Beowulf - The Monster, the Man, and the Fire That Never Goes Out

52 Books in a Year – Week 9

Right. Let's talk about one of my favourite hero stories of old - Beowulf.

Today, I am not going to focus on the Old English Class version. Not the one you were handed in a battered Penguin edition with moustaches drawn on the illustrations, even though they already had beards. I'm talking about Michael Morpurgo's retelling. The one that sits somewhere between children's literature and genuinely stirring adult fiction and refuses to apologise for either. I went into it with full knowledge that I love the Beowulf story, have always loved it, and came out the other side thinking this might actually be the version I'd give someone who had never encountered it before and wanted to understand why this tale has survived over a thousand years.

The answer, if you want it in one sentence, is this: because it understands that the monster is never really the point.

How Morpurgo Does It

What Morpurgo brings to Beowulf that the original poem doesn't always make easy is warmth. The old text is extraordinary. It is also ferociously demanding. It was composed somewhere in the 8th to 11th century by a poet whose name we will never know, preserved in a single manuscript that survived at least one fire, and translated with varying degrees of success ever since. Seamus Heaney's version, which I feel is widely regarded as the most celebrated modern translation. It is a genuine work of literature in its own right.

But... Morpurgo's retelling does something surprising for me personally.

He frames the story through the boy version of me listening to my grandfather tell the tale by firelight. It is how Beowulf was always meant to be experienced. Spoken aloud. In the dark, with the wind outside doing whatever the wind in 8th-century Scandinavia did. Morpurgo understands that this is an oral story wearing the clothes of written literature, and he treats it accordingly. The prose is rhythmic.

Grendel

Let's get to the monster. Because Grendel is one of the great antagonists of all literature and I will die on that hill.

He is not a dragon. He is not a skeleton army. He is a creature of the dark who hates the sound of human joy. That is the whole terror of him. The mead hall Heorot is full of music and laughter and fellowship, and Grendel, lurking somewhere out in the marshes, simply cannot bear it. So he comes in the night and tears people apart. You can read into that whatever you like. Morpurgo doesn't over-explain it, which is the right call, because once you explain what the darkness represents, it stops being frightening. The best monsters are the ones that stay murky.

What I find endlessly fascinating about Grendel, in every version of this story, is that he is described as a descendant of Cain. He is not wholly other. He is, in some theological sense, family. An exiled branch of humanity, warped by jealousy and cursed. That thread of almost-recognition running through the monster is what makes him more than a plot device.

Morpurgo handles this with a lightness of touch that I appreciated enormously. He doesn't make you sit through a seminar on Old Testament genealogy. He just lets the unease sit there, doing its work.

Beowulf Himself

Here is my honest take on Beowulf the character, and I say this as someone who adores this story. He is not easy to love in the way that, say, Odysseus is easy to love. Odysseus is cunning and flawed and frankly often a bit of a disaster. Beowulf is almost impossibly capable. He arrives, he kills the monster, he kills the monster's mother, he goes home, he becomes king, he kills a dragon, he dies. There is a straightforwardness to him that can feel almost alienating in a literary culture accustomed to psychological complexity.

What Morpurgo does cleverly is lean into the clarity of Beowulf rather than trying to muddy it. He is not trying to write a complicated anti-hero. He is writing a man who embodies a specific ideal of courage that his world understood as the highest possible virtue, and he does so without irony. There is something almost radical about that in contemporary fiction. An uncomplicated hero who is simply... good. And brave. And who faces death without flinching, not because he is too dim to be afraid but because he has made his peace with it.

That, to me, is more interesting than most modern antiheroes. Because it asks you a question you have to answer yourself. Could you be that? Would you want to be?

The Dragon

I want to spend a moment on the dragon because it is genuinely wonderful and gets less attention than Grendel in most discussions of this story.

Grendel's mother gets her moment of recognition these days, largely thanks to the 2007 Zemeckis film and Angelina Jolie's extraordinary work in a gold bodysuit. But the dragon in the third act of Beowulf is something else. He is ancient. He has been sleeping on a hoard for three hundred years, and someone has stolen a cup from it. One cup. And for that, he burns an entire kingdom.

That is not evil in the Grendel sense. That is something older. Something almost geological. A force that was here before we arrived and will be here after we have gone, and which we disturb at our peril. The dragon does not hate humans. He simply does not particularly factor them into his thinking until they become a nuisance.

Beowulf going out to fight the dragon as an old king is the emotional core of the whole story. He knows he is going to die. Everyone around him knows he is going to die. His thanes stay back in the trees. Only Wiglaf stands with him. And he goes anyway. That moment, more than any of the monster-slaying heroics of the first two-thirds, is what Beowulf is actually about.

It is about what kind of person you choose to be when the odds are honest with you.

Why Morpurgo's Version Matters

There is a version of this adaptation that could have been timid. A safe retelling suitable for school libraries. A competent and forgettable version that has the literary equivalent of a digestive biscuit.

I have to say his version has muscle. A genuine affection for the source material. He makes the world feel real, which is harder than it sounds when you are writing about fantastical things like mead halls and sea crossings, with monsters that live under lakes. He gives the violence weight without wallowing in it. I felt that when Beowulf's people built his funeral pyre by the sea, a genuine solemnity occurred.

I'll be honest with you. I found the ending affecting. I knew it was coming and have known it was coming since I first encountered this story. That is the mark of a retelling that has done its job properly.

What It Connects To

For those of you who have been following this challenge from the beginning, the threads across these books continue to pull tight.

The Iliad has its Achilles, choosing glory and early death over a long, forgotten life. The Mahabharata has its battlefield of dharma, asking what honour actually costs. The Norse myths, as I covered in the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda entries, are saturated with the idea of a heroism that does not flinch from its own end. An important note is that it is an Anglo-Saxon text, but its roots reach back into the same Germanic and Norse mythological soil that produced Odin and the Ragnarök tradition. The same questions, just different monsters.

What I find remarkable, following this reading list in order, is how consistent the obsession is. Every culture, every era, every tradition seems to have arrived at the same problem and tried to answer it through story. The problem being, of course, that we all die. The monster at the door is always, eventually, just time.

Final Verdict

★★★★★ (5/5)

Five stars, and here is why that is not as simple as it sounds. I am not giving five stars to Beowulf, the original poem, though that deserves its own conversation entirely. I am giving five stars to what Morpurgo has done with it. He has taken one of the oldest stories in the English literary tradition and made it readable, emotional and alive for anyone willing to pick it up.

If you have never read Beowulf in any form, start here. If you have read it before in other translations, read this one too, because it will remind you why you cared about it in the first place.

I mean, touché.

Next Up: The Hobbit - Let’s get Tolkien on the way!