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Home , Eaters of the Dead, Heorot, Hygelac, John McTiernan, The 13th Warrior, The Dragon (Beowulf)

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Alena Vrabcová

The Story of in Recent Films Bachelor‘s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

2013

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author‘s signature

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my supervisor prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. for her kindness and helpful guidance. I would also like to thank prof. Dr. Hans Sauer and Veronika Traidl for their help and advice.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ...... 5 2. Beowulf ...... 9 2.1 History of the Beowulf Manuscript ...... 9 2.2 New Approaches ...... 11 3. (1999) ...... 13 4. Beowulf and (2005) ...... 22 5. Beowulf (2007) ...... 27 6. Conclusion ...... 33 Works Cited ...... 36 English Abstract ...... 39 Czech Abstract ...... 40

1. Introduction

Heroic tales have accompanied our society a great many years, since the time people gained the ability to speak and to narrate them. These stories, like today, could be about the daily events, comic or sad, or maybe shocking in some way. In any case, they were and still are meant to amuse the listeners, distract them so they could forget about their own problems and, if some fictional story was being told, the audience could even become a hero for a while, escape from the reality and fight the evil creatures which might represent the bad things in their own lives. Thus the stories encourage us, endow us with the strength to overcome our daily problems or, at least, they allow us to believe that there is a good in the world and we only need to find it.

Often the hero of the story is a strong young man, a mighty warrior or a brave knight, who has all the virtues that the society admires and which the people would like to posses themselves. The hero ought to be honest, truthful, courageous and loyal, and of course, there has to be some adventure, some mission to be accomplished. One of the best ways to show off all the hero's merits, as history shows us in many old stories, is to send him to fight and defeat some sort of a (usually a ). In the case of

Beowulf, is not missing but he is the creature that belongs to the end of the story. At the beginning we meet Grendel, a frightful monster that terrorizes good king

Hrothgar, coming every night to his hall and killing innocent people inside it.

Usually we had in the story to represent the evil and heroes who represented the good. However, nowadays the taste has slightly changed. As John D. Niles puts it,

"widespread reflection on a social order that is becoming ever more pluralistic and multicultural has shifted attention toward Beowulf as a site for debate concerning ethnic or national identity" (8). With the "melting pots" getting bigger and bigger in many countries, people are dealing with multicultural problems. Maybe that is why the

5 monsters and the heroes in the present stories are losing their strictly black and white definition. Victor Hugo's Quasimodo was seen as a monster because he was so different and ugly but we know that under the surface there was a kind and lonely person capable of love. Tolkien's Glum, who was in a kind of enemy, was later in The Lord of the Rings revealed as an unlucky hobbit who simply found the ring much more powerful than he was and thus was forced to live a long and lonely life in the caves where it would be really hard to stay a good and cheerful creature. The monsters in the stories are becoming more human than purely wicked and in modern society the new storytellers present a question rather than an answer to who is the monster and who should be defeated.

Such a new storyteller, in our age, is certainly a film medium. The filmmakers have at their disposal many advantages in comparison with a spoken narrative and even more in comparison with a written text. When reading the text, we can of course use our own imagination and create the world we like. On the other hand, when the film shows us the story that comes from the fantasy of another person (director, screenwriter...) then we can discover many more worlds than only the one which is ours. Be it as it may, to adapt a story to the motion picture is not easy, there are always some factors that may worsen the work of the filmmakers. To adapt a narrative that is old or well-known−or both−is much harder than filming an unknown tale because people are expecting something, often they expect to see images they saw while reading the story for themselves. David Hume once wrote that "[t]he same Homer, who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and at London. All the changes of climate, government, religion, and language, have not been able to obscure his glory" (Hume). With Beowulf, the situation is somewhat different because the poem was actually lost for a long time. But the fact that the story of Beowulf is today once

6 more studied, admired and retold in film adaptations nevertheless proves its quality, comparable to those of Homer's work.

Professor Hans Sauer writes in the Introduction to his 205 Years of Beowulf

Translations and Adaptations (1805-2010): A Bibliography that Beowulf "has been translated into at least 28 different languages so far" (Sauer 11) and, as we can read further, even in distant countries such as Japan Beowulf became a work of interest.

Moreover, the translations or recreations of the poem have also attracted artists and poets, the most outstanding one being the Nobel Prize winner who published his "poetic re-creation" of Beowulf in 1999 (Sauer 10-12). "With Heaney,

Beowulf translations entered the multimedia age, because Heaney also published his own reading of his translation. . . . Conversely, several books were published in connection with the film Beowulf/The Legend of Beowulf (2007) . . . and the film also had its own website" (Sauer 14). With this in mind we can say without any fear that

Beowulf entered the new age successfully because, as an ancient poem, it became known not only to scholars or students, but also to the general public in the form of audio recordings, animated and also feature films, not speaking of board games or PC games.

Sauer summarized it fittingly when he gave a lecture on Beowulf and Beowulf

Films in Brno, 29 March 2012, saying that Beowulf was rediscovered relatively late but in spite of that it is now regarded as the masterpiece of literature and although the films were shot also relatively late, there were at least five of them between 1998 and 2008 (Sauer 2012). This lecture was an inspiration for me to write my thesis on the topic discussed by Sauer. At the beginning of the thesis, there is a brief introduction of the history of the Beowulf manuscript and of the various approaches to

Beowulf during the history. I have chosen three films which are analyzed by the

7 comparison with the original story of Beowulf. Each film is discussed in a separate chapter. The film Beowulf (2007) is one of the three films this thesis is dealing with. It was chosen for its rare type of animation, called motion capture technique, and also for its attractively written plot with the main character being Grendel's mother rather than

Beowulf himself. The two films chosen for my thesis are The 13th Warrior (1999) and Beowulf and Grendel (2005). The latter one puts Grendel into the middle of the story, not as an evil creature, but rather as an outcast with morals, who is seen as a monster only by people that do not know his real nature. The 13th Warrior offers the story of Beowulf considerably changed, retold from the point of view of an Arabian ambassador who is observing the customs and behaviour of his Viking companions while fighting against the evil known as "wendol." In the thesis, all of the films are compared with the original story as pictured in the ancient poem and the differences and similarities are analyzed in detail. The purpose of this study is to show that even if these films are not competing for Oscar nominations or eternal glory, they are still worth watching, showing the various possible scenarios of how the story could have happened and capturing the attention of the audience bringing it to the more thorough investigation of the original poem itself.

