Beowulf is a Christ-like figure both in this revision and the original epic, sacrificing himself for the good of the people but not before, as Gilgamesh would say, his name was stamped on bricks. Yet, while he did vanquish Grendel in the film, he gave in to temptation as that young hero (you have to see the film). His attempt to atone for his sin as an older king does free his people, but brings down his son, and by implication, his way of life as well. With the death of Beowulf and his son (you have to se the film), the age of heroes comes to a close. A new king has been crowned and the old ones must pass into legend.

I’m reminded of the end of John Boorman’s Excalibur: Arthur kills his son Mordred, but sacrifices himself in the battle. Both Kings (Beowulf and Arthur) are left without heirs, so their reins must come to an end with their respective deaths. Both kings, too, are laid to rest on boats, but while Arthur is destined for Avalon and perhaps a return some day, Beowulf sinks beneath the waves as his ship becomes his pyre. Boorman and Zemeckis both tell the stories of the end of epochs — not the demise of patriarchy, but a change — perhaps with one superstitution being replaced with another.

Zemeckis’ film deals with the guilt of the father. The human women are chattel, as one would expect in an epic, but they are sympathetic and strong, demanding respect from the heroes. (There is a scene where one of Beowulf’s men — who we know is married — tries to have his way with a girl. She says “no” and struggles out of his grasp, delivering a final slap across his face before leaving. Cool.) Grendel’s mother is the most interesting: she is the demon of a heroic age (I can’t help but think of Circe, the sirens, Helen, Eve, Medea, Dido…) that has a magical influence over even powerful men. She desires a son, too, like a king — an heir to her kingdom. She represents disorder to the patirarchs Beowulf and Hrothgar, but she also has a potency that neither can resist.

The end of the film is fascinating. It’s a transition, but one that’s bittersweet and ambiguous. I didn’t think I’d like this film very much; I’m not a fan of the go-motion animation. However, this one is provocative and exciting, both in a viscreal and a thoughtful way.

It makes me want to go read Beowulf again.

As the narrator states first thing: the subject of the Iliad is the rage of Achilles and the consequences of that rage for both the Achaeans and the Trojans. War effects not only the men who fight the battles, but also the women and children whose lives are then shaped by its outcome. War represents the worst and, ironically, the best of humanity: ugly brutality and terrible beauty. If you doubt this, look at the place violence holds in our culture; films like The Matrix even show violence as poetic: a graceful dance of destruction that thrills the audience like little else. We both pity with Hector and sympathize with Achilles; neither side of the war holds all of our sentiments. The final outcome of the war, then, becomes truly tragic: only one culture can continue while the other is destroyed or enslaved.

The Iliad‘s participants are the nobility of both cultures, or the aristoi: “the best people.” They are the hereditary holders of wealth and power, and their decisions effect all of the culture. For example, Agamemnon’s decision to infuriate Achilles at the outset of the Iliad has lasting effects on the Greek warriors during the last weeks of the Trojan War. Like most epics, of which the Iliad is really the definitive example, the action begins in medias res, a few weeks before the end of a ten-year campaign, with all of the epic’s traditional accouterments. The Iliad poses questions, as will the Odyssey, about the nature of political order and what humans must do to maintain that vision and structure. The initial contention in the Iliad is between the Greek champion Achilles and the Greek commander Agamemnon. Who has the stronger claim to right: Agamemnon who has the hereditary position, or Achilles, the one with merit? Ultimately does it matter? When swords are drawn, reason becomes irrelevant.

Upon reading the Iliad, I’m often struck by the selfishness of the culture of men. Indeed, one may argue that all wars since the beginning of time are about men and what they want to control: state, wealth, women. What will men do to maintain their view of order and structure? What are the consequences of the resulting pride, arrogance, destruction? In book one of the Iliad, we discover that because of Agamemnon’s refusal to relinquish Chryseis, Apollo has rained a plague upon the Achaean forces. Because he is eventually challenged by Achilles — who represents the wishes of the rest of the men — Agamemnon decides to claim Achilles’ prize (a girl named Briseis) to reassert his authority and put Achilles in his place for his challenge. Achilles shows cunning and restraint — qualities that are usually associated with Odysseus — in his argument with Agamemnon, while the latter rages and rails like a wounded child. Yet, when Agamemnon’s men take Briseis, Achilles, also child-like, begins to pout by his ships, cries to his mother, and refuses to play the war game anymore. This final decision precipitates the death of many Achaeans, including Achilles’ friend Patroclus. Achilles’ resulting rage ends with the death of Hector in book twenty-two, and Achilles’ own apocryphal death under the bow of Paris before the war’s end.

