Paper/Project on how Tone is Developed in Beowulf: Text vs. Movie
Key Ideas and Details: Reading Literature & Film

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.1 Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the
text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its
development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific
details; provide an objective summary of the text.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.3 Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting
motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or
develop the theme.
Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.7 Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different
artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment (e.g., Auden’s “Musée des
Beaux Arts” and Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus).
Perhaps the easiest way to go about this is to start with the creation of some kind of a Venn Diagram
based on the Integration of Knowledge and Ideas standard above.
From this Diagram/Three-Column Notes/List, discuss how the differing Tone leads to a much different
Theme (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.2, above).

We know Beowulf is an allegory that is meant to show us what is necessary to hold a civilization
together against the forces which attempt to draw it apart. As such:
o Beowulf, Hrothgar, and Heorot are symbolic of all that is necessary to hold a civilization
together (Heorot symbolic of civilization itself).
o Grendel is one of the forces which claws at the fabric of society:
 What does he represent?
o Unferth is related/linked to Gredel (he killed his own brothers; thus linked to Cain—the
father/ancestor/whatever of Grendel).

The MOVIE Beowulf can be taken as a moral story about how each man is fallible and his sins
will come back to haunt him:
o Hrothgar fathered Grendel by sleeping with Grendel’s Mom
o Beowulf fathered the dragon that eventually kills him by sleeping with Grendel’s Mom
o The film ends with Beowulf’s appointed heir, Wiglaf, transfixed by—you guessed it:
Grendel’s Mom. Apparently, we humans are low-life hound dogs unable to control our
lusts and this will always come back to burn us.
o http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0442933/synopsis for the synopsis of the movie.
So . . . here’s a thesis for you:
The differing tones in the 2007 film version of Beowulf and the text of the epic poem as translated
by Seamus Heaney are due to the differing themes of the two works.