Our friend Dave Lull has forwarded me the link to the substack of a writer named Brian Heming, who has embarked on a project to re-cast the Odyssey as a Viking saga in Tolkien style.
I have no idea why anyone would want to do this. But here are the chapters.
I bear Mr. Heming no ill will. But I find I rather resent the whole idea.
It takes me back to the 2006 Robert Zemeckis film, Beowulf. I reviewed it on this blog (lost, I believe, in our migration) concluding that “I didn’t hate it.” I didn’t love it either, though. I thought the animation was weird. I thought Angelina Jolie was completely out of place (stiletto heels, seriously?). But my main objection was that the writer, Neil Gaiman, had taken a Germanic saga and turned it into a Greek tragedy. Saga heroes are taken down by fate, Greek heroes by their own fatal flaws.
My point, in case I’m being obscure, is that Greek legend and Germanic legend are different things. Neither is necessarily better than the other, but they are distinct pleasures, like wine and bread, not meant to be confused.
But you may not care about this. There’s no reason why you should. Read the Viking Odyssey, if you like, with my blessing.
I was so put off by what I picked up about that Beowulf movie and the Beowulf and Grendel one that came out not so long before it, that I never saw either. And I still have not caught up with Grendel, Grendel, Grendel (1981). I recently ran into and enjoyed the abridged audiobook of Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead – which I had somehow never even heard of before (but have not tried the movie) – though it got me thinking I should reread Tolkien’s “Sellic Spell” (which I haven’t done, yet). For that matter, I also enjoyed Robert Graves’ Homer’s Daughter. But all three of the latter are indeed reimaginings within the same respective cultures and periods (more or less).
The Beowulf and Grendel movie had superior costumes and weapons, but it was baldly deconstructionist, and I hated it. Zemeckis’s Beowulf, as I said, was not so bad.
Oddly, I actually like The 13th Warrior, the movie, better than Crichton’s book, Eaters of the Dead. The book had one of those scenes where a woman goes willingly to be sacrificed, which I hate. The movie minimized that element. And it was the only adaptation of Beowulf I’ve seen that really takes the story — and the hero — seriously.
Thanks for this!
That authentic Ibn Fadlan description – and a fictional variation – were both in the abridged audiobook, and I was dreading what the movie might do with it!
I will now not hesitate to give it a try!
Tangentially to the mixing of distinct pleasures, I just ran into Mandell Creighton in his History of the Papacy referring to a letter of 6 August 1621 by Peter Bembo on behalf of Pope Leo X: “Leo wrote to express his sense of the great benefit which the Church, ‘ vexed and assaulted by others,’ would derive from a new David suited to the needs of the time, whose graceful lyre was to reduce the most sacred mysteries of the Christian faith to the measure of Virgil’s Aeneid, and to the mode of representation required by the sentiments of paganism” – ! This in turn reminded me of such things as Faltonia Betitia Proba’s Fourth-century work, Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi (A Virgilian Cento Concerning the Glory of Christ), which Wikipedia says “reworks verses extracted from the work of Virgil to tell stories from the Old and New Testament of the Christian Bible.” If we might think of Milton’s epic and dramatic approaches as not unconnected with all this, I would add (in my ignorance of the late-antique Latin, the Byzantine Greek, and the Italian neo-Latin works) I suspect he did so much more successfully (whatever Voltaire suggests in Candide).
Good point. There is precedent.