Beowulf as Children's Literature

Abstract

Britt Mize's powerful introduction establishes the volume's importance, identifying children's literature as “the single largest category of Beowulf representation and adaptation” (p. 3). He sets the stage for the book's essays with articulate musings on the history, study, and state of children's literature and an illustrative survey of Beowulf adaptations for young people. This introduction stands on its own as an essay, but a consequence of its strength is to set a pitch somewhat beyond what this single volume can match.Mark Bradshaw Busbee's impressively researched essay is one of the collection's best. Drawing from a wealth of historical context and his incisive close readings of text, Busbee explains how the story of Beowulf's entrance into the tradition of children's literature is also the story of N. F. S. Grundtvig's epoch-making engagement with the poem, especially his translation Bjowulfs Drape, and its role in the development of his ethnonationalist philosophies of political and educational reforms. Busbee also chronicles Bjowulfs Drape's legacy by examining the influence of the translation on children's adaptations of Beowulf written by “Grundtvigian” authors in the following generations. From this narrative emerges one of the most pervasive themes of the volume—the connection between Northern European cultural jingoism and the adaptation of Beowulf for young readers.Renée Ward's “The Adaptational Character of the Earliest Beowulf for English Children: E. L. Hervey's ‘The Fight with the Ogre’” is about a short prose adaptation she says has not yet been studied; one of the virtues of this collection is its recuperative nature, how it exhibits understudied texts like this one. This essay pairs well with Busbee's study of Grundtvigian Denmark's affair with Beowulf by discussing the position of “The Fight with the Ogre” within Victorian England's imperial cultural schemes.Amber Dunai's chapter on J. R. R. Tolkien's adaptations of Beowulf, and on the poem's influence on his work in general, wrestles with a crucial question underlying the whole collection: what makes “children's literature” for children? She approaches this question by comparing Tolkien's theories of fantasy and of children's literature first to the content and circumstances of his oeuvre and then to contemporary works written specifically for children; the essay is valuable in part for this account of a complex relationship between theory and practice. Without reference to scholarship theorizing definitions of children's literature, Dunai's argument sometimes feels a bit unmoored. She makes a point of resisting strong conclusions that the Tolkien texts discussed can be absolutely defined as “for children”—a point that could have been strengthened by joining the critical conversation confronting the paradox that the harder theorists of children's literature work to propose a strict definition, the more it eludes them.Carl Edlund Anderson's essay surveys Beowulf-for-children adaptations from 1930 to 1970 to reveal a crucial shift in the tradition; during this time, “reuses” of Beowulf join, for the first time, the “retellings” that had previously been the norm. Anderson dissects the repurposing of Beowulf in Rosemary Sutcliff's 1956 The Shield Ring, providing a thorough case study of exactly how these radical adaptations work, and showing how it exemplifies a general move away from didactic, simplified paraphrase and towards works of real literary dignity for young people.Bruce Gilchrist's chapter presents an encyclopedia of visual representations of women characters in illustrated adaptations of Beowulf. Gilchrist warns readers that his conclusions are “dispiriting, suggesting overall a loss of human female presence and authority in the illustration history of the poem, and a concomitant unpleasant gain in the aberrant monstrosity of Grendel's mother” (p. 132). He thus identifies a growing division between the academic and the popular life of Beowulf; although women characters have always been central to the poem's scholarly discourse, and even more so in recent decades, it seems that popular visual adaptations increasingly cater to a readership with narrow interest in women. This chapter is loaded with reprinted images from the adaptations discussed, and although Gilchrist analyzes many more that are never seen by the reader, he entwines his analysis with sufficiently vivid description. Because the chapter's sections are divided not by chronology but by female character, some unique diachronic comparisons become possible—like that between Edwardian associations of feminine power with royal fashion, on the one hand, and the influence of H. R. Giger's Alien designs on modern visual ideas of monstrously powerful femininity on the other.Janet Schrunk Ericksen's essay has a compelling premise: how do children's adaptations of Beowulf play with focalization to reproduce, temper, or even augment the horror of Beowulf's fight against Grendel's mother, which she calls the most frightening scene of the original poem? With her tight focus on narratology, Ericksen fills a unique and refreshing niche in the volume. But horror, like humor, is difficult to explain and easy to spoil; I would have appreciated more block quotes instead of quotations