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2. Beowulf

Beowulf is an ancient poem which is today still partly shrouded in mystery. We do not know the name of the author, nor are we sure about the date when it was created.

What we know for sure is that it is a poem written in Old English, 3,182 lines long, set in Scandinavia and now resting in the British Library within a manuscript known as

Nowell Codex or Cotton Vitellius A. xv. Sometimes it is called simply the Beowulf manuscript, as the poem of Beowulf is the most widely known text of the codex. We also know that "the Beowulf codex came to light in the later sixteenth century . . . for

Lawrence Nowell [hence the first name of the codex], servant to Lord Burgley, wrote his name and the date 1563 at its head" (Niles 2). The second name mentioned comes from the location which the manuscript had in the library of Sir Robert Cotton, "where it was shelved as the fifteenth manuscript on the first shelf of a bookcase surmounted by a bust of a Roman emperor Vitellius" (Niles 2-3). There are of course various studies that uncovered other interesting details about Beowulf, those that concern its prosody, diction, rhetoric, style, structure, symbolism or gender roles. Also the approaches to

Beowulf are many, some of them are mentioned below, in the second subhead.

2.1 History of the Beowulf Manuscript

The history of the manuscript is quite adventurous, as it had been located in the library of Sir Robert Cotton−the library that was damaged by fire in 1731: "23 [Oct.]. A

Fire broke out in the House of Mr Bently, adjoining to the King's School near

Westminster Abbey, which burnt down that part of the House that contained the King's and Cottonian Libraries. Almost all the printed Books were consumed and part of the

Manuscripts" (cited in Prescott). This notice was included in the October 1731 issue of 9 the Gentleman's Magazine. Prescott further notes: "This short note, tucked away between reports of the discovery of a disfigured corpse near Bath and an accidental shooting at Hackney, records what was perhaps the greatest bibliographical disaster of modern times in Britain" (Prescott). Luckily, most of the poem of Beowulf remained quite well preserved, although its "erosion . . . continued until 1845, when the manuscript was inlaid, at last providing the fragile edges of the manuscript with some protection and preventing further loss" (Prescott). In Prescott we can find some more interesting details about the techniques used for restoring not only the Beowulf manuscript, but also other damaged manuscripts of the Cotton collection that survived the fire.

The poem of Beowulf became known after the year 1815 when it was published by Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin. Soon after that other editions were published in English,

German, and Danish (Niles 2, 4). The history of studying the poem of Beowulf has begun. "Nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon studies received an unintended boost from the

French revolution and the Napoleonic wars" (Niles 4). And as Niles further comments,

Beowulf "was prized as the work from the pure source of the Germanic race, of whom the English were considered to be one offshoot" (4). However, according to the scholars of that time the poem needed some amendments. Niles describes how some of the passages that indicated were removed from the narrative to reveal the original passages that were written before the monks got hold of them. The scholars wanted to find traces of pagan belief (Niles 4). Nevertheless, scholars soon began protesting against such modifications and "Klaeber's edition of the poem in 1922, with subsequent revised publication in 1928, 1936, 1941, and 1950, put a seal on a consensus that now seems as bland as toast, although occasional voices are still heard in dissent: that the work is a unified Old English heroic poem infused with Christian ideals" (Niles

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5). As another part of Beowulf history Niles mentions Tolkien's lecture Monsters and

Critics, given in 1936. Tolkien criticises the approaches of scholars who were only seeking for historical evidence rather than for discovering the beauties of the poetry itself:

[T]o rate a poem, a thing at the least in metrical form, as mainly of historical

interest should in a literary survey be equivalent to saying that it has no literary

merits, and little more need in such a survey then be said about it. But such a

judgment on Beowulf is false. So far from being a poem so poor that only its

accidental historical interest can still recommend it, Beowulf is in fact so

interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite overshadows

the historical content, and is largely independent even of the most important

facts (such as the date and identity of ) that research has discovered

(Tolkien).

Niles claims that Tolkien's idea was "the notion of the individual poet as a hero" and he also pertinently notes that the poet was "a man like Tolkien himself," as he "let his mind play over a lost heroic world of the imagination" (Niles 5). Niles then introduces the three main scholarly directions that were taken between 1940s and 1980s−aesthetic, patristic, and the oral-formulaic and he finally summarizes the past fifty years of scholarly approaches to Beowulf as an "unresolved controversy as to how the poem is to be read" (Niles 7).

2.2 New Approaches

There are still many attempts of how to read Beowulf but probably no one can claim that the meaning of Beowulf is completely known to him or her. According to Niles, "we will be more apt to accept it [the poem] as something more yielding: a text (from Latin

11 textum, "a woven thing, web") whose appearance varies depending on how the light strikes it" (Niles 9). The best approach of all might be the one where we will remain open to the approaches of everyone else. If we suppose Nile's statement to be true−that

"the "meaning" of Beowulf may not be the most important thing about it," (10) then the story of Beowulf might be perceived as tabula rasa on which we may project our own ideas while reading the text. Niles ends his Introduction by saying that "[t]he future of

Beowulf studies . . . will not belong to those who just read the text, in the narrow sense of interpreting it. It will lie with those who also take pleasure in it, adapting it to their own purposes in the world in which they live, as the poet's own listeners and readers surely did" (Niles 11). For this reason we may claim that also the film adaptations of the poem are worthy approaches to the text because what the directors do is precisely

"adapting the story to their own purposes." They are showing us how they see the poem and what they find within it and by doing this they consequently adjust our own projections that we might have. And in case there is someone who did not know anything about the story before, these film adaptations may open a new door for them and so they will discover not only the world created by the stage crew, but perhaps also the existence of the text that is more than a thousand years old.

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3. The 13th Warrior (1999)

The book's original name is The and it was written by

Michael Crichton in 1976. The name The 13th Warrior belongs to the film adaptation of the book. The 13th Warrior was directed by John McTiernan and in

1999. Crichton's novel The Eaters of the Dead arose as a reaction to Crichton's friend's college course. Kurt Villadsen proposed to teach a course that should be named "The

Great Bores" and deal with the stories that were important for Western culture but which were not read anymore because they were too tedious. Crichton disagreed and wanted to prove the untruth of his assertion by writing the novel (Crichton 95).

