Beowulf

From One Generation of Readers to the Next Generation of Viewers

For years, Hollywood has taken many pieces of literature and turned it into something on the big screen. They have taken stories from great writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, J. R. Tolkien, and Stephen King. They have transformed their works and put them on the silver screen with movies such as, Lord of the Rings and Storm of the Century. Hollywood has even been able to take an epic poem written so long ago that its date of manuscript is unknown. The epic poem is about the life, battles, and death of the heroic king of the Geats, Beowulf. Beowulf, is an epic poem of a great warrior and defender of evil from those who are innocent. In Beowulf, the reader is brought into a world of kings and monsters through stories of Beowulf's battle with Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a mighty dragon.

Grendel has said to be a descendant of a giant race that survived the great flood of Genesis, and he has even been classified as a descendant of the first killer known to man, Cain, son of Adam, murderer of his brother Able. Then in the epic poem of Beowulf, Grendel is described as being an "infamous killer" (33), having "swift hard claws" (32), "his eyes gleam with darkness, burning with a gruesome light" (32). He is also introduced in the story as a "man-eating monster who lives at the bottom of a foul mere, or mountain lake. His name might be related to the Old Norse grindill, meaning storm, or grenja, to bellow" (19), but there are difference in the way that the creature in the 1999 sci-fi movie version of Grendel is depicted. In the sci-fi adaptation of Grendel, he is a monster who moves so swiftly that his shape and figure is distorted, except for one time in the movie; the time in which Beowulf, played by Christopher Lambert, fights him in the underground sewer area of the outpost. In this scene, Grendel resembles something that could only be made from someone's wildest imagination: leather like skin all over his body, razor sharp teeth, and talon like spikes on his back, legs, and head, almost as if he were an alien from a distant planet.

Grendel's mother isn't described by much more than a female warrior or monstrous woman. Then in the poem Beowulf, very little is known about her except for the fact that she had claws and that her skin was very tough because Beowulf "discovered that no sword could slice her evil skin, that Hrunting could not hurt her" (40). In the sci-fi film, she is put into the form of a succubus. A succubus is a creature from the medieval times that was thought to come to men in their dreams and seduce them and have sexual intercourse with them to the point of exhaustion, even death. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succubus). Although she is seen mostly as a succubus in the film, when she is coming to avenge Grendel's death, she becomes a very foul