You can read my popular culture article, “Old Tales/Modern Tellings: Early Medieval Revenants in Science Fiction and Fantasy” at Southwest Journal of Cultures.
If nothing else, you can find some good recommendations for speculative fiction reads.
the glory and the challenges
You can read my popular culture article, “Old Tales/Modern Tellings: Early Medieval Revenants in Science Fiction and Fantasy” at Southwest Journal of Cultures.
If nothing else, you can find some good recommendations for speculative fiction reads.
This was a great article, points well-made. I would also add references to the plethora of Beowulf/Grendel references in popular culture video games, including the Final Fantasy, Devil May Cry, and most recently, StarCraft series.
Although it proves your point, I’m entirely mortified that J.K.Rowling explained in an interview that she’d never read Tolkien, and didn’t owe anything to his legacy (sorry I don’t have a reference for this, it was on a television special before one of the movie debuts). The statement does make the case for a cultural awareness of the heroic tradition.
As a further aside, I wonder what sort of link there might be between awareness of these culturally (diluted) tales and Durkheim’s ideas about collective consciousness?
Anyway, thank you for sharing your insight!
You are correct about the video games. They aren’t much on my radar, but I do know they are there.
I guess if I had included them I could have done the paper only on Beowulf references.
I found a new series recently and in the most recent book, there’s another Beowulf reference. Ilona Andrews, in her novel Magic Bleeds, references Grendel. She names her poodle Grendel and someone asks why.
“He came into a mead hall full of warriors in the middle of the night and scared them half to death” (178).