Crichton started to create his work on the basis of the story of Beowulf as if it was true. He compares himself to Heinrich Schliemann who examined the poem of Iliad and found what he claimed was Troy and Mycenae or Arthur Evans who uncovered the

Palace of Knossos on the basis of the Minotaur's legend (Crichton 95). Crichton imagined the events that happened in the Beowulf story as realistic. He worked with the poem as if it was describing actual events that happened in the past and he just retold them in the novel. He tried to find the original kernel of the poem and describe it to us as if we were watching a documentary film from the point of view of one of the actors.

He did not want to merely invent the tale. He wanted it to be somehow supported. As he writes in his Factual Note on Eaters of the Dead, published in 1992, he intended to separate the poetic invention in the Beowulf poem from the facts

(Crichton 95). Unluckily, modern scholarship offered no method for this intention.

"Even to try would mean making innumerable subjective decisions, large and small, on every page—in the end, so many decisions that the result must inevitably be still another invention: a modern pseudo-historical fantasy about what the original events might have been" (Crichton 95). He did not know which parts of Beowulf were true

13 hence which parts he should keep and which he could omit. He imagined that even if it was possible, the realistic manuscript would probably include mainly the descriptions of various battles, furthermore narrated by subjective observers. That is why he remembered an Arabian manuscript that he once read. It was a manuscript of written by an Arab Ibn Fadlan who travelled from Baghdad to Russia, met there and provided one of the first eyewitness accounts of Viking life and culture (Crichton

95). Crichton used Fadlan's writing to retell the story of Beowulf as if seen by Ibn

Fadlan himself:

I obtained the existing manuscript fragments and combined them, with only

slight modifications, into the first three chapters of Eaters of the Dead. I then

wrote the rest of the novel in the style of the manuscript to carry Ibn Fadlan on

the rest of his now-fictional journey. I also added commentary and some

extremely pedantic footnotes (Crichton 96).

As he was writing, Michael Crichton knew that the dating of the manuscript and that of the poem differed. Nevertheless, the dates are not so far from each other and the dating of the heroic poem was never certain. He started to create historical fiction and later he even did not recognize himself what was true and what was not:

But within a few years, I could no longer be certain which passages were real,

and which were made up; at one point I found myself in a research library trying

to locate certain references in my bibliography, and finally concluding, after

hours of frustrating effort, that however convincing they appeared, they must be

fictitious (Crichton 97).

He also states that except for the Factual Note on Eaters of the Dead the rest of the novel is a fiction.

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The book Eaters of the Dead seems to be a realistic manuscript written by an

Arabian traveller named . In his Introduction, Michael Crichton introduces him to us as an ambassador who was sent by Caliph of Baghdad to the king of the Bulgars but who never accomplished his mission because he met a company of

Northmen, joined them on their journey and after his return he recorded his experiences in the form of an official report to the court (Crichton 10). Crichton then enumerates various scholars who, throughout the history, helped to preserve at least some fragments of Ibn Fadlan's manuscript. Crichton provides us with names and dates, all of which support the idea of realistic research. He claims that his work is based on the translation by professor Per Fraus-Dolos whose name he reveals to us later in the Factual Note as being a translation from Latin "by trickery-deceit" (Crichton 97). He furthermore presents the "author," Ibn Fadlan, and his manner of writing about the events he saw and about the society of the tenth century Baghdad.

The actual Fadlan's story begins with the Islamic prayer delivered by Ibn

Fadlan who then tells us his name and position at the court. He also familiarizes us with his little romantic adventure because of which he was sent on his mission and then starts to describe his journey towards north with the beginning in the City of Peace

(Baghdad). They proceed to Turkey, then to the land of the Baskirs and finally they come to the land of the Bulgars where they meet Northmen for the first time. He comes in contact with Wyglif, who is ill at the time, and Buliwyf who is chosen to be a new leader instead of Wyglif. Ibn Fadlan and his company are invited to a feast held by the

Northmen and Fadlan describes to us, in alarm, some customs of his hosts that he has seen:

[I]n the midst of the song there was ejaculation and also mortal combat over

some intoxicated quarrel of two warriors. The bard did not cease his song

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through all these events; verily I saw flying blood spatter his face, and yet he

wiped it away without a pause in his singing (Crichton 23).

These observations of his seem realistic and for the modern reader they could be amusing. Even though Michael Crichton invented most of his words, it is probable that the Arab of Islamic religion must have been really horrified when he saw such (from his point of view) uncivilized behaviour. His mission was to deliver an official report and he had to write down everything as it really was; thanks to it we can now read his lines with a smile as he is apparently terrified and simultaneously impressed. We can almost see the man sitting between the Northmen with the terror mixed with interest in his eyes.

Fadlan continues his tale with the description of the funeral of Wyglif. Wyglif was burnt on a ship with a slave girl who sacrificed herself willingly. Fadlan observes the funeral rituals and presents to us an old woman called the angel of death for the first time. She supervised the funeral and she also killed the girl. Wyglif also obtained valuable clothing and other treasures. Except for the girl, they also killed various animals and threw them into the ship where the dead man lied. Fadlan gives a special attention to the process of killing the young slave girl.

The film The 13th Warrior begins similarly−Ibn Fadlan () starts his narration with the explanation why he was sent to the mission and then continues with the present events, his travel to North, his meeting with the Vikings and

Buliwyf (Vladimír Kulich) and the attendance of the feast and the funeral. Yet the original story of Beowulf is considerably different. Apart from the fact that there is no

Arabian ambassador involved, also the funeral that takes place at the very beginning of the ancient poem is dissimilar to Crichton's interpretation. In Beowulf, the king who dies is called Scyld. He is a Danish king who is about to die, so, as he wished, he is taken to

16 the sea-shore and "sent off to sea in a ship adorned with costly armour and other things"

(Hall 21). Crichton's dead king's name is Wyglif which is a corruption of the name

Wiglaf. , in the original poem, is a warrior who fights in Beowulf's service and who will come to help Beowulf when fighting a dragon at the end of the poem. Also, in

Beowulf there is no mention about pagan funeral rituals that would include killing animals or sacrificing slave girls. This custom was truly described by Ahmed Ibn

Fadlan in his Letters On the Vikings, as he witnessed a funeral made by a Swedish tribe named Rus which lived on the banks of the Volga. James E. Montgomery, in his article that provides an annotated translation of Ibn Fadlan's text, quotes Roesdahl explaining that "the custom of killing slaves and interring them as grave-goods was not uncommon among the Vikings" (quoted in Montgomery 14). In The 13th Warrior we can also see the funeral, although it is not shown as closely and in such a detail as described by

Fadlan in his report and subsequently by Crichton in The Eaters of the Dead.

