Annotation: Robert DiNapoli - "Beowulf for Today"

It's been a good day. I was given a copy of Eaters of the Dead, and I've read through the frame narrative's introduction. Michael Crichton's novel is, after a fashion, a Beowulf for today and is roughly contemporary with John Gardner's Grendel (Crichton's novel was published five years after Gardner's). It has me thinking a lot about how different Beowulf becomes not only in its film adaptations, but its novel adaptations as well. The poem's structure and style, as well as the very mind its narrator seems to exhibit (more on that in the future), just strike modern readers as almost impenetrable, if I judge by the feedback my students have given. The basic plot is easy enough to follow, but the tangents, the framed songs of Sigemund and Hildeburh, and the part where we are told what happened to make Beowulf king of the Geats all combine to make the poem itself slippery. For the undergraduate student, these parts are hard to reconcile with the "main story" of Beowulf fighting the monsters.

So adaptations must adapt, must trim, must transform into something completely different. Gardner tells us the story from Grendel's perspective, while exploring existentialism and nihilism in the process. Crichton creates a frame narrative of the Arab diplomat Ahmed Ibn Fadlan and his time among the Norse when Buliwyf and his people are locked in combat against the Wendols, Neanderthal relicts who feast upon human flesh. Maria Dahvana Headley recasts the story into a modern suburban gated community and uses the structure of the original to build a new story focused upon police brutality, land theft, and racism. Beowulf is quite malleable, and that it can speak to us today through these adaptations is quite impressive. Enough rambling, though. There's an annotation to post.

DiNapoli, Robert. “Beowulf for Today,” Area Magazine 146 (Feb. 2017): 45-49.

The opening of this article engages with the timing of the poem and the reference to Ingeld (which DiNapoli connects to Alcuin of York and his “What Has Ingeld to do with Christ?”). Primary focus is placed on what themes Beowulf carries that speak across time. Key for thinking about Grendel’s Mother is DiNapoli’s sense of the poet’s vision of a human ideal. Mostly DiNapoli takes Beowulf as a fair ideal of a hero, measured and reassuring while graceful in putting doubters in their place. Of the Grendelkin, DiNapoli firmly lands on them as “large with moral and existential darkness” as the “demon-seed kin of Cain” (48). Grendel is described as a monstrous cannibal troll (46), and Grendel’s Mother is not mentioned much beyond notes that Beowulf pursues her into her “lair,” which further pushes the Grendekin away from humanity and into bestial monstrosity. For DiNapoli the original poem rings with genuine heroism, while modern ideas of heroism ring false, replaced with blustering tweets echoing between hollow deeds. I’m not entirely disinclined to the notion that the poem is straightforward in presenting Beowulf as a genuine hero, but I am rather disinclined to think of Grendel’s Mother as a monster, and this article certainly reinforces the traditional take on that.