![]() ![]() Crichton’s novel combines Beowulf’s story with Ibn Fadlan’s account of his journey among the Bulghars, which gives the novel a geographical and multi-cultural approach that was absent in the Anglo-Saxon poem. The article focuses on the encounter with the otherness represented by Grendel in the original Beowulf and on how it changes in its rewriting 'Eater of the Dead' by Michael Crichton (1997): from the threat morally and ethically posed of the medieval poem to the contemporary anthropological threat revealing our fear for previous stages of evolution. If a culture can, or can try to, define itself and narrate its own survival through its hero, a hero needs an antagonist to define itself: Beowulf’s antagonist is the well-known monster called Grendel. But in the poem another main cultural encounter takes place. "The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, as we read it, is already the literary place of a cultural encounter over centuries between an old Germanic heroic story and the Christian culture of the writer, a novel of our days which re-uses the story is the continuation of a tradition already inscribed in the old poem. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |