Beowulf: a digital hero from England’s lost culture

‘Beowulf! How’s your father?’ shouts Anthony Hopkins as Ray Winstone steps out of the boat which has brought the Geats’ tribal leader from Sweden to Denmark. As a way of grabbing attention it probably works better than ‘Hwaet!’ — the narrator’s initial injunction to sit up and listen in the original text. This may be English literature’s first epic, but even its admirers concede that the multiple plots recounted in 3,182 lines can confuse. These are shaggy dog stories of a somewhat bloody kind rather than Virgil or Homer, and in the absence of a unifying artistic vision we need to be kept engaged.

Digitally enhanced live action brings a novelty to Robert Zemeckis’s newly released film of Beowulf and the undulations of Grendel-fighting Winstone’s six-pack (courtesy of 3-D animation technology) constitute a pretty arresting sight. Hopkins as beleaguered Hrothgar, king of the Danes, digs deep into his own tribal past and opts for a South Wales valleys accent. Those rolling ‘r’s and big vowels seemed just right, says Zemeckis, after ‘long debates about how Welsh might have grown out of Old English’ — a droll notion since the native literature of the former predates the latter.

In the millennium or so of its history as written literature Beowulf has meant different things to a great many people. The Victorians who were its first scholarly interpreters delighted in the difficulty of the language. Beowulf showed that academic ‘English’ might be quite as tough as Greek and that the language’s earliest texts could reveal attitudes as satisfyingly archaic as any creed expressed by Ajax or Achilles. This, therefore, was a worthy English successor to the Homeric tradition since it too showed layers of oral tradition accruing around the campfire.