many other adaptations) demonstrate that the genre of fantasy is perhaps neither inherently conservative nor subversive but instead fosters an “aesthetics of ambivalence”:

In this reading, fantasy addresses the ambivalence involved in making sense of differing interpretations of the world by depicting the process of making sense as a process of making decisions, a highly political undertaking… resolution remains temporary, the result of decision instead of essential truth.²⁵

Hunt nonetheless maintains that fantasy can be an “essentially democratic” form—”democratized by being outside the solipsistic system of high culture.”²⁶ So too, while adaptations surely signify the continuing significance of the source, adaptors are “just as likely to want to contest the aesthetic or political values of the adapted text as to pay homage.”²⁷ The adaptation, by its very existence, “challenges the authority of any notion of priority.”²⁸ Similarly, approached as products of popular culture, reinventions of the poem might also constitute a symbolic form of dissent to the status quo that a text like Beowulf—canonical, patriarchal, militaristic, Christian—represents. That is, adaptations are a potential source of ideological resistance to both the cultural hierarchy represented by the original text (that by its very nature privileges educational attainment) and the social hierarchy that such a text presumably reflects (in this case, a male military...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Why Beowulf?
• 2 Beowulf’s Monsters
• Retellings
• Bibliography
• Index