The brutality of Achilles and its consequences are most evident in Book XXII of the Iliad. Achilles’ rage blinds him to anything but the death of Hector, the Trojan champion that killed Patroclus in book sixteen. Replete with epic similes of the hunt, book twenty-two illustrates Hector’s own reluctance to do what he sees as his duty to face Achilles, yet thinks only of himself and what his people might think if he doesn’t face the Greek killing machine (cf. ll. 108-156). Hector’s resolve is soon shaken as he sees Achilles closing, bloody rage the only thing that Achilles sees. Hector flees, but is soon tricked by Athena into stopping to face Achilles, perhaps a commentary on Hector’s need for companionship and Achilles’ desire for only personal vengeance and renown. Hector is mercilessly murdered in front of Troy’s walls, like a fawn at the jaws of a lion.

The death of Hector, then, is given a final cultural context from Hector’s widow Andromache. She now sees the demise of Troy, but personally she sees no future for their son Astyanax. The death of the father, then, is a weighty metaphor for the Trojans: the order that they secured will soon be rendered useless by the barbarity of war; the father’s death leads to the destruction of social order. This theme will be taken up in the Odyssey as well: what is the responsibility of the son for maintaining order in the absence or death of the father? As Andromache sees no future for Astyanax, life does continue even after the carnage of war, yet a new order is imposed on the losers — those who escape death. This theme of continuity is also addressed by Virgil in his Aeneid.

Is war, then, a necessary component of human life? Just because it has been historically up until this point, are we to be like Achilles who could not hear reason through his bloody thoughts: “No truce / till one or the other falls and gluts with blood” (XXII.313-14)? When do we decide that war is better than order?

He is very young, perhaps in his early twenties, fearless, tall, fleetfooted, strong, a compound of muscle and beauty with so powerful a sense of his own precedence that he is willing to let the war go badly when his honor is sullied. The Trojans, led by their stalwart, Hector, kill many Greeks and come close to burning the Greek ships and cutting off their retreat. Hoping to stem the tide, Achilles’ tentmate and beloved friend Patroclus enters the battle. He dons Achilles’ armor, and in that armor — as a substitute for Achilles — he is slain by Hector. Achilles’ withdrawal now comes to an end. Enraged, inconsolable, he prepares at last to enter the battle (we are deep into the poem, and we have not yet seen him fight), an event accompanied by a cataclysmic rending of the heavens and the seas. The sky darkens, the underworld nearly cracks open. Huge forces, unstoppable, move into place. Achilles begins to fight, expelling his anguish in a rampage. As Book XXI opens, he is driving the Trojans back toward Troy:

But when they came to the crossing place of the fair-running river
of whirling Xanthosa stream whose father was Zeus the immortal,
there Achilleus split them and chased some back over the flat land
toward the city, where the Achaians themselves had stampeded in terror
on the day before, when glorious Hektor was still in his fury.
Along this ground they were streaming in flight; but Hera let fall
a deep mist before them to stay them. Meanwhile the other half
were crowded into the silvery whirls of the deep-running river
and tumbled into it in huge clamour, and the steep-running water
sounded, and the banks echoed hugely about them, as they outcrying
tried to swim this way and that, spun about in the eddies.
As before the blast of a fire the locusts escaping
into a river swarm in air, and the fire unwearied
blazes from a sudden start, and the locusts huddle in water;
so before Achilleus the murmuring waters of Xanthos
the deep-whirling were filled with confusion of men and of horses.

