Beowulf as Children's Literature ed. by Bruce Gilchrist and Britt Mize

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beowulf as Children's Literature ed. by Bruce Gilchrist and Britt Mize Kim Zarins (bio) Beowulf as Children's Literature. Edited by Bruce Gilchrist and Britt Mize. University of Toronto Press, 2021. Over one hundred adaptations of the Old English poem Beowulf have been for children, yet this repository has not received a book-length treatment (3). Bruce Gilchrist and Britt Mize remedied the oversight with this edited volume, of interest to medievalists, children's literature scholars, Tolkien scholars, and education specialists. Britt Mize's introduction includes the volume's stakes: education's entanglement with literary production, the inclusion of canonical retellings in children's literature, and the racialized messages positioning Beowulf as a monument of "their own people's heritage," that is, white, Northern European heritage (7). Nationalism drives early adaptations of Beowulf. In "A Little Shared Homer for England and the North": The First Beowulf for Young Readers," Mark Bradshaw Busbee explores the first adaptation for children (Danish, not English), by N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783-1872). His 1820 Bjowulfs Drape landed on the curriculum and remained an influential staple in the Danish school system for generations. Scyld Scefing, the Danish people, and the "Goth" Beowulf are idealized in folksy language, while Grendel seems employed by the Catholic Church, preying on slumbering minds as slumbering Danes who require liberation from Beowulf/Luther; later, Beowulf dispatches Grendel's mother, "Jesabel," to Hell. I wanted context for these comparisons. Busbee notes Tolkien's debt to Grundtvig, though this chapter might elucidate why a Catholic like Tolkien despised allegory. The first English children's adaptation was written by a Victorian woman whom Renée Ward resurrects from obscurity in "E. L. Hervey's 'The Fight with the Ogre.'" Hervey's tale ends with Beowulf's triumph over the main antagonist, Grendel's mother—her head, not Grendel's, serves as his trophy. Beowulf is a monotheistic, masculine ideal, so much a man of action that there is no dialogue. Ward ends her chapter with a puzzle pertaining to Kate Greenaway's illustration of Grendel, which would seem to be a recycled illustration of the Norse giant Skyrmir—yet the publication in Hervey's volume predates the Norse publication. In "Tolkien, Beowulf, and Faërie: Adaptations for Readers Aged 'Six to Sixty'" Amber Dunai charts Tolkien's engagement with retelling Beowulf thrice, evoking different aspects of the poem: "The Hobbit thus marks a transitional point between the historically dominated Lay of Beowulf and the thoroughly folklorized Sellic Spell" (93). My question is whether this leaning toward Faërie is just another instance of adaptation of equal utility or aesthetic value to the historical one he employs first, or rather whether Tolkien's three adaptations suggest a trajectory moving toward what storytelling should do. In "Treatments of Beowulf as a Source in Mid-Twentieth-Century Children's Literature," Carl Edlund Anderson surveys this era's shift from "retelling" Beowulf in a straightforward [End Page 243] manner to "reusing" Beowulf more loosely, "to reflect on their own interests, ideas, and creative visions" (124). I wanted more information as to what these driving concepts are that made "reusing" essential. These terms imply aesthetic value judgements privileging "reusing," yet it seemed Anderson's examples of Ian Serraillier's blank verse or Rosemary Sutcliff's Dragonslayer speak to fidelity not as an erasure of creative power but a strict form employed to showcase it. Sutcliff "has reforged her influences into a finely wrought personal vision" exemplified in her elegiac conclusion: "And when the song was all sung, all the men went away, and left Beowulf's barrow alone with the sea wind and the wheeling gulls and the distant ships that passed on the Sail-Road" (118). Meanwhile, Bruce Gilchrist laments retellings move so far from the original that female representation in illustrations is lost, even today. In "Visualizing Femininity in Children's and Illustrated Versions of Beowulf," Gilchrist discusses the importance of Beowulf's women and how they are illustrated, or not, over time. As a teacher, I've found that Wealtheow's rhetoric is a hard sell among my monster-oriented students; Gilchrist reminds me to do her justice. Even as my students...