Later in the book, Fadlan depicts the arrival of Wulfgar, the son of Rothgar, who comes as a messenger to ask Buliwyf for help with the battle against the terror of a monster named "wendol". This is similarly depicted also in the film, but there is no messenger coming for help in Beowulf. Moreover, king 's (named Rothgar by

Crichton) sons are Hrethric and Hrothmund who are mentioned in the original poem only marginally. Wulfgar, on the other hand, is Hrothgar's retainer and lord of the

Wendels. "Wendol" represents the evil that torments Rothgar's kingdom. It is inspired by Grendel, who troubles king Hrothgar, however, Crichton introduces to us the whole new monster −or rather monsters−people that remind us of Neanderthals, as they have

"big heads, large hands, strong bony ridges above the eyes, protruding faces" (Tattersall

57). Ian Tattersall adds that "these are features that we can read directly from the bones that the Neanderthals have left us" and that "wendols" are "products of Crichton's

17 imagining, not Ibn Fadlan's observation" (Tattersall 57). Nevertheless, these creatures augment the drama of the story and also in the film they support the necessary feeling of fear and thrill−maybe much more than a disgusting and almost pitiful character of

Grendel as depicted in the film Beowulf that was directed by Robert Zemeckis and on which the following chapter comments.

In Crichton's novel, the Arabian ambassador is then chosen by the angel of death to be the thirteenth warrior who will travel with Buliwyf's company to Rothgar's kingdom to fight the enemy. They travel northward and while in the ship, they meet sea- monsters. Fadlan describes them as follows:

It was in the shape of a giant snake that never raised its head above the

surface, yet I saw its body curl and twist over, and it was very long, and wider

than the Northmen‘s boat, and black in color. The sea monster spat water into

the air, like a fountain, and then plunged down, raising a tail that was cleft in

two, like the forked tongue of a snake. Yet it was enormous, each section of the

tail being broader than the largest palm frond (Crichton 40).

As Michael Crichton explains in the footnote, Ibn Fadlan is depicting whales here. The company passes them and nothing interesting happens. In The 13th Warrior this scene is even omitted. In the original poem, things go much more riveting. The story of the sea- monsters is connected with Beowulf's swimming competition against his friend Breca.

He narrates it in Hrothgar's hall when Unferth, a Danish courtier, provokes him saying that Grendel will be much bigger danger than the one Beowulf experienced when he lost the match against Breca. They swam for five days when the sea-monsters came and one of them attacked Beowulf and dragged him to the bottom of the sea. Beowulf defeated it but then more of the sea-fiends came on and Beowulf killed nine of them before he reached the land (Hall 46-49).

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After the episode with the whales, Fadlan and Buliwyf's company reach

Rothgar's land, Venden, and the first thing they see is Rothgar's feasting hall: "I said to

Herger it was a magnificent sight, but Herger and all his company, led by Buliwyf, were groaning and shaking their heads. I inquired of Herger why this was so. He said,

‗Rothgar is called Rothgar the Vain, and his great hall is the mark of a vain man‘

(Crichton 41). Buliwyf claims that Rothgar deserves the misfortune and only he,

Buliwyf, and his company can save him (Crichton 41). In the film, when they come to

Rothgar, Buliwyf only asks him: "What troubles this place, old man?" The king does not answer and the other men from the company are making fun of him saying "you know he might be mad" and "has anyone seen one in a hundred years?" (The Thirteenth

Warrior, 1999) While in the ancient poem, there are no doubts on Beowulf's or on his companions' side and king Hrothgar is not called a "vain man."

In the novel, they find a destroyed farmhouse and its inhabitants dismembered yet before they reach Rothgar's hall. In the film, this scene comes later but the effect is the same. This is the first sign of the presence of "wendol" that they find and after which they have to believe that there really is some evil thing or creature that is killing

Rothgar's people. They also discover here a sculpture of "wendol's Mother." Fadlan describes it:

I saw it to be the torso of a pregnant female. There was no head, no arms, and

no legs; only the torso with a greatly swollen belly and, above that, two

pendulous swollen breasts . . . the Northmen were suddenly overcome and pale

and tremulous; their hands shook to touch it, and finally Buliwyf flung it to the

ground and shattered it with the handle of his sword (Crichton 44).

From the previous extract we can read the depiction of the doppelganger of

Grendel's mother. In Beowulf, the poet describes the hall of Heorot as it was left empty,

19 because Grendel killed all the men sleeping in there and carried them into his lair. He attacked the hall more times. After he is killed by Beowulf, Grendel's mother comes and also attacks the men sleeping in the hall. Michael Crichton's version is a bit different, but the motif remains. Sons of the Mother, "wendols," are coming repeatedly to Heorot to kill the people inside and sometimes they eat them (similarly as Grendel). The only difference is that they are numerous, they take the heads of the killed to their cave and they look like bears (or Neanderthals−the theory mentioned hereinbefore). Their bear- like appearance could be another of Crichton's connections to the original, as Beowulf, according to Henry Sweet, "means literally 'Bee-wolf,' wolf or ravager of the bees −

'bear'" (Sweet 201). Further, Michael Crichton does not describe any "real" dragon, as we know him from the original poem, but in both the book and the film we can find an allusion to this topic. When the "wendol" attacks Heorot, the Northmen are fearfully speaking of an awakened fire-worm or fire-serpent. Later they discover that the fire comes from the torches carried by the enemies who were coming in a row and so they looked like a long fire-worm (or dragon).

The Mother of "wendol" is described by Ibn Fadlan: "that she was surrounded by serpents, which coiled at her feet, and upon her hands, and around her neck. These serpents hissed and flicked their tongues; and as they were all about her, upon her body and also on the ground" (Crichton 83). The Arab and his fellows find her in the cave, much alike as in Beowulf. Beowulf also has to go through the water to reach Grendel's mother. Moreover, he has to kill some serpents and sea-. In the poem the hero wins and returns uninjured to Heorot, while in Crichton's version, albeit Buliwyf also wins the fight, he is wounded by the monster and eventually he dies.

Michael Crichton is borrowing names from Beowulf, modifying them and mixing them up. That might be confusing or even unpleasant for a reader who knows

20 the original Beowulf poem but if we read Crichton's book as something new, without the meticulous connection with the original Beowulf, then we can find an interesting attempt at explanation of one of the oldest Old English poems. The 13th Warrior that is based on Crichton's book follows the novel quite accurately, with only slight changes.

