Reviews

A film beyond any other film I have seen in the past few years, Beowulf and Grendel is a masterpiece of restraint, skill, authenticity, artistic beauty and storytelling at its purest. I have just finished watching this and after 100 minutes of audio and video bliss, I cannot help but post about it. Filmed for the most part in Iceland, with an Icelandic and English cast, this film retells the most famous and ancient of written texts of the English language.

Beowulf and Grendel is not an adaptation for the cinema, but an interpretation or an extrapolation of the original medieval text. It is overflowing with beauty and a deep respect for the 1500-year old piece of skaldic poetry. Every image is a work of art and the screenplay respects to the dot the original epic, whilst allowing a large amount of artistic license. I suppose it may annoy the purists as Jackson annoyed the Tolkienistas, but I really doubt anyone would be too upset by this film.

Unlike the medieval saga of Beowulf, Beowulf and Grendel takes a neutral and deeply philosophical stance on the tale and demonstrates how a culture of violence and revenge is inevitably doomed to destruction through blood feud and vendetta. This is clearly one of the underlying themes of all Icelandic Sagas, but nowhere else is it portrayed with such clarity as in this film adaptation of the Saga.

The film starts before the written text and looks at the early childhood of Grendel, at the slaying of his father at the hands of Hrothgar's men and at the birth of hatred that will thereafter forever run through his veins. Following this introduction the film follows the screenplay whilst using much of the prose material in various tangents such as Beowulf's swimming wager with his companion. The screenplay then runs its course whilst employing good humour (not comedy!) and a somewhat more informal approach than the medieval text. As many of you may already know Beowulf is a skaldic poem, an unusual variety of poem that existed during the early middle ages (commonly and wrongly known as the "Dark Ages") in the Teutonic tribes of modern day Germany, Scandinavia and the British Isles. These poems were the ultimate form of storytelling, having developed from campfire tales to vastly elaborate, highly formulaic poetry of several thousand verses. Beowulf and Grendel holds itself very closely to this and occasionally does draw onto the actual verses in narration and during a few of the feasts.

Where Beowulf and Grendel (2005) differs enormously from the "original" Beowulf (please note the quotation marks) is in its Christian content. Naturally, it is very difficult to talk about Christian content in Beowulf since it is clearly a pre-Christian, pagan text. The themes contained in the medieval text are of pagan origin: kinship, revenge, the acquisition of wealth, honour and death in battle to mention but a few. As the roots of the tale of Beowulf developed in Scandinavia, the story switched from being a purely oral delivery to being a written text. Naturally, at this time, only the Christian clergy knew how to read and write, so despite the fact that the alleged events had happened 3 to 800 years (depending on which historian you talk with) before the actual Christianisation of the British Isles or Scandinavia, the story took on a distinctive Christian twist. Yet another example of the misappropriation of pagan myth in Christian doctrine. The film wants nothing to do with this, looking through the flowery Christian messages and deep into the blatantly pagan content.

It would of course be unfair to say that it is purely a pagan story line since there is clearly a Christian element to it, the Celtic missionary, but he simply serves to demonstrate (in my opinion) the underhanded methods used by the early Church to convert the "heathens". These heathens who naturally (and this is a historical fact!) understood perfectly well the implications of the "White Christ" and merely saw him as "yet another deity to add to their pantheon" (to quote my post-roman history professor, Stephen Church). The image of Hrothgar wearing Mjolnir, the Hammer of Thor, on a pendant right above the crucifix the Celtic priest had given him is a perfect example of the early Germanic/Viking opinion of this new divine invader.

As you can probably detect, I am extremely excited by this film. I have been expecting its release for almost two years now, along with Das Nibelungenlied (a.k.a. The Sword of Xanten). I find it equally exciting to see a Scandinavian/North European cast and film crew.

I suppose that if I was to place an element of criticism in this review-ette, I would simply say that it would have been interesting to have the actors speak in Gamle Dansk and other Teutonic tongues. Passion of the Christ did this for Arameic, it would have been feasible to do it for this film.

With this very weak criticism (more of a personal, vested interest than anything else), I exhort you all to watch this film.