Robert Zemeckis’s New Agey Beowulf

By John David Ebert 

Beowulf was a great patriarchal classic. Robert Zemeckis’s celluloid version of Beowulf, however, is a great matriarchal entertainment. Though Zemeckis’s film appears to follow the contours of the Anglo Saxon epic, the point that it makes is exactly the opposite, for the point of Beowulf had been the celebration of the manly deeds of a single mysterious warrior who appeared out of the bogs and fens of Denmark, defeated three monsters and then disappeared back into the mists of song and legend. Beowulf’s deeds, moreover, were accomplished almost entirely by himself, on his own – with a little help in the dragon battle from Wiglaf – and he essentially put himself on the throne only after his king Hygelac and Hygelac’s son had died. There are almost no women in the epic, and on those few occasions when they do appear, it is only as barmaids to serve the ale that keeps the men happy and ready for their next adventures. This was one of the reasons why Tolkien undoubtedly loved the epic so much, for he claimed that the Norman invasion of England – bringing its admixture of French Celtic ways – spoiled Anglo Saxon mythology. Beowulf is one of the few surviving examples of a pure and undiluted, pre-Celtic Anglo Saxon myth world. Tolkien did not like Celtic myth. And it is safe to say that he most likely would have found little to appreciate in Zemeckis’s film.

It is much more likely, however, that Tolkien’s great – and equally erudite – colleague  Robert Graves, author of The White Goddess, would have found Zemeckis’s film more satisfying, since the Beowulf that it portrays is actually much closer to a Celtic type of hero than an Anglo-Saxon  one, for Graves was a Celtic scholar who paid little attention to the realm of Scandinavian and Anglo Saxon myths. The role of women in Celtic mythology is much more pronounced than in Scandinavian myth, and Zemeckis’s Beowulf is a man who attains the throne only with the help of a goddess.

Almost the only deed in the celluloid Beowulf which Beowulf accomplishes on his own, just as in the epic, is the slaying of Grendel. But then when the time comes for our hero to kill Grendel’s mother in similar fashion, as he does in the epic, he instead fails to do so and falls prey to an enchantment, an enchantment which the Celts would have recognized at once as a geis. In order to put him on the throne in Hrothgar’s place, all Beowulf need do is to mate with Grendel’s mother and produce a new monstrous offspring to take Grendel’s place, in this case, the dragon that he will later battle to the death. Once on the throne, Beowulf is invincible and cannot be harmed. He also cannot lose a battle, and we see this fact beginning to trouble him, as well it would have troubled the real Beowulf if he had realized that his deeds were no longer his own but the result of the work of a goddess. Beowulf, in this version of the story, is not happy about his situation, for he has been robbed of his heroism by a resurgent matriarchy. He does still battle the dragon to a mutual Ragnarok-style annihilation, but in Neil Gaiman’s screenplay, the dragon is his son, and is meant to be an ironic counterpart of Grendel. At his funeral, we are shown his accomplice Wiglaf about to fall under a similar spell of enchantment by Grendel’s mother, who beckons to him from the waves, to come and visit her in her kingdom of the Land Below Waves, a favorite Celtic motif. And so the cycle will begin again.

Thus, in this film version, Beowulf’s deeds are not his own, but the reflex of the magical protections of a goddess, and this is precisely what we often find in Celtic mythology, whose stories are full of masculine heroes who attain their power with the close and carefully guided aid of women. Beowulf here resembles Cuchulainn more than anything else, for Cuchulainn was the great Celtic counterpart of Achilles, a blonde warrior hero who took on an entire army single-handedly in the epic of the Tain. But we must note that the leader of the army he opposes is a woman, Queen Madb. And we must also note that Cuchulainn learned how to fight from the warrior skills of a woman named Schathach, who taught him everything he knows. And in one episode, Cuchulainn’s violent battle frenzy is cooled precisely by a woman, an Ulster queen named Mughain, who tricks him into being lowered into a vat of cold water by a hundred and fifty naked women. At his death, the goddess of fate, Morrigan, perches upon his shoulder in the form of a crow, as though to claim him as one of her own.

Thus, Zemeckis’s Beowulf is stamped by a pattern of female involvement that is much closer to the world of the Celts, whose warriors were so often women, and whose kings so often attained the throne by means of their assistance, as in the case of Llew Llaw Gyffes, who attained both his name and his battle gear and armor from his mother. In the original Beowulf epic, it is very possible that Beowulf’s victory over Grendel and his mother was meant to represent the rejection and overthrow of this very notion of the warrior who becomes king by means of the power of a goddess (Grendel is a sort of shriveled up shadow version of such a figure), for this had been the way of kingship in Mesopotamia, Egypt and amongst the Hittites (at least, until the advent of Gilgamesh, who was the first hero to spurn the power of the goddess and to reject her aid in attaining the throne). The Anglo-Saxon Beowulf is more similar to Gilgamesh in this sense, while Zemeckis’s is closer to Cuchulainn.

And so to my final point: the celluloid Beowulf is an entertaining film that appears to follow the Anglo Saxon epic rather closely, but actually does so only in its surface topography, as it were. The deep structures of the narrative, however, are completely the opposite of those of the ancient epic and cannot be relied upon as an adequate summation of the epic’s meaning. The Anglo Saxon epic says: the greatness of a man is a function of his deeds, and he needs no woman to clear a path for him. The Hollywood epic says: a man is not only nothing without his woman, but it is the woman who makes him what he is and establishes what he can, or cannot, do. Thus, each age  reimagines  the past in accordance with its own world view. And in our age, the possibilities for heroic achievement and the slaying of dragons and monsters is becoming grimmer and grimmer, as Nature resurges all around our dragon-slaying civilization and begins to devour it.

In Zemeckis’s film, what we are really witnessing then is a story of Western civilization (i.e. Beowulf) in process of being dismantled – and not just by the Critical Theorists – but by the Earth herself, personified by Grendel’s mother. The celluloid Beowulf may serve as a marker showing us that we are headed in our contemporary mythologies in the direction of the goddess-swamped and stultified Hindu civilization, for there, too, the early dragon slaying heroes of the Vedic Age were gradually swallowed up and digested by the Great Mother. Our heroes are fast becoming mere puppets of cosmic forces, and the mythologies of the Western Canon are under siege from all quarters.

Thus, the irony of Zemeckis’s film: while it appears that he is rescuing an obscure epic from the anonymity of college English courses in order for the masses to appreciate it on a large scale, his version of the film actually shows us the degree to which the canon is under assault by revisionist thinking, for his Beowulf is not the Beowulf of the canon, but Beowulf as reimagined  by New Agey Californians with their resurgent neo-goddess religion. 

The only thing missing from the film is an Enya soundtrack.