Shiraz Socialist

By all accounts it’s a “cracking good” fillum, if you like lots of writhing, naked bodies, fire-breathing dragons and huge-breasted, nipple-less viragos (sounds good to me):

The source material is rather less engaging – Seamus Heaney’s best efforts notwithstanding. In fact, this may be a unique example of the film being better than the book. Kingsley Amis described Beowulf (in a 1946 letter to Philp Larkin) as:

“The anonymous, crass, purblind, infantile, featureless HEAP OF GANGRENED ELEPHANT’S SPUTUM, ‘Barewolf’”. He then went on to compose a poem entitled ‘Beowulf’:

So, bored with dragons, he lay down to sleep

Locking for the last time his hoard of words

(Thorkelin’s transcript B), forgetting now

The Hope of heathens, muddled thoughts on

fate.

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Councils would have to get along without him

The peerless prince had taken his last bribe

(Zupitza’s reading); useless now the byrnie

Hard and hand-locked, fit for a baseball

catcher.

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Consider now what this king had not done:

Never was human, never lay with women

(Weak conjunction), never saw quite straight

Children of men or the bright bowl of heaven

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Someone has told us this man was a hero.

But do we want him? do we want to follow

His tedious journey to his ancestors

(An instance of Old English harking-back)?

I may or may not go and see the film. But I’m most certainly going on the Ray Winstone ‘Beowulf’ personal fitness course.