The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

by Burke, Jessica

  In The Lord of the Rings, by far the most obvious borrowing from Beowulflies in the characterization of Rohan and the Rohirrim. Meduseld, the seat of Théoden in Edoras, appears modeled directly from Heorot, where Hrothgar ruled the Spear-Danes. Many of the names in Rohan are found also in Beowulf —Éomer, Gárulf, Guthláf, Gúthwinë, Háma, Helm, Théoden, and still more besides. And it isn’t merely the names, but the architecture, the armor and weaponry, the language, and the culture itself that were borrowed—though as in his answer to the query about The Hobbit and the cup-stealing episode, Tolkien is circumspect. But Tom Shippey unmasks him:

  You remember, no doubt, the footnote, in one of the Appendices, where Tolkien says you mustn’t think that the Riders [of Rohan] resemble the ancient English in any except accidental respects. Absolutely untrue! Tolkien covering his tracks yet again! The Riders of Rohan resemble the Old English down to minute detail. Their names are all Old English […] but they also behave that way. All the habits which he talks about like […] piling arms outside, not being allowed in to see the king with weapons in your hand, the counsellor sitting at the feet of the king, all these come straight out of Beowulf, down to minute detail. The actual things they say are said by characters in Beowulf, very often.18

  It is also worth noting that the name Froda occurs in Beowulf (though not solely in Beowulf), and this is certainly part (though again, not all) of the history of Tolkien’s character, Frodo Baggins. Gollum likewise resembles Grendel in many respects. Both are characterized as half-man, half-monster, cannibals creeping about in the dark under a curse, both stronger and more cunning than other men, and so forth. Gríma Wormtongue, too, bears similarities to Grendel. The blades that pierce the Nazgûl melt before the hobbits’ eyes, just as the blade with which Beowulf decapitates Grendel melts away before his. As I say, I could go on, but let that suffice as we must now turn to our attention to Neil Gaiman. Gaiman’s Beowulf

  Neil Gaiman’s work reveals a double-edged influence: the direct impact of Beowulf as well as the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien, and through him the secondary, more indirect influence of Beowulf again. The most obvious example of Gaiman’s engagement with the tradition came in his and Roger Avary’s screenplay for the 2007 computer-animated film adaptation of Beowulf, but the story actually begins much earlier than this.

  After co-writing a string of cult hits with Quentin Tarantino in the early 1990s — Reservoir Dogs(1992), True Romance(1993), and finally Pulp Fiction (1994), for which they shared an Academy Award — Roger Avary was looking for a project of his own. In 1995, he wrote a treatment for Beowulf. The dramatic core of his proposed film came from a series of questions Avary had asked himself about the poem more than a decade earlier:

  If Grendel is half-man, half-demon … then who is his father?

  Why does Grendel never attack Hrothgar, the king? How does Beowulf hold his breath for days on end during the fight with Grendel’s Mother? Maybe he wasn’t fighting her? Or maybe he isn’t human?

  When Beowulf goes into the cave to kill Grendel’s Mother, why does he emerge with Grendel’s head instead of hers? Where’s the proof that the mother was killed? 19

  These are probing questions! Reading between the lines—in this case literally—Avary decided that “[alt]hough it’s not in the poem, clearly, Grendel was Hrothgar’s bastard son [...] sired […] in exchange for worldly wealth and fame.”20But in spite of his novel interpretation, Avary continued to struggle with how to adapt the “odd two-act structure”21of Beowulfinto a cohesive feature film. It was Neil Gaiman who provided the final insight: “Roger, don’t you see? If Grendel is Hrothgar’s son, the dragon surely must be Beowulf ’s son—come back to haunt him.”22 The two decided to work together on a full-length screenplay, and the result was hammered out over two weeks in June, 1997. Owing to the vagaries of the motion picture industry, it would take another decade, and a second draft of the screenplay, before their vision of Beowulf, remade “as a sort of Dark Ages Trainspotting, filled with mead and blood and madness,”23 would finally reach the public. But Gaiman was not content merely to wait on Hollywood.

