I found it sort of bland. Compared to Raffel, I mean.
Here’s an interesting story:
I took a survey class of early English lit with a professor who specializes in Old English. So she loves Beowulf like her own flesh and blood. She also hated the Heaney, but for entirely different reasons. She went into long tirades about how inappropriate his word-choice was, how the meaning was entirely different in the original text, blah blah. I, on the other hand, just didn’t find it a very fun read. Again, try the Raffel.
Maybe it’s just because I’m not a huge LOTR fan (although I did enjoy reading it) and my memory of him is hazy but I found Mr. Bombadil to be a pretty useless side note in the whole thing. I last read the books just a few days before the movie came out and I didn’t mind that he was missing at all.
I just read Beowulf (heaney) because I never finished it the last time I tried (3 years ago) and I was annoyed that they were going to come out with the movie before I read it. I enjoyed it more than I did when I read it in high school, which was probably a different translation. I might try a different one someday just to see how different it is, although probably not so soon after reading this one. I did find the prose to be a bit bland, and have been thinking that there must be an awful lot of words in old english that rhyme with “benches,” as that seems to be the most frequent word in the poem
I tried to get interested in the movie, but after seeing the trailers and hearing a clip of Crispin Glover speaking old english, I decided that the whole thing seemed really lame to me. I don’t mind that it’s not faithful to the poem so much as that the ways that it’s unfaithful to the poem seem pretty stupid to me. They could have come up with a better reason to feature a quasi-nude Angelina Jolie.
I am sorry but what did you say? Tom Bombadil, useless?
I am having a heart attack. Sin sin sin…
That’s all right I see Tom Bombadil in a different light than you so its cool.
Oh and the Grendel’s mother thing, I haven’t seen the movie, but the nude-like mother, should have more scales and be less human like she is a demon read her brief dexcriptions, she has fangs and things like that.
I’m no fan of Tolkein’s either. I’ll tell you what was wrong with Tom Bombadil. He was fluffy. (That’s a technical term. ) Can you imgine what the film would have been like with Tom Bombadil in it? It would have bombed, for one thing.
It’s not strictly relevant, but anyone interested in looking at originals of Early Scandinavian writings, can find some here: VefHandritalisti
Then you missed Tolkein altogether. Bombadil is the heart and soul of Tolkein’s philosophy for his world. If you don’t “get” that, it’s small wonder you didn’t get anything else about Tolkein’s philosophy.
Thank djm Tom Bombadil is essential to the books, the movies it would have been hard to present him, because all though in the books a very important character, his on screen development would have taken a long time. But still I still want to see him in the movies.
I liked the poem (though I have no idea whose translation I read). The end saddened me greatly. SPOILER One of the great tragedies of the story was how he gave his life to recover all that treasure from the dragon to help his people, but instead of using it they simply burried it with him. So his death was rather useless in the end.
