Caitlin Kiernan - Beowulf

For Grendel

Talibus laboribus lupos defendimus.

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

There was a time before men, a time before even the world existed, when all the cosmos was only the black void of Ginnunga gap. To the farthest north lay the frozen wastes of Niflheim, and to the farthest south, the lands of bright, sparking furnaces belonging to the giant Muspéll and so named Muspellsheim. In the great emptiness of Ginnunga, the cold northern winds met the warm breezes blown out from the south, and the whirling gales of sleet and snow melted and dripped down into the nothingness to form Ymir, father of all the Frost Giants. The giants called him Aurgelmir, the gravel-yeller. Also formed from these drips of rime was the first cow, Audhumla. With her milk she fed Ymir, and with her tongue she licked the first of the gods, Búri, from a block of salt. In later times, Búri’s son, Bur, had three sons by the giantess Bestla. They were Odin, Vili, and Vé, and it was they who slew great Ymir and then carried his corpse to the dead heart of Ginnunga gap. From his blood they fashioned the lakes and rivers and seas, and from his bones they carved mountains. From his massive teeth they made all the stones and gravel, from his brain the clouds, and from his skull they constructed the sky and laid it high above the land. And so it was that the sons of Búri built the world, which would be the home of the sons of men. Last of all, they used Ymir’s eyebrows to build an enormous wall, which they named Midgard, which was raised up beyond the seas, all around the edges of the world’s disk, that it might always protect men from the enmity of the giants who had not been drowned in the terrible deluge of Ymir’s blood.

And here, under the sanctuary of Midgard, would all the innumerable lives of men be lived. Here would they rise and struggle and fall. Here would they be born and die. Here would the greatest among them find glory in mighty deeds and, having died the deaths of heroes, be escorted by the Valkyries through the gates of Odin’s hall, Valhalla, where they feast and drink and await Ragnarök, the final battle between the gods and the giants, where they will fight at Odin All-Father’s side. The great wolf, Fenrir, will be at last set loose upon the world, and in the oceans, the Midgard serpent will be unbound. Yggdrasil, the world tree, will shudder, its foundations weakened by the gnawing jaws of the dragon Nidhögg. An ax age, an age of clashing swords and broken shields, when brothers will fight and murder one another; a wind age, a wolf age, there at the twilight of the gods when all the cosmos will dissolve, finally, into chaos.

But before the coming of that end, which not even the gods may forestall, there would be all the generations of men and women. All the countless wars and treacheries, loves and triumphs and sacrifices. And the greatest of these might be remembered and repeated in the songs and poetry of skalds, for a time.

There, under Midgard, would be an age of heroes.

The land of the Danes ends here, at this great wedge of granite cliffs jutting out high above the freezing sea. The foam of icy waves lashes the cruel shingle, narrow beaches of ragged bedrock and fallen boulders, polished cobbles and the stingy strands of ice-and snow-scabbed sand. This is no fit place for men, these barren, wind-scoured shores in this hungry, sun-shunned time of the year. By day, there are few enough wild things—only seals and walrus and the beached and rotting carcass of a whale, only the gulls and eagles soaring against the mottled, leaden sky. During the long nights, the shore becomes an even more forsaken and forbidding realm, unlit but for the furtive glimpses of the moon’s single pale eye as it slips in and out of the clouds and fog.