So I just read that Angelina Jolie has been cast in ‘Beowulf.’ Hmmmm. Beowulf.

This would be entirely laughable but Neil Gaiman is contributing, which at least sparks a ray of hope. It’s supposed to be a blend of animation and reality a la ‘The Polar Express’ also by director Robert Zemeckis. Hmmmm. Beowulf? My guess is that most people know Beowulf as ‘the story where that warrior guy kills Grendel. While that does indeed happen, that’s only a fraction of the story.

‘Beowulf’ is an unusual poem in that it’s relatively short but doesn’t deal with a particular event. ‘The Iliad’ for instance is all about one specific period of the Trojan War; a lot happens before and after ‘The Iliad’ but, for all intents and purposes, the story has to do with a specific event during the course of the war. ‘Beowulf,’ on the other hand, is challenging — to reader and scriptwriter alike — because it has no middle section and therefore doesn’t have a plot, or least not the way modern readers think about plot. It goes something like this:

1) A little pre-history that describes how this king’s hall becomes ravaged by Grendel
2) Beowulf, as a young man just hitting his prime, comes to save the day
3) Beowulf kills Grendel
4) Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother
5) Beowulf lives the rest of his life in which there are virtually no details
6) Beowulf gets killed by a dragon

In the middle there, there’s a long digression talking about wergeld and bloodfeuds and things like that. That’s the only point in which women are really in the story — they’re sort of used as collateral to make peace between warring tribes. The Beowulf poet, who is a Christian, uses the digression to basically point out that mankind needed some other moral authority to live by because these family feuds were never really settled and the war continues. But this is not part of the linear action of the poem.

So how in the world are they going to make this make sense? I dunno. My guess is that they’re going to make Angelina Jolie the love interest of Beowulf somehow; she’s certainly not going to be cast as Grendel’s mother. This tinkers with the story’s structure and besides, the religious undertones of Beowulf would be nearly impossible to get across on film to a modern audience. Are they just going to butcher the story a la ‘Troy’ did to ‘The Iliad’? Probably.

I hope to God they try to market ‘Beowulf’ as a good read for the masses. I don’t think sales of ‘The Iliad’ jumped after that movie and I would have to say ‘Beowulf’ is several times less accessible to the modern reader.