  In 1998, sometime not long after he and Avary wrote their first draft of the Beowulf screenplay, Gaiman published a poem called “Lawrence Talbot: BAY WOLF” in the multicontributor anthology, Dark Detectives. The poem is an obvious adaptation of the basic Beowulfstory; it hardly needs pointing out that the title is a clever twist on the name of the Anglo-Saxon hero. Moreover, the poem exhibits some of the same unique interpretations that characterize the film adaptation (and a few new ones).

  The poem was reprinted — retitled simply “Bay Wolf ” (remember Tolkien’s adaptation of the character as “Beewolf ”) — in Gaiman’s own collection, Smoke and Mirrors, in the same year, and Gaiman chose a telling epigraph for his new book: “But where there’s a monster there’s a miracle,” from a poem by Ogden Nash entitled “Dragons are Too Seldom.” It may not be a coincidence that this recalls Tolkien’s 1936 lecture on Beowulf, discussed above. Remember, Tolkien charged that the dragon in Beowulf was not quite dragon enough — realdragons are too seldom, we might say. Gaiman, in his transformation of the dragon into more than just a dragon, but Beowulf ’s bastard son, was very much in sympathy with Tolkien here. This epigraph could also serve as a rallying cry for every fan of fantastical literature, from those enthralled by the Beowulf poet a millennium ago to the teaming hordes of present-day fantasy fans.

  In the poem, Gar Roth is a Venice Beach kingpin, running an all-night hot spot full of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Grand Al is just a neighbor turned vigilante—not necessarily a bad guy himself; but Gar Roth was keeping him up all night with the noise. Beowulf is Lawrence Talbot, a noirish “adjuster” for hire, and a man who (it seems) can transform into a wolf. The battle between the Bay Wolf and Grand Al transpires much as in Gaiman’s source material, but Grendel’s motives are more like those in the Avary/Gaiman screenplay. Talbot pursues Grand Al to his mother’s lair, where he encounters the monster’s mother. Here again, the novel interpretation in the screenplay is apparent: “whether I loved her or killed her... [w]hat we did is no business of yours.”24 The subtext is obvious. One can almost see the seductive ghost of Angelina Jolie.

  “Bay Wolf ” does not proceed as far as the dragon episode, perhaps for the same reason that Roger Avary originally found Beowulf hard to adapt (its “odd two-act structure”). But it’s pretty clear that the solutions that Gaiman and Avary worked into their screenplay were behind much of Gaiman’s appropriately poetic reinvention of Beowulf: the noise as a motive for Grendel’s predation, Grendel’s mother as the original MILF, Beowulf as part-monster himself, and so on. “Bay Wolf ” is a clever adaptation in many other ways as well, recalling the Venice Beach gang wars of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, just two years before. It is full of imaginative language and witty turns of phrase (e.g., “fearmoans and whoremoans” for pheromones and hormones).25

  The idea that Beowulf was a skinchanger of some kind, as we see in the poem “Bay Wolf,” has a basis in philology. In the second draft of the screenplay (and in the final film), Grendel’s mother greets Beowulf with the following words:

  Are you the one they call Beowulf ? The Bee-Wolf. The bear. Such a strong man you are. With the strength of a king. The king you will one day become. […] I know that underneath your glamour you’re as much a monster as my son Grendel. Perhaps more.26

  In the first draft, Grendel’s mother makes the accusation even more directly: “And you’re a monster too. Part bear, part wolf, all monster.”27 Gaiman and Avary are making veiled references to etymologies proposed for the name Beowulf, in which it was theorized that Beowulf was Old English béo“bee” + wulf “wolf,” and bee-wolf was a kenning for bear, a “wolf or ravager of the bees.”28 In the original medieval context, this was probably merely metaphorical, but Gaiman and Avary have taken the etymology literally. In either case, this philological touch would have appealed very much to Tolkien, and it’s even possible that
it was Tolkien’s indirect influence which prompted Gaiman and Avary to include such an academic detail in their screenplay.

