Review by New York Times Review
"BEOWULF," a 3,000-line epic poem composed early in the eighth centujry, is the first significant text written in English, or in what eventually became English. What interests scholars about the story is its place in our linguistic development, and also the way it blends both Christian and pagan details. But what recommends "Beowulf" to children - and to older readers who haven't lost a child's delight in stories that are both scary and gory - is that it's also a firstrate horror yarn, featuring slaughter, dismemberment and underwater sword fights. There are not one but three monsters: Grendel, a man-eating ogre who snacks nightly on sleeping Danes until Beowulf, the story's hero, sails over from what is now Sweden and rips his arm off; Grendel's mother, a fearsome swamp creature, hell-bent on avenging her creepy son; and a treasure-hoarding dragon, who was the inspiration for some of Tolkien's winged worm-things. The story is so powerful and so elemental that it has inspired countless retellings - in movies, cartoons, even an opera. There have also been a couple of comic-book versions, and working from this tradition, the graphic novelist Gareth Hinds has reimagined "Beowulf" as a kind of superhero tale. Grendel here bears a passing relationship to the monster in the "Alien" movies: he has the same elongated snout, the same dripping, needlelike teeth. Beowulf when we first see him looks long-faced and sleepy, but when he doffs his robe on the night when he is to fight with Grendel, and girds himself in a belted, Depends-like garment, we see that this guy is ripped. He has the V-shaped torso, the lats, the delts, the bulging thigh muscles of, say, Captain America or Green Arrow. The narration is an adaptation of A. J. Church's 1904 prose translation, which is sufficiently antique-sounding that it can pass for basic Olden-speak, the lingua franca of so many fantasy novels these days. When Beowulf gets into an argument with Unferth, a jealous rival at the Danish court, for example, he says, "Surely the alecan has wrought with thee, friend Unferth, that thou hast said such things." But great stretches of this "Beowulf" take place with no words at all, except the occasional "SMASH," "SSWACK" and "SKUTCHLP." Hinds stages great fight scenes, choreographing them like a kung-fu master and then drawing them from a variety of vantage points, with close-ups, wide angles and aerial views. In its way, the result is as visceral as the Old English, which was consciously onomatopoeic, and by changing his palette for each of the poem's three sections he evokes its darkening rhythm. Beowulf at the end, old and spent, looks a little monstrous himself, with age spots to rival Mr. Burns's on "The Simpsons," and this is not out of keeping with the subtext of the poem, which is that except in memory and legend nothing lasts for very long. James Rumford's "Beowulf: A Hero's Tale Retold" (coming out later this summer) is quieter and more realistic. Rumford's inked-in watercolor drawings devote attention to domestic details of the Danish court - pets, houses, the fire pit the king sits at. Grendel on first view, a smudgy figure wading in a swamp, seems sort of forlorn, and as far as combat voyeurism goes, the illustrations are pretty chaste. You learn more here from reading than from looking, which was surely the author's intention. He has very cleverly adapted the story in a style that except for a few necessary imports like "ogre," "dragon" and "giant" relies on Anglo-Saxon words, and the result is both a not-bad approximation of the original and easily comprehensible to readers in, say, the fourth and fifth grades, who can linger over passages like: "A deep wound now opened up on Grendel's shoulder and widened. The sinews were bursting, the arm bones loosening. There was only one way out. The ogre tore himself free and ran onearmed into the night!" An even better text is Michael Morpurgo's "Beowulf" (Candlewick, $17.99), which came out last year. The illustrations, by Michael Foreman, are a little pallid and storybookish, with at least one - a depiction of Grendel's mother as a grass-skirted fashion disaster with scaly green breasts - that is apt to elicit snickers rather than shudders. But Morpurgo, a distinguished British author of children's books, preserves much of the oddness and complexity of the original, and, though his text is in prose, even some of the poetry. Of the three versions it's also the clearest about Grendel's motivation: it drives him mad, eavesdropping at the banquet hall, that the Danes have the gift of telling stories. Charles McGrath, a former editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Candlewick's first foray into the graphic novel format proves an odd blend of ancient history and modern action. It's an epic poem seen as a video game. Beowulf, written circa 800 CE, is the story of a warrior-hero charged with dispatching the marauding monster Grendel and its terrible mother. An action epic in any form, this abridged translation is no exception, and it retains the original's dominant themes, including what warriors, and fathers, leave behind for future generations. The original's poetry has become prose narration, loaded with portent and melancholy even amid images of bloody ( very bloody) battles between sword and claw. Hind's watercolor art is thick with atmosphere and grand in its conception of vast halls and shadowed caves, but the line work is somewhat amateurish. The book makes a gorgeous whole, though; the long, wordless battles reproduced on glossy, high-quality paper are particularly noteworthy. It all feels a bit like dressing a Lethal Weapon movie