A mighty hero sails to the land of his fa­ther’s trusted friend, slays a fam­ily of mon­sters to de­fend a hall and its king, wins glory and honor for his name to be­come king him­self, and per­ishes in epic bat­tle with the dead­liest op­po­nent he ever faced.

It sounds like a time­less story, a fan­tasy about a con­quer­ing hero and his dar­ing quest. Be­owulf is the ear­li­est known Old Eng­lish poem, so an­cient that no one even knows the name of the au­thor.

A clas­sic, mytho­log­i­cal tale show­cas­ing the Nordic val­ues of honor, bat­tle, and am­bi­tion, Be­owulf has even seen adap­ta­tion to the sil­ver screen in the 2007 film of the same name di­rected by Robert Ze­meckis. Both de­pic­tions pre­sent Be­owulf as a mighty Geat hero come to save a king of Den­mark from a feral beast, but their de­f­i­n­i­tion of “hero” varies from myth to movie. The film de­pic­tion of Be­owulf re­flects on the in­her­ent un­re­li­a­bil­ity of myth and leg­end, and ex­am­ines the mod­ern as­sess­ment of what be­ing a hero truly means.

In the orig­i­nal Be­owulf poem, Gren­del, the mon­ster who at­tacks King Hroth­gar’s hall, is a de­scen­dant of the Bib­li­cal first mur­derer, Cain, a “grim and greedy crea­ture… cruel and sav­age… proud of his plun­der” as he at­tacks and eats the Danes (Be­owulf, Page 9). The movie takes a more sym­pa­thetic ap­proach to the mon­ster to con­trast him against its ver­sion of Be­owulf; The film’s Gren­del is sickly, cursed, mis­shapen, and only at­tacks be­cause the mer­ry­mak­ing of the Danes harms his su­per­nat­u­rally sen­si­tive ears.

The son of a de­monic se­duc­tress who con­ceived him with Hroth­gar, Gren­del is the king’s great­est shame: a lonely, iso­lated fig­ure torn be­tween his hu­man and de­monic ori­gins. Be­owulf, mean­while, is pow­er­ful, tall, and a bois­ter­ous sto­ry­teller, proud of his many heroic deeds. He is a brag­gart who, while gen­uinely well-in­ten­tioned, ex­ag­ger­ates his feats and proudly bat­tles with­out weapons or ar­mor, show­ing his great pride.

While the Nordic hero cul­ture of the myth de­mands that one ex­ag­ger­ate their feats to high­light their rep­u­ta­tion, the film ques­tions this de­cep­tion. Rather than slay Gren­del’s venge­ful mother like in the poem, 2007’s Be­owulf re­peats Hroth­gar’s mis­take by sleep­ing with her. Pride, not lust, mo­ti­vates these ac­tions, as Gren­del’s mother promises the hero, “A man like you could own the great­est tale ever sung. Your story would live on when every­thing now alive is dust.”

This scene re­veals Be­owulf’s weak­ness as a proud, am­bi­tious war­rior; he be­comes king at the cost of his honor. This high­lights the in­her­ently un­re­li­able na­ture of the oral sto­ry­telling promi­nent in an­cient Nordic cul­ture. When no one writes their sto­ries down, who is to say what truly hap­pened?

In the myth, the dragon that burns down vil­lages and ul­ti­mately kills Be­owulf has no con­nec­tion to Gren­del or his mother. It is a beast of na­ture rather com­mon to Nordic mythol­ogy. The film pre­sents the dragon as the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Be­owulf’s ego by mak­ing the mas­sive, golden crea­ture his son, just as Gren­del was Hroth­gar’s. When he falls in bat­tle slay­ing the mon­ster, his friend Wiglaf sees it as a no­ble, self­less sac­ri­fice, but Be­owulf ac­cepts the truth: that had he not suc­cumbed to the promises of Gren­del’s mother, the dragon would never have been born, and dozens would still live.

Be­owulf’s fi­nal re­quest to his wife is to “k​eep a mem­ory of me, not as a king or a hero; but as a man: fal­li­ble and flawed.” While the myth treats vi­o­lence and de­cep­tion as wor­thy paths to glory, the film turns this idea on its head. Gren­del is an un­sung vic­tim, his mother a venge­ful ma­nip­u­la­tor; both Hroth­gar and Be­owulf fall prey to the com­mon lure of hu­man pride. 2007’s Be­owulf shows the mod­ern crit­ic’s per­cep­tion of leg­end, ques­tion­ing if war and ex­ag­ger­a­tion truly earn some­one the ti­tle of hero.

Sources

Anony­mous. (2019). Be­owulf. Alma Books.

“Be­owulf.” 2024. En­cy­clopæ­dia Bri­tan­nica. En­cy­clopæ­dia Bri­tan­nica, inc. Jan­u­ary 26, 2024. https://​www.bri­tan­nica.com/​topic/​Be­owulf.

Ze­meckis, Robert, dir. 2007. Be­owulf. s.l.: Warner Bros.