The book itself is very readable and although it may look as if it is pulling a reader's leg and trying to mystify us with a made-up narrative about the Vikings fighting the

Neanderthals with an Arabian traveller witnessing it and describing it to us, it is also an adventurous story that might attract an attention of the readers and move them to search for the truth and thus discover a real testimony of Ahmed Ibn Fadlan and his travels or the ancient poem of Beowulf itself. As for the film, its shooting was accompanied by problems because John McTiernan and Michael Crichton had quite a different opinion on how the film should be shot. In the video interview with Vladimír Kulich which was uploaded to Youtube.com in January 2012 he explains, that the two directors were arguing like children and the film could have been much bigger success if this was different. He also comments on the characters of the thirteen warriors who are in the film and who did not get enough space to develop and create some relationship with the audience (Kulich). According to Kulich, Michael Crichton had the final cut and he seems to think that it was not very good for the film. Maybe it could have been a better film with a bigger fan base if it was shot in a different way, however, the comments under the video on the You Tube channel are supportive and it can be seen that there are many fans still, even after fourteen years that passed since the first DVDs emerged.

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4. Beowulf and Grendel (2005)

Beowulf and Grendel (2005) is a film made by the director Sturla Gunnarsson, a Canadian born in Iceland and a great admirer of Icelandic nature:

I‘m standing on a mountain pass, looking out over a glacial river delta on

Iceland‘s south coast. Looming behind me is the Myrdalsjokull, an immense

glacier shrouding an active volcano. It is the most beautiful, primordial

landscape I‘ve ever seen — which is why I picked it as the main shooting

location for Beowulf & Grendel (Gunnarsson).

This is an excerpt from the article that Gunnarsson wrote for The Globe and Mail,

Canadian newspapers. He describes here the beauties of his native land, specifically those parts where the shooting took place, and it is this very land which is one of the most powerful factors that make Beowulf and Grendel what it is. Although the original poem is situated in Scandinavia, the Icelandic exteriors that can be seen in the film are more than suitable for a sixth-century , king Hrothgar with his subjects or the mighty warriors. It is a land almost untouched by human feet. With its vast green valleys, lava landscapes, waterfalls and fjords it looks like if it stopped in the past.

Sturla Gunnarsson explains:

At first, you‘ll drive through miles of eerie petrified lava fields, and you‘ll

begin to understand why Icelanders believe the landscape is alive with trolls

and huldufolk (invisible people). . . .This region is the home of the epic

Icelandic , and there is not a rock, knoll or crag that doesn‘t have a story

(with the exception of a boulder near the village of Vik, which is known as ―the

rock without a story‖) (Gunnarsson).

And a troll is the second most important element of the story, because Grendel is not simply a monster of Cain's kindred that hates the happiness of human race, as written in

22 the poem, but he is rather a relative of humans who has feelings and even some kind of moral principles.

At the beginning of the film we are watching two trolls−a father with his son.

The boy is playing around and laughing. Quite a happy family picture which is at once disturbed by the scene with the warriors riding the horses. As we will learn later, it is king Hrothgar (Stellan Skarsgård) with his retinue who are tracking the elder troll because he stole some food from them. "Grendel!" "Father!" The elder troll lifts up his child and runs to hide him behind the cliff. The warriors, who quite a lot outnumber the unarmed troll, kill him immediately. The king then discovers little Grendel but because no one else sees him, he takes pity on him and leaves him alone. Afterwards, Grendel finds his father's body and being too weak to carry it away, he cuts off his father's head and takes it to his cave. Here he lives till his adulthood, still mourning his loss but becoming big, strong and creepy troll who seeks his vengeance (Beowulf and Grendel,

2005). Just at the start we can observe the most striking difference between the original poem and the film story. The screenwriter Andrew Rai Berzins adds Grendel's father to the plot. Though he is killed early, his death initiates the formation of Grendel's (Ingvar

Eggert Sigurðsson) character which is very important for the story.

When Beowulf (Gerard Butler) is sleeping in king Hrothgar's mead hall,

Grendel does not come and kill all the men there. The first night, Berzins's Grendel humiliates them by urinating on the door only. It is the first warning. Local witch,

Selma (Sarah Polley), tells Beowulf that Grendel was hurt by someone and Beowulf becomes suspicious (Beowulf and Grendel, 2005). In an interview for

Monstersandcritics.com Andrew Rai Berzins explains: "Beowulf arrives to find the

Danes‘ dilemma is not so cut-and-dried. The demon/monster has a name, a personality, and a gripe. . . . I‘ve given him [Beowulf] some doubts. Also, Beowulf is less boastful

23 in our version" (Berzins). The next night Grendel only watches the hall, the soldiers cannot see him. Beowulf decides to ask Selma more about him and while visiting her,

Grendel shows up and then runs away. Beowulf finds him and they speak together,

Selma is interpreting Grendel's speech for Beowulf (Beowulf and Grendel, 2005).

Grendel can speak and what he says surprises Beowulf−Grendel apparently thinks that his vengeance concerns only because they killed his father. From what he says

Beowulf grasps that Grendel does not want him dead because he is not a Dane−he did nothing to him. While king Hrothgar still does not want to tell the truth, Beowulf and his company find Grendel's cave. He is not there but they find the head of his father and one of the warriors destroys it. This deed makes Grendel angry and next night he enters the hall and kills−only−this one man (Beowulf and Grendel, 2005). That testifies he is not an ordinary killer craving for blood. He revenged the dishonour of his father.

Nevertheless, he killed one of Beowulf's men, which makes Beowulf angry and he manages to catch Grendel by his arm. Here we can see another important moment.

Grendel is suspended on a chain, Beowulf has a chance to kill him but he does not do it.

Instead, Grendel himself cuts his arm off and escapes. The mighty warrior obviously has some serious doubts about his rescue mission.

Nothing like that can we find in the original story of Beowulf. There the warrior boasts about his ability to kill the monster, then he kills the monster by ripping its arm off. Beowulf's task is clear−to save Hrothgar's kingdom. The original Beowulf asks no questions about the monster's past but Grendel's behaviour does not offer a single dubitation about his intent: "Then his spirit laughed aloud: he, the cruel monster, resolved that he would sever the life of every one of them from his body before day came; for the hope of feasting full had come to him" (Hall 58). However, Berzins uses

24 the motif of family bond and blood feud which makes Grendel more human than monstrous and which might make the audience much more sympathetic to him.