embedded in description and analysis, especially since she relies on her own judgment when classifying a scene's horror rather than referring to other horror theories.Britt Mize uses the first version of Beowulf for children written in Chinese as a cipher for reinterpreting the social dynamics of heroism in the Old English Beowulf. Mize, pretending no familiarity with Chinese, is conservative with his commentary on 贝奥武甫, transliterated as Bèi’àowǔfǔ; he uses an unpublished translation to read it, and he says in a note that his analysis “is carefully restricted to the content and images of Bèi’àowǔfǔ and makes no claims that rest on nuances of word choice” (p. 215). The method is daring but it works. For example, Mize uses the naturalistically conversational dialogue of Bèi’àowǔfǔ to propose that the monologic orations of Beowulf are not as one-sided as they might seem; it implies a custom that assent goes without saying, loading any verbalized assent or dissent with greater significance. The insights that Mize generates through this method extend beyond the relationship between Bèi’àowǔfǔ and Beowulf; he compares Bèi’àowǔfǔ’s “broadly dialogic sense of social relations . . . not limited to war band or court but cuts across social hierarchy” (p. 201) to the “aristocratic, warrior-class public” (p. 210) of not only Beowulf but Old English poetry generally, such as Widsith, which gives readers “the impression that distant halls are social islands in a blank and silent sea” (p. 210).Robert Stanton's essay on theriocentric adaptations argues that animalizing characters is a step further down the rabbit hole of ideas associating children, early medieval people, and Beowulf with primal biological and cultural truths. “Grendel's Dog, from Beocat” and James Rumford's Beo-Bunny are star exhibits of the adaptations discussed in the volume, and Stanton enriches our understanding of the place of zoomorphism in children's literature by exploring how crossing the boundary between adult and children's literature is facilitated by crossing the boundary between animal and human. His decision to conclude with studies of Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book is both playful and perplexing—imperfectly connected to the theriocentric Beowulfs covered in the rest of the chapter, but generative subjects of comparative analysis alongside Beowulf in their own right.Yvette Kisor's chapter tackles an important task—accounting for the considerable influence of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movies on adaptations of Beowulf in the first decade of the twenty-first century. As with many other chapters, Kisor's method is to conduct an impressive survey of adaptations from a particular era—here, after 2001. Most compelling is the central study of Nicky Raven's Beowulf: A Tale of Blood, Heat, and Ashes, illustrated by John Howe, a well-known Tolkien illustrator and a consultant on Jackson's films. Kisor's look at this text becomes an interesting case study of book marketing and its complicated relationship to book text and other content, demonstrating how the marketing at fans of the recent LOTR films affects not only the book's jacket, but its illustrations, decorations, and textual apparatus as well.The book's final discursive chapter is a transcribed conversation between editor Mize and two authors of Beowulf adaptions for children: Rebecca Barnhouse, author of The Coming of the Dragon, and James Rumford, author of Beo-Bunny. The transcribed extemporaneous speech is not only a joy to read but proves to be a powerful philosophical medium; Mize conducts the conversation masterfully, posing incisive questions that spark conversations on topics hardly exhausted by the preceding collection of essays. For example, he asks Barnhouse and Rumford whether they considered how adult librarians, teachers, and parents control children's access to their works. This was a major topic of Busbee's essay and touched upon by Kisor's tantalizing vignette about an ill-received “mass-mailed classroom activity kit” (p. 258) promoting Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf film, but it was not one of the volume's main themes. Yet, as Mize's question implies, it is essential to understanding children's engagement with Beowulf. The authors’ responses are also full of intrigue, such as Barnhouse's comment that “kids have definitely responded to [Dayraven]. He's the one they like the most” in her novel (p. 272). This invites another essential question: what do children think about Beowulf and its adaptations? Only research could prove whether a reader-response oriented study of Beowulf adaptations for children is too elusive, but one of the virtues of this chapter is its provocation of questions not posed elsewhere in the volume.Beowulf as Children's Literature concludes with a glorious bibliography, curated and introduced by Gilchrist, of probably every version of Beowulf substantially adapted for children from Grundtvig's Bjowulfs Drape to the present. Overall, this is a trailblazing volume on an understudied subject, full of original insights into obscure texts, and examining works designed to interface between Beowulf and human consciousness at its most raw and absorbent is a creative and essential way to approach the modern cultural history of the poem.