up like a Shakespearean drama, but this offering will have high appeal for many, particularly fans of video games and action movies. --Jesse Karp Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The king of heroic epics gets a lavish visual interpretation in Hinds's full-color mixed-media gem, originally self-published as three separate issues in 2000. He begins with a credit to two versions of the familiar story (A.J. Church's 1904 translation and that of Francis Gummere), in which a vicious monster named Grendel terrorizes the great hall of King Hrothgar for 12 winters, and the hero Beowulf arrives from afar, to try to defeat the creature and succeeds-with his bare hands. Then he must contend with Grendel's mother, when she comes to avenge her son's fate; the third chapter deals with the mournful end to the hero's life, resulting from a battle with an enormous dragon. Each chapter begins with a brief narrative (paying homage to the cadences of the story's early verse renditions), before giving way to a lengthy, wordless and bloody battle. Hinds's angular perspectives and unusual color palettes (dark, ruddy colors, deep burgundy blood, and not a ray of sunshine in sight) lend the book an almost overwhelming sense of menace. The third and most emotionally forceful chapter centers around an incredible two-page spread that shows the dragon awakening; it's an arresting image in a book filled with many. For fantasy fans both young and old, this makes an ideal introduction to a story without which the entire fantasy genre would look very different; many scenes may be too intense for very young readers. Ages 10-up. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up-This epic tale is exceptionally well suited to the episodic telling necessary for a successful graphic novel, as the warrior-hero fights Grendel, Grendel's mother, and, ultimately, the dragon that claims his life, and (in true comic-book fashion) each challenge is significantly more difficult and violent than the one before. Although greatly abridged and edited, the text maintains a consistent rhythm and overall feel appropriate for the poetic nature of the story. Dialogue and narration are presented in identical text boxes, but astute readers will be able to decipher from the images which character is speaking. Each specific event is complemented by illustrations that effectively convey the atmosphere-historical details are paired with sketchy, ethereal drawings, the violent battle scenes are darkly tinted with red, and the end of Beowulf's life is indicated by gray, colorless imagery. Hinds's version will make this epic story available to a whole new group of readers. This book is likely to be especially popular when the Beowulf movie, directed by Robert Zemeckis, is released in November 2007.-Heather M. Campbell, Philip S. Miller Library, Castle Rock, CO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
(Intermediate, Middle School) The epic Anglo-Saxon poem ""Beowulf"" is structured around the hero's three fights-to-the-death: with the jealous monster Grendel, nightly terrorizing Danish king Hrothgar's shield hall; with Grendel's mother, bent on revenge; and finally, in Beowulf's old age, with the dragon laying waste to the Geats' lands. The poem has survived since 800 c.e., however, because of what it has to say about the nature and value of friendship, character, leadership, loyalty, and glory. Hinds's graphic-novel-styled version revels in all the one-on-one combat (and indeed pictures Beowulf as a comics-style superhero, with the body of a WWF wrestler). But the disproportionate emphasis on action alone makes his version a superficial one. Panels are arranged without tension; the many typefaces are hard to read; and even the action scenes lack dynamism. Rumford's version, in contrast, is superb on all counts -- from the elegant bookmaking to the vigorous, evocative prose (""when sleep was at its deepest, night at its blackest, up from the mist-filled marsh came Grendel stalking"") to the pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations that strikingly recall the work of Edmund Dulac. Rumford even manages to hint at the poem's emotional depths in his concise retelling, which is written almost entirely using English words of Anglo-Saxon origin. The book design is similarly fundamental, with the three distinct parts of the story delineated by green, blue, and yellow backgrounds. Most effective of all is the dragon lurking -- sinuously, patiently -- behind the panels of the first two sections, foreshadowing Beowulf's eventual fate. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Pairing art from an earlier, self-published edition to a newly adapted text, Hinds retells the old tale as a series of dark, bloody, chaotic clashes. Here Grendel is a glaring, black monster with huge teeth, corded muscles and a tendency to smash or bite off adversaries' heads; the dragon is all sinuous viciousness; and Beowulf, mighty of thew, towers over his fellow Geats. The narrative, boxed off from the illustrations rather than incorporated into them, runs to lines like, "Bid my brave warriors O Wiglaf, to build a lofty cairn for me upon the sea-cliffs . . . " and tends to disappear when the fighting starts. Because the panels are jumbled together on the page, the action is sometimes hard to follow, but this makes a strongly atmospheric alternative to the semi-abstract Beowulf, the Legend, by Stephen L. Antczak and James C. Bassett, illus by Andy Lee (2006), or the more conventionally formatted version of Michael Morpurgo, with pictures by Michael Foreman (2006). (Graphic fiction. 12-15) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
