Beowulf

In this week's Film Club (4.30pm, Thursday 26th July, Room 6.300, Tickets 50p!) we will be screening the 2007 production of Beowulf.  But what is Beowulf, and how is it connected to the British Museum?

Students of literature are often introduced to Beowulf as the oldest surviving work of English literature.  It's a poem about the heroic deeds of Beowulf, a warrior prince or chieftan, who must protect his people by fighting first the monster Grendel, then Grendel's angry mother, and finally a dragon.  The exact age of the poem is unknown, because it would have passed from generation to generation orally.  It tells the story of an Anglo-Saxon world, but the earliest written versions we have of the poem are thought to date back to the 11th Century.  As you can see from the image above, it may be hard to recognise the language as English.  The spoken and written forms of English have changed dramatically over the past 1000 words, and we now refer to the language of Beowulf as Old English.

For more information about the poem, including early manuscripts, and video and audio recordings of experts speaking about it, the British Library website has an excellent page devoted to Beowulf. The Nobel-prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney has written a modern English version of the poem that is much easier to read, and perhaps better still are the video recordings of Heaney reading his poem aloud.  The following clip, in which Heaney reads the poem's prologue, is an obvious starting point!

Our link from Beowulf to the British Museum comes via the Sutton Hoo Helmet, which was discovered, unsurprisingly, at Sutton Hoo - not far from here in Colchester.The BBC Radio 4 programme on the Sutton Hoo Helmet suggests that the real-life Beowulf would probably have been buried wearing a helmet just like the one unearthed at Sutton Hoo. For anyone with an interest in archaeology, there's a nice slideshow on the archaeology behind Beowulf here.

Beowulf is an action hero, and the 2007 film adaptation is certainly an action movie.  It starts Ray Winstone and Angelina Jolie, but it's an all-CGI production.  Director Robert Zemeckis is a pioneer of CGI (see this history of CGI in the movies for more details) and the film should appeal to anyone interested in film-making and animation.  For more on the film, you can read reviews from Empire magazine and the Film School Rejects blog.  Finally, I'll leave the trailer to introduce the style and content of the film to you...as you can see, the story has come a long way since its origins in Old English oral poetry.