Beowulf

Introduction

Sometimes I think of stories as animals. Some common, some rare, some endangered. There are stories that are old, like sharks, and stories as new on this earth as people or cats.

Cinderella, for example, is a story which, in its variants, has spread across the world as successfully as rats or crows. You’ll find it in every culture. Then there are stories like the Iliad, which remind me more of giraffes—uncommon, but instantly recognized whenever they appear or are retold. There are—there must be—stories that have become extinct, like the mastodon or the sabre-toothed tiger, leaving not even bones behind; stories that died when the people who told them died and could tell them no longer or stories that, long forgotten, have left only fossil fragments of themselves in other tales. We have a handful of chapters of the Satyricon, no more.

Beowulf could, so easily, have been one of those.

Because once upon a time, well over a thousand years ago, people told the story of Beowulf. And then time passed and it was forgotten. It was like an animal that no one had noticed had gone extinct, or almost extinct. Forgotten in oral lore, it was preserved by only one manuscript. Manuscripts are fragile and easily destroyed by time or by fire. The Beowulf manuscript has scorch marks on it.

But it survived…

And when it was rediscovered it slowly began to breed, like an endangered species being nurtured back to life.

My first exposure to the story three hundred years after the only manuscript was acquired by the British Museum came from an English magazine article pinned to a classroom wall. That was where I first read about them, Beowulf and Grendel and Grendel’s even more terrible mother.

My second encounter was probably in the short-lived Beowulf from DC Comics. He wore a metal jockstrap and a helmet, with horns so big he could not have made it through a door, and he fought enormous snakes and suchlike. It didn’t do much for me, although it sent me in search of the original in the shape of a Penguin Classics edition, which I re-read years later when Roger Avary and I came to retell the story in movie form.

The wheel keeps turning. Beowulf has long since left the endangered species list and begun to breed its many variants. There have been numerous accounts of Beowulf on the screen already, ranging from a science fiction version to a retelling in which Grendel is a tribe of surviving Neanderthals. It’s all good: different retellings, recombining story DNA. The ones that work will be remembered and retold, the others will be forgotten.

When Roger Avary and I were first asked if we thought there should be a novel inspired by the film we had written, we said no and suggested that people simply read the original poem instead. I’m glad that the powers that be ignored us, and just as glad that they found Caitlín R. Kiernan to retell this version of the story.

Because she did. She took the tale of Beowulf and the script to the film and she told a tale that pounds in your head, a mead and blood-scented saga that should be chanted at midnight in swamps and on lonely hilltops.

She tells a tale of heroism and firelight and gold, punctuated with love and secrets and moments of extreme violence. It’s an old tale, one that deserves to be retold as long as people care about heroes and monsters and the dark. It’s a story for each of us.

We all have our demons.

Beowulf thought his was Grendel…

Neil Gaiman 2007