After Grendel's death in the sea, Hrothgar confesses that he killed Grendel's father but let the boy live. Beowulf wants to know more and so he finds Selma who tells him her story. She came to the kingdom as a whore and when her master died, people thought she killed him so they excluded her from the village. This was an opportunity for the men who wanted to have sex with her. One day Grendel came to her cottage, he lied with her and left. From that time no other man could come to rape her because

Grendel guarded her (Beowulf and Grendel, 2005). This narrative becomes more important later in the film, after Beowulf meets Grendel's mother.

Similarly as in the original story, also in Gunnarsson's film the mother of

Grendel comes to Heorot to revenge her son's death. Instead of killing all the sleeping men in the hall, as in the poem, she only seeks her son's arm nailed to the column and she kills the men inside in self-defence. So even in her case the bond of family is stronger than the desire for blood. Beowulf enters Grendel's cave again, he finds water inside and swims through it to another cave. There he discovers Grendel's dead body but right after that Grendel's mother attacks him. Beowulf kills her and then a boy emerges in the cave. It is Grendel's and Selma's son (Beowulf and Grendel, 2005). The circle is closing. Beowulf has to decide whether he wants to kill the last member of Grendel's kin or whether he will let the innocent boy live his life and hope that he will grow a good person. Beowulf tells him that he may be proud of his father; later he builds up the burial mound in remembrance of Grendel and probably also to assure the boy that killing his father was a mistake.

As can be seen, Sturla Gunnarsson's Bewulf and Grendel corresponds with its title. It tells the story of the two men, the warrior and the troll, who are similar to each

25 other more than they would ever think. Who is the real monster here, Grendel or

Beowulf? All things considered, their roles might be quite opposite to what we know about them from the original poem. In the film, Grendel was made an orphan in a very young age; his father was killed because he stole a fish, probably to feed his child. The boy grew up in a cave in the company of his father's head. He mourned all his life over this loss and the only thing he could think about was the time of his revenge. On the other hand, Beowulf is known as a fearless warrior and is expected to save the kingdom tormented by the evil monster. As he is gradually learning the background of his enemy,

Beowulf comes to think that it would be monstrous of him to kill Grendel in cold blood.

Thus he tries to warn Grendel, via Selma, that he has to honour the word he gave to

Hrothgar but that he does not want to do so. He wants Grendel to leave. The wish that could have worked if one of the warriors did not smash Grendel's father's head before−the consequences of the act are written hereinbefore. The emphasis of this film is put on the humanity that exists somewhere where we might have not expected it.

Both Grendel's mother and Grendel are depicted in more human way than as we know them from the original poem. Grendel's mother standing above her son's corps looks mournful and when she is taking Grendel's arm away from Heorot, she seems to fight only when she has to, not for a revenge. Although she looks as a real monster, she acts as a real mother. She and her son are victims of the people who call them monsters but who are maybe the real evil here.

26

5. Beowulf (2007)

Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf (2007) is, for now, the latest adaptation of the poem. It is also one of the most innovative versions concerning the method of shooting.

As Dave Kehr explains in his article Duplicate Motion, Then Capture Emotion, Robert

Zemeckis used a motion capture technique or "mocap . . . technique for transforming live action performances into computer animated images" (Kehr 1). This method allows film-makers to unleash their imagination−add, for example, some musculature to Ray

Winstone's (Beowulf) body or make a long tail out of Angelina Jolie's (Grendel's mother) plait and cover her whole figure with gold.

The fantasy of the creators of this new version of the Beowulf story did not stop at the characters' appearance. The screenwriters, Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, wrote the scenario in 1997. They invented an interesting plot which builds on the character of

Grendel's mother as a beautiful and powerful temptress. She controls king Hrothgar because he is the father of her son Grendel and after Beowulf emerges, she seduces him as well and gives birth to his son, the dragon, who will kill Beowulf in his last battle.

The character of Grendel's mother is here, in Robert Zemeckis's film, maybe even more important than the hero himself. Her voice is heard for the first time right after Grendel's first attack on Heorot (which takes place in the first 10 minutes of the film). Grendel goes back to their cave, she reproaches him for killing the men in the hall and he complains that their feasting hurts his ears. Then she appears in the reflection of the shield. She has a fish-like face and with her tentacle she strokes Grendel and praises him for not hurting Hrothgar (Beowulf, 2007). In this scene, she is presented as a loving mother who also cares about the fate of the king, although we are not yet sure why.

Grendel's earlier refusal of fighting him at Heorot might have given us some clue, though.

27

Gwendolyn A. Morgan, in her essay Mothers, Monsters, Maturation: Female

Evil in Beowulf, presents Grendel's mother as an Archetypal Great Mother. She cites

Erich Neuman who describes this archetypal figure as follows: "Great Mother in her function of fixation and not releasing what aspires toward independence and freedom is dangerous" (cited in Morgan 54). Morgan adds: "[t]he Great Mother becomes the

Terrible Mother, a monster which dominates, threatens, and in some manifestations actually devours the male" (Morgan 54). In the film, Grendel's mother truly dominates both Hrothgar and later Beowulf. They are afraid of her and simultaneously they fall to her seduction and promises. At the end of the film, when Beowulf confesses to the Queen Wealthow (Robin Wright) that he has always loved her he also tells her: "She was beautiful and full of fine promises. I was weak" (Beowulf, 2007). In contrast to the original poem, Beowulf admits here his weakness for the woman, although she is a supernatural being. Morgan also suggests the sexual union in the contest with Grendel's mother:

[H]er contact with the hero is fraught with sexual imagery and diction: she

―gropes‖ for him . . . and shares ―embraces‖ with him . . . she attempts to tear

off his armor; and, after his futile attempt to force her to the floor, she reverses

the position and sits on him in a perverse parody of copulation (Morgan 56).

The sexual tension between Beowulf and Grendel's mother in Zemeckis's film is indisputable, although they do not fight. At first, he sees her in his dream asking him to give her a son. After he awakens, the hero finds out that the monster revenged the death of Grendel by killing all the people who slept in Heorot. Beowulf decides to find and kill her. After he enters her cave, she emerges from the water−slowly and temptingly.

Her body looks like if it was made of gold and she is naked. Her talk is sweet, she promises Beowulf that he will always be the king, as long as she is in possession of the

28 golden drinking horn (Beowulf's gift from Hrothgar) and he has her in his heart. She wants him to give her a son instead of the one he killed and he succumbs, similarly as king Hrothgar in the same situation many years ago (Beowulf, 2007).