But heaven-descended Achilleus left his spear there on the bank
leaning against the tamarisks and leapt in like some immortal,
with only his sword, but his heart was bent on evil actions,
and he struck in a circle around him. The shameful sound of their groaning
rose as they were struck with the sword, and the water was reddened
with blood. As before a huge-gaping dolphin the other fishes
escaping cram the corners of a deepwater harbour
in fear, for he avidly cats up any lie can catch;
so the Trojans along the course of the terrible river
shrank under the bluffs. He, when his hands grew weary with killing,
chose out and took twelve young men alive from the river
to be vengeance for the death of Patroklos, the son of Menoitios.
These, bewildered with fear like fawns, lie led out of the water
and bound thcir hands behind them with thongs well cut out of leather,
with the very belts they themselves wore on their ingirt tunic
sand gave them to his companions to lead away to the hollow ships,
then himself whirled back, still in a fury to kill men. (XXI, 1-33)

Homer didn’t have to tell his listeners that the leather thongs, tightening as they dried, would cut into the flesh of Achilles’ Trojan captives. Nor did he have to explain why Achilles later kills a Trojan warrior, an acquaintance, who begs for mercy at his knees. But how is the American reader supposed to respond to this? He comes from a society that is nominally ethical. Our legal and administrative system, our presidential utterances, our popular culture, in which TV policemen rarely fail to care for the victims of crime, are swathed in concern. Since the society is in fact often indifferent to hardship, it is no surprise that irony and cynicism barnacle the national mood. By contrast, the Greek view was savage but offered without hypocrisy. Accepting death in battle as inevitable, the Greek and Trojan aristocrats of the Iliad experience the world not as pleasant or unpleasant, nor as good and evil, but as glorious or shameful. We might say that Homer offers a conception of life that is noble rather than ethical — except that such an opposition is finally misleading. For the Greeks, nobility has an ethical quality. You are not good or bad in the Christian sense. You are strong or weak; beautiful or ugly; conquering or vanquished; living or dead; favored by gods or cursed. Here were some of Tayler’s “binary opposites,” but skewed into matching pairs alien to us, in which nothing softened Homer’s appraisal of quality.

Academic opponents of courses in the Western classics constantly urge readers to consider “the other” — the other cultures, odd or repugnant to Western tastes, which we have allegedly trampled or rendered marginal and also the others who are excluded or trivialized within our own culture: women, people of color, anyone who is non-white, non-male, non-Western. But here, at the beginning of the written culture of the West (the Iliad dates from perhaps the eighth century B.C.E.), is something like “the other,” the Greeks themselves, a race of noble savages stripping corpses of their armor and reciting their genealogies at one another during huge feasts or even on the field of battle. Kill, plunder, bathe, eat, offer sacrifices to the gods — what do we have to do with these ancient marauders of the eastern Mediterranean?

[From "Does Homer Have Legs?"]

Here, Denby gives his initial impressions of the Iliad, supplying some background information that new readers might not be aware of. He also expresses some discomfort at the Homer’s style: in that the poet offers no guidance through the carnage that was the Trojan war.

By the time the action of the Iliad begins, the deed that set off the whole chain of events — a man making off with another man’s wife — is barely mentioned by the participants. Homer, chanting his poetry to groups of listeners, must have expected everyone to know the outrageous old tale. Years earlier, Paris, a prince of Troy, visiting the house of the Greek king Menelaus, took away, with her full consent, Helen, the king’s beautiful wife. Agamemnon, the brother of the cuckold, then put together a loose federation of kings and princes whose forces voyaged to Troy and laid siege to the city, intending to punish the proud inhabitants and reclaim Helen. But after more than nine years of warfare, the foolish act of sexual abandonment that set the whole cataclysm in motion has been largely forgotten. By this time, Helen, abashed, considers herself merely a slut (her embarrassed appearance on the walls of Troy is actually something of a letdown), and Paris, her second “husband,” more a lover than a fighter, barely comes out to the battlefield. When he does come out, and he and Menelaus fight a duel, the gods muddy the outcome and he war goes on. After nine years, the war itself is causing the war.

