Cain's Clan's Revenge

Eaters of the Dead is a deservedly little known book by Michael Crichton.  It starts off dully enough as the travel journal of an emissary form the Caliph of Baghdad in 921 AD.  But after a few chapters of pointless wanderings, the book suddenly morphs into a rewriting of Beowulf.  And not a very interesting rewriting of Beowulf.  For a while it seems like the goal is to present the Ur-Beowulf, the story of what really happened before legend took over and there were monsters and dragons in the tale.  That idea might have had some promise, but Crichton seriously botches the whole enterprise.  First, he gets the order wrong; the dragon (really just an army carrying torches at night) comes before the battle with Grendel’s mother, and it is the latter which kills him, not the former.  That change alone ruins the conceit that this is the Ur-Beowulf.  Then, Crichton can’t leave well-enough alone.  In the story, Grendel is “wendol” which means “the black mist” from which a brutal army descends upon civilization.  Now that is a clever innovation.  But, then Crichton can’t help himself, and we discover that the wendol is really hiding a tribe of Neanderthals, who have survived the evolutionary change and persist until 921 AD.  Silly.  It would have been better to leave them as a bunch of barbarians if the goal was to retell Beowulf as an actual historical account.  So, instead of a monster Grendel, we have a bunch of Neanderthals with a bizarre mother cult, who are hiding out and attack only when the black mist descends on the land.  Oh, and throw in some prophetic dwarves (why?  I have no idea).  How exactly is this new version more believable than the orignal?

How did this crash-and-burn come about?  Crichton tells us in an afterword that the idea was born when a friend of his was toying the the idea of teaching a college class called “The Great Bores” all about books which nobody ever read for pleasure but were assigned in college.  Crichton, convinced that Beowulf wasn't boring, went home to write a story which would show that Beowulf was exciting.  To prove this he, in the end, wrote a boring book of his own.  Irony abounds.  The sad thing is that with the Heaney translation, I have a hard time imagining that anyone, Woody Allen perhaps excepted, thinks Beowulf is boring anymore. 

Crichton also ends his afterword with this rather telling remark:  “When Eaters of the Dead was first published, this playful version of Beowulf received a rather irritable reception from reviewers, as if I had desecrated a monument.  But Beowulf scholars all seem to enjoy it, and many have written to say so.”  Yeah—the book is so bad that Crichton actually wrote that.

So, what is it about Beowulf that it attracts bad adaptations?  I’ve never watched the recent Beowulf movie after hearing how horrid it was.  Though, come to think of it, after reading Crichton’s novel, I may watch it—after all, it can’t be as bad as this book.