Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Alena Vrabcová The Story of Beowulf 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. The 13th Warrior (1999) ........................................................................................................ 13 4. Beowulf and Grendel (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 monster (usually a dragon). In the case of Beowulf, the dragon 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 Heorot and killing innocent people inside it. Usually we had monsters 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 The Hobbit 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 Seamus Heaney 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 Old English 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 next 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