How can a book make one feel injured and exhilarated at the same time? What’s shocking about the Iliad is that the cruelty and the nobility of it seem to grow out of each othcr, like the good and evil twins of some malign fantasy who together form a single unstable and frightening personality. After all, Western literature begins with a quarrel beween two arrogant pirates over booty. At the beginning of the poem, the various tribes of the Greeks (whom Homer calls Achaeans — Greece wasn’t a national identity in his time), the various tribes assembled before the walls of Troy are on the verge of disaster. Agamemnon, their leader, the most powerful of the kings, has kidnapped and taken as a mistress from a nearby city a young woman, the danghter of one of Apollo’s priests; Apollo has angrily retaliated by bringing down a plague onthe Greeks. A peevish, bullying king, unsteady in command, Agamemnon, under pressure from the othcr leaders, angrily gives the girl back to her father. But then, demanding compensation, he takes for himself the slave mistress of Achilles, his greatest warrior. The women are passed around like gold pieces or helmets. Achilles is so outraged by this bit of plundering within the ranks that he comes close to killing the king, a much older man. Restraining himself at the last minute, he retires rom the combat and prays to his mother, the goddess Thetis, for the defeat of his own side; he then sits in his tent playing a lyre and “singing of men’s fame” as his friends get cut up by the Trojans. What follows is a series of battles whose savagery remains without parallel in our literature.

It is almost too much, an extreme and bizarre work of literary art at the very beginning of Western literary art. One wants to rise to it, taking full in the face, for the poem depicts life at its utmost, a nearly ceaseless activity of marshaling, deploying, advancing, and fleeing, spelled by peaceful periods so strenuous — the councils and feasts and games — that they hardly seem like relief at all. Reading the poem in its entirety is like confronting a storm that refuses to slacken or die. At first, I had to fight my way through it; I wasn’t bored but I was rebellions, my attention a bucking horse unwilling to submit to the harness. It was too long, I thought, so brutal and repetitive and, for all its power as a portrait of war, strangely distant from us. Where was Homer in all this? He was every where, selecting and shaping the material, but he was nowhere as a palpable presence, a consciousness, and for the modern reader his absence was appalling. No one tells us how to react to the brutalities or to anything else. We are on our own. Movie-fed, I wasn’t used to working so hard, and as I sat on my sofa at home, reading, my body, in daydreams, kept leaping away from the seat and into the bedroom, where I would sink into bed and turn on the TV, or to the kitchen, where 1 would open the fridge. Mentally, I would pull myself back, and eventually I settled clown and read and read, though for a long time I remained out of balance and sore.

One of the first characteristics of a hero that the class suggested is bravery. Indeed, bravery seems to be a universal characteristic of the hero. At on point, Palmer Joss asks Ellie why she wants to be the one to take the machine seat. She cannot answer explicitly, and Palmer tells her that she is the bravest person he has ever met. She relies, “Or the nuttiest.” Ellie’s desire to see what’s on the other side represents her community’s current need to see what’s beyond their world. It’s interesting that Contact came out in 1997, at the height of the X-Files‘ assertion that “the truth is out there.”

Part of Ellie’s bravery, and perhaps that of the hero in general, is her unselfishness. This might also suggest her sacrifice, her pioneering action, her strength, her ability to survive, and her endurance. Indeed, we want our heros to do what we cannot: these deeds are what make them heroic. Ellie’s endurance, her drive in the face of adversity to pursue what it is she believes in is admirable. Perhaps this also suggests that heros need to be idealistic and a bit impractical. If Ellie had listened to Drumlin, she would never have heard the signal from Vega. If she let witch hunters like Kitz wear her down, she would invalidate her integrity and be less heroic. When is the last time our culture lionized a sell-out?

In fact, Ellie became a scapegoat in the end during a scene reminiscent of the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. Senator Kitz tries his best to force Ellie to renounce her testimony that she ever traveled to a distant part of the galaxy. His relentless questioning and citing of tangible fact had Ellie doubting her own experiences by appealing to her reason as a scientist. Since she had no proof of her journey — something science relies upon — Kitz suggests that she imagined the whole thing. Her refusal to be swayed even by hard scientific evidence suggests her strength and endurance, and also shows how she grows as a character.

Heros must be human; therefore, they must have flaws. Ellie’s flaw was her inability to conceive of answers that can be proven by science. Ellie’s experience with the machine and her journey to Vega teaches her about faith, in belief that transcends the empirical.

Some negative characteristics were also suggested: pursuit of fame, pride, and arrogance. The former has been a characteristic of many heroic traditions. The Greeks believed is a grim afterlife, so any living would have to be done while alive: that was the time of the hero, as Achilles teaches Odysseus in Book 11 of the Odyssey. By proving one’s skills, one could achieve fame, an immortality in the verses of the poet. While this sort of fame was important to the Greeks and others, our culture often views fame as a hollow pursuit, one that is essentially the desire for money and power. An indeed, Ellie seems to want this as well: when her idealism is stomped on at every turn by the opportunist Drumlin, her disappointment is always evident. Her pride and drive also keep her from making an enduring connection with Palmer Joss and the rest of her community. These traits show that a hero is often a leader, but that leadership can be a lonely and isolating place.

