Episode 32: Circolwyrde-Generated Imagery

Young Adult Movie Ministry

Details, credits, errata: This week we watched the extremely lurid and silly 2007 Robert Zemeckis CGI movie Beowulf, easily the best of on-location shoots in the uncanny valley, starring Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Crispin Glover, and John Malkovich, and written by Neil Gaiman (Good Omens) and Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction). It’s both terrible and wonderful at the same time. Our guest is medievalist Ethan Campbell, which is a lot like having Noam Chomsky on your show to discuss the lyrics of Carly Rae Jepsen.

Some recommended reading: Gaiman’s other two stabs at the Beowulf story, the poem Bay Wolf from his collection Smoke and Mirrors, and The Monarch of the Glen, which is in Fragile Things and features Shadow, the protagonist of American Gods. The translations of the poem we like are Seamus Heaney’s, from 1999, J.R.R. Tolkien’s, from 1926 (but first published in 2014—an excerpt is here), and a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that has nearly everyone over the moon and is winning plain old book awards on top of translation awards.

Our lead image this week is a 3d rendering of a house and a lone tree in the sunset, provided through creative commons (CC-BY-SA) by digital artist Mayqel, created in Blender and used with our thanks. Sam really wanted to call this episode “Circolwyrde-Ġesċeōp Lícnes” but he couldn’t get the characters to input. Que sera, sera.

Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Beowulf is copyright 2007 ImageMovers. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review and no other copyright is intended or implied. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.

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