Beowulf Movie vs Story

Samantha Gunderson

Mrs. Silkwood

AP Literature

7 October 2013

Beowulf: Voices vs. Words

Since the beginning of the film industry books, short stories, and poems have been turned into videos. This has caused many different opinions of the original piece to arise without any real knowledge of the work. The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is an Old English epic poem that was brought into the film industry. This heroic poem is vaguely represented throughout the work of theatre production in the computer generated film Beowulf.

The twenty first century has been home to many different technical advances, as well as computer generated video. The original epic poem of Beowulf has been affected by the twenty first century in various ways. Women; originally not a portraying factor of the trials of Beowulf, however, through the twenty first century view they became a considerable part of the story. Throughout the poem Beowulf does not succumb to the eyes of any women, not even Grendel’s mother. The twenty first century slant puts all of the current views of women on Beowulf’s shoulders. Beowulf descended down into the swamp, found Grendel already dead and successfully killed his Mother, at least in poem. In the twenty first century Beowulf descended down into the swamp, found Grendel dead, had sexual intercourse with his mother, impregnated her, left and lied to the community. In the Anglo-Saxon time period, Beowulf would have never lied to the people of the kingdom, and he would have never succumbed to the woes of the monsteress Grendel’s Mother. She is not the only person/thing to make Beowulf break in the current eyes of society. The Queen, the beautiful Queen, not mentioned throughout the poem but one or two times is a focal point throughout the entire movie. She catches Beowulf’s eye at the beginning of the movie and pulls him around throughout the entire movie. In the poem, women are nothing. They are barely mentioned and sexual intercourse is barely even hinted at,...