Opportunities missed

Meanwhile, Hollywood
betrays Beowulf
Unbridled violence laced with special effects… Result: the fantasy
based on the Anglo-Saxon hero is like an ugly videogame.
Instead of seeing the movie, why not read the poem for ourselves?

Before The Golden Compass, Robert Zemeckis’s adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, one of the finest works from early medieval England, was released as a fantasy movie. Containing echoes of older pagan traditions, Beowulf tells how a courageous hero battles against a series of tremendous monsters, in the two phases of his life, strong youth and old age. In the background, we glimpse the ancient Germanic kingdoms and the feuds between them. The poem is a troubled and poetic tale of the experience of the limits which every life encounters. However hard man struggles and strains, in the end it always seems that evil and darkness will be victorious with one last blow of the tail. Tolkien saw this image as a wonderful epitome of the condition of pagan man faced with the tragedy of death. “It’s a subject no Christian should ever despise,” he declared, because Jesus descended to earth to save us from being subjugated to the limit, which our own noblest efforts can only stave off. In short, here’s an opportunity to take up a fine poem of the Western tradition, innocent of the special effects and violent distortions of the Hollywood makeover. (E. R.)