Sympathy for the Devil

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

Broadway is poised to reinterpret a literary classic for the musical stage. Beowulf, written between the 8th and 11th century, is to be transformed into a quasi rock opera with a Monty Python-like comic edge. The musical production is a collaboration between alternative theater groups from San Francisco and New York City. At the official website for “Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage,” the producer’s tease is most telling:

Flawed heroes, sympathetic monsters and haughty professors collide as this hefty poem is rescued from the grasp of 1,000 years of highbrow analysis and transformed into a defiantly raucous musical. Presented by San Francisco's infamous Shotgun Players and New York's infectious Banana Bag & Bodice, this new SongPlay is an irreverent dissertation on art versus criticism in blood soaked Scandinavia!

Sympathetic monsters?

Here’s a quick Beowulf refresher: in a great mead-hall in Denmark called Heorot, King Hrothgar’s knights gather to drink, tell stories and listen to the bards sing as the king dispenses gifts to his faithful followers. The joyful noise disturbs the demon dragon Grendel, who leaves his swamp and storms into the hall, disrupting the joyful fellowship by tearing knights limb from limb. Hearing of the demonic chaos plaguing Hrothgar’s kingdom, Beowulf and a group of fellow warriors sail to Hrothgar’s aid. During a feast held in Beowulf’s honor, Grendel, hearing the joyous sounds he hates with fiery intensity, enters the mead-hall intent on committing grizzly murder. The brave Beowulf, unarmed, lunges at and grabs the demon, tearing off the monster’s arm. The beast slinks back to his swamp and dies. Only one soul mourns the monster’s death – its mother. She demands tribute but is refused. Beowulf eventually battles the mother demon, killing her with a giant’s sword.

To the Medieval mind, the dragon was the ultimate smooth-talking materialist. In its hidden lair (in caves or volcanoes), the beast collected tons of treasure for no other purpose than mindless accumulation. It's eyes, no doubt, were bloodshot for lack of sleep guarding the loot it never spent. Dragons were believed to be articulate and persuasive in argument – the better to lead gullible humans astray while separating them from their loot.

A parallel in our time is the ridiculous fight between Representative Barney Frank and executives at American International Group (AIG). Frank plays the unconvincing role of Beowulf to AIG’s Grendel. In fact, both are dragons seeking to seize the treasure of taxpaying dupes to spirit away to their mountain lair.

In the Christian allegory of Beowulf, Grendel hasn't the power to destroy the King and therefore seeks to snare and destroy the weakest among his warriors. The mead hall is where the master sits in Christian fellowship with his subjects, giving gifts as his followers sing songs of celebration. The music of joyful fellowship enrages the soulless materialist dragon Grendel, who enters the hall to kill the recipients of the King’s blessings. Is it any wonder nihilists pays homage to the dragon?

In his 1936 essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and Critics,” J.R.R. Tolken  (of "Lord of the Rings" fame) wrote:

A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world. The monsters remained the enemies of mankind, the infantry of the old war, and became inevitably the enemies of the one God…Beyond there appears a possibility of eternal victory (or eternal defeat), and the real battle is between the soul and its adversaries. So the old monsters became images of the evil spirit or spirits, or rather the evil spirits entered into the monsters and took visible shape in the hideous bodies…

In “Beowulf and the Heroic Age,” W.R. Chambers wrote:

…The gigantic foes whom Beowulf has to meet are identified with the foes of God, Grendel and the dragon are constantly referred to in language which is meant to recall the powers of darkness with which Christian men felt themselves to be encompassed. They are the ‘inmates of Hell,’ ‘adversaries of God,’ ‘offspring of Cain,’ ‘enemies of mankind.’ Consequently, the matter of the main story of Beowulf, monstrous as it is, is not so far removed from common medieval experience as it seems to us to be from our own…Grendel hardly differs from the friends of the pit who were always in ambush to waylay a righteous man.

The New York Times review of  “Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage,” admits the show’s purpose to turn this moral view on it head:

Subverting the images of the evil monster and the noble warrior, the show adopts a sympathetic tone toward Grendel, who, it’s even suggested by his mother in one of the show’s irreverent jokes, was ‘slightly retarded.’ As for Beowulf, Mr. Craig, with his slight paunch, black plastic glasses and shambling gait, looks more like an indie rocker than the ultimate warrior.

Nihilists on the Left sympathize with monsters because they feel small when standing near the elevated and robust Christian hero, and therefore stand resolute with the small, ground-level agents of destruction that are more their measure (Castro comes to mind). Like Grendel, they too are roused to anger at the mere sound of Christian joy and crash the party to wreak havoc. Their backward moral sensibilities, as Grendel's mother might observe, render them more than “slightly retarded.”

--Mr. Curmudgeon