However, the character of Grendel's mother is not the only figure who seductively seeks to grab the audience's attention. Her body looks immensely beautiful, silky gold and wet when reappearing from the water, with captivating eyes in a perfect face. That could be enough to please the male audience. If it was not enough, there are also queen Wealthow and a young mistress of Beowulf, both beautiful and innocent.

They are ideal opposites to the monster beauty of Grendel's mother but simultaneously flawless complements to various tastes of the audience. The female part of the viewers may also find some attractive scenes in Beowulf. Ray Winstone (Beowulf), born in

1957, thus aged 48 in 2005 when the film was shot, had to play a twenty-year-old warrior who was supposed to strip himself in the film. Thanks to the motion capture method of shooting we can see the whole new figure of Beowulf, not very resembling

Winstone. Beowulf's body is hunky, strong and pleasant to look at−maybe too much, though. Is it possible that a sixth-century warrior would have no hairs? Also a nifty way of hiding his private parts, once with a claw of Grendel's stubby hand, second time with a soldier's helmet, adds rather a ridiculous than a dramatic effect to the end of the combat. This new technique has certainly many advantages but, unfortunately, sometimes to the exclusion of credibility.

Speaking of credibility, Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary inserted some interesting changes into the plot if we compare it to the original story. The most striking one is the concept of fatherhood. In this 2007 version, Hrothgar is presented as the father of Grendel and Beowulf as the father of another creature that comes from the same womb as Grendel does−the dragon. In one of the interviews, Avary said that "the

29 story reminds him of a game of telephone tag where one person whispers something to the person next to them and by the end of the line, the story is completely different from the original version" (Murray). However, Forni nicely quotes Stam who wrote that "the prestige of the original is created by the copies, without which the very idea of originality has no meaning" (cited in Forni 56). That is why we should not automatically condemn new attempts to retell the old stories and rather try to find in them the new and actual elements that might extend our point of view.

In the original poem, Beowulf returns back home to Hygelac's court and after his (and his son's) death, Beowulf becomes the king, reigns peacefully for fifty years until an unknown dragon appears and begins to guard a hoard of treasure. Some outlaw then steals a precious goblet from the hoard, which forces the dragon to take vengeance and he destroys the whole country with fire (Hall 132-136). Beowulf takes twelve men with him, telling them he will fight the dragon single-handed or die (Hall 147). Then, alone, he enters the dragon's den. He is not successful in his fight against the dragon and his companions seeing that, all run away to the woods. Only Wiglaf returns, to help his king who is then bitten to his neck by the dragon. Later on, Wiglaf wounds the dragon and Beowulf kills the dragon with the rest of his strength.

In Gaiman and Avary's version, the dragon does not appear from nowhere and no one steals anything from him. On the contrary, Beowulf, after fifty years of promised reign, gains the drinking horn he was supposed to leave with Grendel's mother (a slave happens to find it) and brings it back to her, into her cave. At first, we hear a man's voice that speaks to Beowulf: "Look at you, you're nothing, an empty nothing." He also threatens Beowulf to kill his wife and mistress. Beowulf wants to know who is speaking and the speaker emerges as a mirror image in the water: "I'm something you left behind, father." This scene turns out to be a dream, but the devastated kingdom is real. That

30 night the dragon attacks for the first time. Then, in a form of a golden man, he sends a message to Beowulf, "for my father", says the man, "the sins of the fathers!" (Beowulf,

2007) Beowulf puts on his armour and goes to the lair of the two monsters to return the horn. He asks the mother of his son to leave his land in peace but she replies that it is too late and behind her a big golden dragon emerges. Then he flies towards Heorot with

Beowulf and Wiglaf at his heels.

At the castle, he tries to kill Wealthow and Beowulf's young lover and the hero tries to kill him, single-handed−because he is hanging next to the dragon's neck on a chain, holding it in one arm. This very arm he then tears up to prolong it in order to reach the dragon's heart. Accompanied by a dramatic music, he rips the dragon's heart out of his body with a bare hand. The dragon falls down to the shore under the cliffs and dies, the fall kills also Beowulf who manages to speak with Wiglaf before he passes on.

Beowulf hears the voice of Grendel's mother, Wiglaf tries to persuade him that he had killed her many years ago but the hero resists: "Too late for lies Wiglaf, too late"

(Beowulf, 2007). The hero dies, confessing he was not such a hero everyone thought.

Wiglaf looks disbelievingly; he is now the king of Beowulf's kingdom. However, the end of the film remains open.

Beowulf is honoured by a ship funeral. When the ship breaks apart, Wiglaf sees Grendel's mother to embrace the hero and both of them sink into the waters of the sea. The new king stands on the shore then and the beautiful monster reappears on the surface of the water. Wiglaf enters the sea and as the last moment we see his face coloured in gold (Beowulf, 2007). We may meditate now, whether he will also succumbs to the beauty of the gorgon and whether he will be the third father of her third son.

31

In Robert Zemeckis's film, the character of Grendel's mother is surely the most important mover of the story. In many aspects it corresponds to Gwendolyn A.

Morgan's ideas. Angelina Jolie represents an immensely beautiful and powerful woman who seduces and subjugates the two most powerful men and as we can see at the end of the film, she will most probably do the same thing to the third one. We may even deduce that this is a long-term cycle from which we watched but a tiny part. She is a mother that takes care of her children and it does not matter whether her child is a pitiful ugly monster with a hypersensitive sense of hearing or whether it is a golden dragon that is magnificent as much as she is. She wants the best for her progeny as every human mother does and if someone endangers it, she does not fear anyone and is able to retaliate destructively. When the child is killed, she finds a new father for a new offspring. Like the earth, she never stops to produce a new life in spite of human effort to overcome and rule over her.

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6. Conclusion

Every one of the films that were chosen to be analysed in this paper has some advantages and some disadvantages. The main weakness of the first one, called The

13th Warrior, is certainly the presence of two directors and their two different approaches towards the topic. For someone who has not read Michael Crichton's novel

The Eaters of the Dead the story may be confusing for example because the characters are not developed enough, as Vladimír Kulich noted in the interview mentioned in the third chapter. Still, the fact that the main character is played by Antonio Banderas, who is quite a well-known film star and who was already known from the film The Mask of

Zorro (1998), probably causes that this film will not be easily forgotten. And that is all- right because both the film and the novel offer an interpretation of the ancient heroic poem which is originally written in Old English and tells us a story from the times of myth where dragons and sea-monsters are nothing abnormal and which might seem too unlikely and unbelievable to some people nowadays. Michael Crichton's version, the book, as well as the film, reveals to us how these legendary events might have really happened and introduces one of the many constructions that we can accept or decline, but in any case, we may enlarge and develop our own theories or find here an inspiration for the creation of new ones.