  Remarking and Remaking the Tradition The changes that Gaiman and Avary made to the underlying story of Beowulf, along with its departures from the tone or style of the original, stirred up swift irritation among medieval scholars and literati. The film was called “a great cop-out on a great poem” (Bonnie Wheeler), “some kind of monster” ( Jeff Sypeck), “Anglo-Saxons of the Caribbean” (Gary Kamiya), and “a weird cross between a serious attempt to envision the Northern early medieval past and ‘Ye Olde Medieval Worlde’ of Shrek” (Michael Drout), to give just a taste. “Dr. Virago” (a pseudonym) shares a more nuanced, but still highly critical opinion in a lengthy online review. It was, she writes, like “a sloppy disaster of disorganization, hastiness, illogic, and misreading,” though with “moments of insight;” it was “a mess of a movie,”29 but she

  could see some of the seemingly odder choices were still informed choices—they were attempts at doing something based on interpretation rather than the literal elements of the poem—but in going so wrong, those choices were all the more disappointing.30

  And Richard Scott Nokes “didn’t like the snotty way in which it called the poem into question, while leaving its own telling above suspicion.”31 But is all of this righteous indignation really justified? Anyone has a right to his or her opinion, of course, especially in the subjective judgment of art. But reactions in the scholarly community tended, almost universally, toward offense that anybody would dare alter the story of Beowulf. I take a rather different view myself, as it would seem the Beowulf poet himself did. Far from being set in rune-stone, the story was once quite fluid and only came to be fixed over time. One feature of the poem that serves to reinforce the idea of its inviolability is the fact that it survives in only a single manuscript. That is to say, unlike many other relics of centuries bygone, there are no competing versions of Beowulf with equal provenance from the Middle Ages. There once were several copies separating the poet’s original and the extant manuscript, and like a game of Chinese Whispers, these must have differed—but none survive.32This leaves an understandable lay perception that the poem was always fixed as it exists today, but scholars should—and do—know better.

  Today’s authors—Tolkien, Gaiman, and anyone else besides— have as much right to respond to and adapt the story as did the scops and scribes of Anglo-Saxon England. After all, the story of Beowulf itself was deliberately altered in order to incorporate explicitly Christian elements. To put it simply: Beowulf is already a kind of adaptation, in this case a Christian adaptation of earlier pagan material. “Out of such old lays of Beowulf ’s adventures, our poet selected, combined, and retold a complete story from his own point of view.”33 It is an amalgam of historical facts, remarkably accurate under the circumstances; legend and folk-tale plot elements, with an underlying mythology only hinted at; and the imposition of Christianity, a theological mantle draped rather carelessly over the backbone of the earlier (heathen) belief system. For all the apparent disharmony of this literary chimaera, Beowulf was, and is, regarded as great art.

  It would be wrong to lionize the poet or to insist that Beowulf has no faults. Many scholars agree that it has some very definite faults (though the poem overcomes these and succeeds in spite of its defects).

  Had Christianity not come to Britain and controlled the activity of its poets, we might have had a Beowulf with a heathen mythology, like the lays of the Poetic Edda. […] It is a blemish on the AngloSaxon epic that the newly learned Christian piety crowded this out, not only because of the incongruity of representing the wilder heroes […] swayed by the gentle precepts of the Church, but because this is on the whole so awkwardly done. The religion of the characters seems imposed upon them rather than natural to them. The poorest and weakest parts of the poem are to be found among the definitely Christian passages. The only thing that is naïve about the poem is its theology. Here is untried material, and a childlike attitude toward a new faith. Tradition had not yet taught the poet how to treat it with technical assurance. […] The real vitality of the poem lies in its paganism.34

  And if the Beowulf poet could be permitted to freely choose, reject, and reassemble, cobbling together a whole which succeeds at certain points and fails at others, why not Tolkien or Gaiman? Indeed, both authors dissect out—or at least attenuate—the explicitly Christian elements and place a greater emphasis on the stronger, more vital elements of paganism and the supernatural. How can they be faulted for seeking to right the wrongs—I might say rewrite the wrongs—of the original?35

  At the heart of both Tolkien’s and Avary and Gaiman’s adaptations and responses to Beowulflie the monsters and other supernatural elements. As with the question of the legitimacy of adaptation, this too has authority in the original manuscript. The surviving manuscript36contains more than just Beowulf itself, promoting the primacy of the monsters. Preceding Beowulf, the codex contains three prose works which all deal with monsters: a homily on the life of a “dog-headed St. Christopher [,] twelve fathoms tall;” a description of the “Wonders of the East,” with “dragons […] a hundred and fifty feet long” and “monsters […] so numerous and so varied that strangely tall men are among the lesser marvels;” and a “Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle,” which describes “a great battle between men and water monsters, nicras.”37 Indeed,