Finally, heroes are often mythic and archetypal. Here is where the hero enters the realm of the poet and takes on a life beyond the physical. Myths are stories of profound truths of a culture. Though they might not be “real” in a sense that they actually happened, their significance paradoxically is in the ideals, answers, and guidance that they provide for a culture. Facts, here, become irrelevant, or at least superseded by the story. This is a difficult lesson for the scientist to learn, and is perhaps a lesson for our age.

As our culture takes its first “small moves” into space, we might find that we need our heroes again. When myths of the previous age encounter the realities of the present day, we find ourselves searching for new truths — new stories to help guide us into the next age, perhaps with that notion that the truth is out there. What will we do when we realize that we are not alone in the universe? We will need the heroes and the poets again. The deeds of the hero mean nothing if there’s not a poet to record them. Pay attention to this relationship as you read the selections this semester. Often the poet and the hero are one-in-the-same. This relationship suggests the continued importance of our own literary traditions and the heroic efforts of those that try to keep them alive.

1. Birth Myth — magical, divine conception; born through and by unusual circumstances (like a virgin birth); exposed to nature (like Achilles dip in the Styx) or a conflict with nature.
2. Child Hero — urge to realize himself through useful exploits; demons, monsters, authority challenged.
3. Education — apprenticeship or preparation; hero’s withdrawal from society to discover his identity or potential (internal quest); sometimes there is a teacher or guide.
4. Trial and Quest — essence of life, immortality, home, etc.; suffering always accompanies the hero — usually the death of a friend or loved one
5. Death / Scapegoat — literal or metaphorical death; underworld experience and resurrection; often there is a dominant presence of a woman; promise of a new life; sacrifice of a king (Phoenix) who must avoid becoming a tyrant; positive and negative; the hero accepts the responsibility so that the individual members of the society do not have to.
6. Descent — to the underworld; returns to the earth for more education; rite of passage; night journey and retrieval of parts of the self; pilgrimage to see lost family.
7. Resurrection and Rebirth — apotheosis; a freedom, unity, and transcendence of humanity, time, and space; the hero loses himself to find himself.

Lord Rank, in his essay “The Myth of the Birth of the Hero,” states that many ancient cultures ostensibly share similar legends about the birth and education of their national heroes. This fact in itself does not seem too fascinating, but seeing that these civilized nations probably had no contact or sharing of cultural ideas, Lord Rank speculates on the reasons why these fledgling nations all have these stories. He suggests three likely explanations:

1. The existence of elemental ideas, or a Jungian-like collective unconsciousness on the scale of all of humanity in which humans share similar ideas at similar stages in their development. Therefore, they produce similar stories based on these elemental ideas.
2. The existence of an original community that developed in a favorable locality and eventually spread producing diverse social orders that kept the kernels of their foundational myths intact.
3. Migration and borrowing of stories developed by a particular civilization to others that adopt them as their own. These stories are passed through an oral tradition in commerce and traffic or through early literary influences.

While these theories may or may not be correct, Rank writes that none address the origin of the birth of the hero.

Read more on HumX.

By all means, share those thoughts. Your email helped solidify some of my earlier thoughts on this epic: could parts of Gilgamesh‘s appeal be this warning? I’m sure that many will agree that one of the lessons that we take from Gilgamesh is that of the importance of community and how we treat others, especially if we find ourselves in a position of power. In another entry, I write:

Perhaps part of abusing that power is our relentless (mis)use of our natural resources? Nature seems to have a way of fighting back. I wouldn’t want to suggest that the recent tsunami in Southeast Asia that killed over 100,000 people is a result of humanity’s mistreatment of the planet, but it does show that in the face of nature’s power, we really are no more than ants trying to keep our hill together. Perhaps we need to pay due respect to the environment that shaped our evolution, rather than recklessly thinking, like Gilgamesh, that we can do anything we want with impunity.

Kai, thanks for the email. Please comment more, since I probably left quite a bit out.