The second film, Beowulf and Grendel (2005), profits in the first place from the marvellous panoramic views of the Icelandic landscape and also from the clever shift that makes Grendel more human and humans more evil. That gives us, the audience, a lot of space for contemplation about who is the real monster that should be killed and forgotten and who is the person that is brave, loyal and fearful. Grendel of this film not only resembles a human being by its outside appearance but he is also acting like a human in his most primary sense. He is a lost child who had to grow up

33 without his father because the heartless "human" warriors killed him for no serious reason and who now wants his well-deserved revenge. The "monsters," Grendel and his mother, are depicted as a family where some real, almost (or fully?) human relationship exists. At the end of the film we are also confronted by Grendel's son whose character adds the feeling of human love and bond even more. Beowulf himself tries to act honestly and warn Grendel, tell him that he should leave because he, Beowulf, promised to kill him. Beowulf is disturbed by doubts; he feels that to kill Grendel would be wrong. In the end he does not kill him directly, because Grendel cuts off his own arm and then bleeds to death. He kills Grendel's mother, though, but lets Grendel's son alive and then meditates about his own deeds, kneeling at Grandel's grave.

Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf (2007) is also concerned with family relationships but here the main role belongs to Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother. As a sexy golden woman who appears from the water, the whole body smooth and wet, she easily seduces both Hrothgar and Beowulf and probably will be successful also with the third king,

Wulfgar, although the ending remains open. Grendel's mother takes advantage of her beauty and magical alluring aura that makes the men to unbend and surrender. Beowulf is portrayed as a handsome man who does not fulfil the duties of the warrior very well though. He should kill Grendel's mother but instead, he makes her pregnant and lies about it for his whole life. He also claims that he loves the queen but he has a mistress and he does not seem very brave when he came to Grendel's mother cave asking her to leave his kingdom in peace. In Beowulf (2007), the mother of Grendel is the most powerful character of all because she actually controls the whole kingdom through the kings and their sons. When she loses one, she gets another, the whole process seems to be immensely old, and, consequently, to last forever. She represents not only the mother of monsters, but also the Mother in its true sense, caring about her children and fighting

34 those who might want to harm them. She may be considered to be a kind of Mother

Earth who cyclically restores the life in her kingdom, the earth.

After the comparison with the original poem Beowulf we can see that the films discussed here are first of all only inspired by the poem, they do not try to stick to the original very much. It must be said, however, that it does not mean this approach is a bad one. Whichever adaptation of the piece of work that makes it visible and tries to find a new way of narrating it (if we are speaking about those works that can be narrated) could be considered to be a good one in case this adaptation does not utterly degrade the value of the original work. The films also help to promote the original poem in various ways. For instance, there are many PC games or board games which were created mainly on the base of the latest film adaptation, Beowulf (2007). Beowulf exists also as an animated film and the musician Benjamin Bagby even took up a role of a bard who narrates the ancient poem in Old English while playing the harp. It is important to realize that although these adaptations might be both better and worse, they are in either case valuable since they attract the attention of the general public and hence they lead the people to discover the core of the story itself. Consequently, maybe they will end up reading the poem or creating their own variation of it−both being creditable acts.

35

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38

English Abstract

This thesis analyzes three films that are based on the poem of Beowulf which was lost for a long time and discovered only in the 19th century. The similarities and differences between the original story of Beowulf and its film adaptations are examined and compared.

The first film is The 13th Warrior (1999), directed by John McTiernan and

Michael Crichton. The scenario is based on the book by Michael Crichton, Eaters of the

Dead, with which part of the thesis deals as well. This narrative shows the story of

Beowulf as how it might have happened if it was real. The second film is named

Beowulf and Grendel (2005), directed by Sturla Gunnarsson. In the thesis there is examined an interesting intention of introducing Grendel as a Troll whose father was purposelessly killed and now the "monster" seeks revenge. The third film, Beowulf

(2007), introduces as a main character Grendel's mother. She is depicted as a beautiful seductress who controls king Hrothgar and later also Beowulf, both having a child with her.

All these features found in the films are examined in order to prove that the films about Beowulf are worth watching even though they are not as famous as films that deal with more popular topics. They are valuable because they are able to catch our attention and move us to the discovery of its background, the ancient poem of Beowulf, not only as the modern film version, but maybe also in its raw, unadjusted form.

39

Czech Abstract

Předmětem této práce je analýza tří filmů, které jsou založeny na dlouho ztracené a teprve v devatenáctém století znovuobjevené básni Beowulf. Všechny podobnosti a odlišnosti mezi původním příběhem o Beowulfovi a jeho filmovými adaptacemi jsou podrobně rozebrány a porovnány.

Prvním filmem, jehož režie se ujali John McTiernan a Michael Crichton, jsou

Vikingové (1999). Scénář je založen na knize Michaela Crichtona, Pojídači mrtvých, které se práce rovněž věnuje. Toto vyprávění ukazuje příběh Beowulfa tak, jak by se mohl udát ve skutečnosti. Druhý film s názvem Beowulf: Král Barbarů (2005) režíroval

Sturla Gunnarsson. V práci je prověřován pozoruhodný záměr představit Grendela jako trola, jehož otec byl bezdůvodně zavražděn, a on se tak stal "obludou" prahnoucí po pomstě. Tvůrci třetího filmu, Beowulf (2007), zdůraznili úlohu Grendelovy matky. Ta je zobrazena jako krásná a svůdná žena, která ovládá krále Hrothgara, a později i

Beowulfa, přičemž s oběma z nich zplodí dítě.

Tato práce dokazuje pomocí analýzy výše zmíněných prvků, že filmy o

Beowulfovi stojí za zhlédnutí, ačkoliv možná nejsou tak slavné jako některé jiné filmy zabývající se známějšími tématy. Dokáží nás totiž zaujmout a snad i přimět k tomu, abychom si v Beowulfovi našli něco víc − abychom se dostali k jádru této starodávné básně nejen v jejím moderním filmovém hávu, ale i v její původní syrové formě.

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