Reader Response: Gwyn

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Gwyn wrote the following reply to my (Ryan's) review of Beowulf and Grendel which can be read here.

Persoanlly I thought that it was better than any other adventure/eye-candy film I've seen in the past couple of years.

The medieval studies student in me hated it from a historically accurate point of view, but the literature student, the one with an intense interest in oral transmission and transformation, the one who laments the loss of most oral transmission as a conseqeuence of the otherwise excellent written word, loved it.

Anyone who is familiar with the Beowulf text can see that the Christianity in the surviving manuscript is tacked on to a story where, historically and thematically, it doesn't belong.

Why is it there?

Because it was a concern of the people writing it at the time when they wrote it. I felt like the movie's treatment of Christianity was more a comment on that intrusion than on the historical fact of Christianity.

As a literature student I find the attempted Christianisation of Beowulf to be a corruption of the story, but I still see how it provides the medievalist with priceless information about the struggle to balance cultural pride and a new religion -- I wrote a paper on it.

This is not the bastardisation of an original tale spun by a known author with creative autonomy -- it is an attempt to update a story which was once a living piece of spoken folklore, a part of the "public domain" which was changed and updated with every telling, and hopefully one day will be again.

Sure, it wasn't completely successful, but neither was the Christianisation of Beowulf, which is a distinctive feature of the only surviving evidence of this wonderful story that we have.

Is a story about things supernatual and heroic really to be bound to historical and factual accuracy? I hate to think where such a requirement would leave the Beowulf MS itself.