jordanabina
Beowulf, is one of those stories that I have heard about since I was a kid but never came around to reading. You know those books that your friends whine about because they had to read it in high school or college as required reading? To me, that was Beowulf. I know people who know some of the lines by heart in the original language (Hey Matt), and then I know people who have read Beowulf and hated it. I’m not sure whether or not we hate books because they are required or because we actually don’t like them. For instance, I was required to read A Catcher In The Rye in high school and I loved it, the rest of my class wanted to graduate early I guess.
Besides the fact that Beowulf is kind of one of those books that for some reason you are supposed to read, it also had a movie come out that got some pretty big fanfare. A few years back an adaptation of the book came out in a full CGI movie and got some popularity. Angelina Jolie was in it, or at least an avatar of her was, and the movie was at least attractive to people who he either loved the story or her. I never saw the movie, and now after reading the book, I’m kind of glad I didn’t.
One of the reasons, although not the main reason, for picking up Beowulf was because in this last year of my life I’ve wanted to work my way through the must reads of all science fiction and fantasy. Mostly every list I googled had Beowulf on it, so it became a part of my 2019 book list. The other reason, which is by far the catalyst to the decision for picking this book up, is because of the dramatic impact it had on author and professor J.R.R. Tolkien. After reading a fascinating book on the life and work of Tolkien it became abundantly clear that we would not have any of our middle earth heroes and stories if it weren’t for Tolkien’s journey through the original Beowulf. Because of my love for Tolkien I trusted his judgement and picked up Beowulf for myself.
Beowulf is a story about a man, from a distant country coming and defeating evil in a foreign land. His desire to eradicate evil comes from a mixture of hunger for glory but also to use the gifts of his strengths for good. On a macro level I found it interesting how fast we were introduced to the protagonist who bears the name of the book title Beowulf. It was just a given that he was strong and fierce, not a lot of back story about how it happened or where his strength came from. Beowulf just lives in a world of magic, evil, kingdoms, and super human abilities. To some extent I liked that, it allowed the story to begin with a bang. A little back story and then in the blink of an eye, we were in.
Something I found interesting about the book was how easy it was to understand, which may be a translation issue, but I expected a much more difficult read. The story, although very interesting, was simple. Strong guys hears about bad guy, strong guy comes and defeats bad guy on the first try. Bad guy has a bad mom, she gets mad and kills people. Strong guy goes to kill bad mom, she almost kills him but he survives and wins. Strong guy goes home and lives to be an old strong man. A dragon appears later in his life, strong man kills dragon but it takes his life.
These types of stories are great because they allow the reader to imagine what these villains and heroes look like. If you search the web for Beowulf art there are so many different kinds of representations of the characters you find in the book. The author describes them, but not with enough detail to give you a true picture about what their actual image may be. Many artists depict the mother of the monster to be hideous, others show her beautiful. Some show the monster to be a huge beast but others artists depict him closer to the size of a large man. I love this about fantasy stories, we don’t have anything around us to base these characters on, so we have to lean on our imagination.
The fact that Tolkien was so inspired by all of this had to be because of the original text and language in which it was written. Tolkien was entrenched in the study of words and Beowulfprovided him with enough words to study for years. I feel like even giving my opinion about this book without taking more time to read it in it’s original form is kind of lame. I found it fascinating to think about how long humans have been imagining stories like this. monsters, dragons, and queens. Will that storyline ever get old? I really don’t think it will, and I hope these stories continue to inspire us. The idea that someone was creating, imagining, and thinking this way hundreds of years ago is very cool. It speaks to the human spirit and the desire for something greater than ourselves.
I think Beowulf needs more than one pass through, and also maybe a study guide as well. Not that it’s difficult to read but because I get the feeling that there is more to experience than what is on the surface. It took me a few hours to read, which was shocking and a little disappointing. I’m looking forward to a deeper dive this next time around. Glad to have read it, and definitely glad to see where Tolkien found his dragon. If you want to go on a Beowulf hunt through Tolkien’s work, go read Beren and Luthien, something tells me the dragon is related to our dragon from Beowulf.
