Retro Rants: Beowulf
Ye Olde Bench Press Paid Off I See
Full disclosure, dear reader, I never understood why people complained about having to read this book. It’s stupidly short and the basic premise is “Viking rips off monster’s arm and then fights a dragon.”
You don’t really need more than that to make the sale do you? For a story that only spans fifty to one hundred pages? If you do I can’t help but feel like you fucked up somewhere.
To be fair I suppose much of how you love or hate this work has to do with the translation you get saddled with at your first introduction, along with whether it’s the poetic or prose version, but if you can put up with Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights I feel like you should be able to grind through a few paragraphs of time honored Viking violence.
If I’m being perfectly honest, without the historical significance I don’t know that this would be forced upon people in highschool anyhow because…really…there’s not a whole lot going on here story-wise.
There’s some set up, two fights, and a brief outro. Not bad by any means but I guess the fact that I’m not creaming my shorts by the conclusion means I’m not cutout to be an English teacher. Look, I’m not saying we should read this to kindergartners or anything, but I will say the Wishbone version of this story (Be a Wolf, get it?) kicked undiluted ass and, well, the plot is simple enough for a child to follow along with so…make wise parenting decisions is all I’m saying.
See Also that Timeless Classic “Robinhound Crusoe"
Still, all joking (and non joking- seriously consider reading this to your kids) aside, if this story helped inspire Tolkien to eventually write The Lord of the Rings then I think we can afford to let it do a little grandstanding. But what is it about the story itself that gets people into a tizzy? Why has the story continued to be pressed into the hands of boys and girls in schools the world over?
Now you could be boring and say something like ‘to showcase perhaps the oldest tale ever written in the English language’ but then you’d be lame so don’t. Instead, say something like “because the story features a local man engaging in Viking diplomacy with varying results.”
I hate the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but I truly think this is one of those works where how much you enjoy the story is entirely up to how you yourself picture it, dear reader.
Taken at face value the translations can be dull, monotonous and, quite frankly, nap inducing. That is a strange, strange quandry for a story to be in where a viking rips a monster’s arm off with his own hands like a three year old with the world’s cheapest pinata in act one!
Yes the original was in Ye Olde Aenglish, but it’s almost like in order to fully appreciate the story you have to do a second, simultaneous translation in your head to fully understand the action and bravado you’re actually meant to be reading.
To be frank I can see why people don’t like reading Beowulf (it is a laborious process after all and one every author actively aspires to avoid subjecting their readers to) but damn if I’m at a loss for how they can’t enjoy the tale itself! The entire thing just has such a grandiose nature combined with a certain simplistic charm- like a schoolboy doodling about the exploits of some superhero they invented over lunch instead of taking notes on how the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
Like those metaphorical doodles is Beowulf fun? Absolutely!
Is it educational? …We’ll discuss that at the next parent-teacher conference.