  Beowulf was perhaps esteemed and recopied in the Anglo-Saxon period for quite other reasons that those for which we prize it today. [The prose works] describe marvels fitly to be grouped with Grendel and his dam, with the dragon and water-monsters of Beowulf.38

  Significantly, then, both Tolkien and Gaiman have each in his own way promoted a view of the poem that is more in keeping with its original context than the laity views the work today, and their attenuation of the religious elements and emphases on the monsters are perfectly appropriate. The Avary and Gaiman screenplay does precisely this — as does Tolkien’s short story, “Sellic Spell,” though we also have scattered examples of various kinds through his poetry and fiction.

  Gaiman has said that “[t]he biggest motivation was creating a film that would be satisfying as a story. Beowulf is a remarkable, powerful story. It’s the oldest story in the English language that we have. But, it’s always been considered incredibly problematic, from a literary and critical point of view […].” 39 Avary and Gaiman then elaborate on this:

  AVARY: If you read it, keep in mind that it existed as an oral tradition for maybe 700 years before it was written down, and when the Christian monks put it down onto the document, they added their own flare to the storytelling, and they added their elements of Christianity to it. What we did was look at the existing translations and realized that there were hints and elements of the story [that were left out].

  GAIMAN: For example, when Beowulf goes off to fight Grendel’s mother, he heads down into that lair, all on his own, disappears, is gone for eight days fighting her, and comes back with Grendel’s head. Eight days is an awful long time to fight a monster, and why didn’t he bring herhead back? And so, we are actually very faithful to what happened. We’re just implying that maybe there was other stuff that happened as well.

  These are very legitimate questions. And while Gaiman and Avary are clearly interpolating, they are doing so with a solid foundation and perfectly reasonable intentions.

  The dragon episode in Beowulf offers a lacuna of a similar nature. Stuart Lee and Elizabeth Solopova observe that “the narrative describing the treasure, its history, the dragon and the theft is cursory and leaves much to the imagination. The last survivor, for example, is a mysterious figure, and we know little about the dragon and even less about the fugitive who stole the cup.” Such gaps, they note, “appeal to the imagination and may have inspired Tolkien to approach as a writer what puzzled him as a scholar.”40 We might make an analogous statement about Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman: that they were intrigued by the omissi
ons and wished to read between the lines and recover explanatory elements they felt might have been omitted.

  A Closing Word The year after Beowulfcame to the silver screen, Neil Gaiman wrote the introduction for a new edition of Bram Stoker’s seminal vampire novel, Dracula. In it, he made several pronouncements which seem applicable to Beowulf and his attitude toward it. “I suspect,” he writes, “that the reasons why Draculalives on, why it succeeds as art, why it lends itself to annotation and to elaboration, are paradoxically because of its weaknesses as a novel,” reasons which, mutatis mutandis, are just as pertinent to Beowulf. “Dracula is,” like Beowulf,

  a book that forces the reader to fill in the blanks, to hypothesize, to imagine, to presume. […] The story spiderwebs, and we begin to wonder what occurs in the interstices. […] [Y]ou might find yourself, almost against your will, wondering about things in the crevices of the novel, things hinted at, things implied. And once you begin to wonder, it is only a matter of time before you will find yourself waking in the moonlight to find yourself writing novels or stories about the minor characters and offstage events […].41

  This is what Tolkien did, and this is what Gaiman has done again a half-century later. They are not the only authors to confront the critics and scholars, taking Beowulf in new directions, breathing new life into a work already more than a thousand years old, nor will they be the last. John Gardner’s Grendel, Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, and Parke Godwin’s The Tower of Beowulf all play in the same space. While the 1981 film Clash of the Titans is given a scaffolding of Ancient Greek settings and mythology, its plot structure is clearly a calque on Beowulf: the hero faces three monstrous foes, with Calibos, Medusa, and the Kraken obvious analogues of Grendel, his mother, and the dragon.