Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Robert Nye has rewritten the Beowulf saga into a nice little stand-alone fable, but it is so far from the original text that it is a disservice to new readers. Nye had his own idea of what the theme of Beowulf should be, but the original text does not support his theme, so Nye rewrote it until it did -- and then he crams the theme down the reader's throat as though it's the central point of the entire Beowulf saga. Nye's theme is that we should embrace our weaknesses and thereby make them our strengths (huh?), and he demonstrates this through Beowulf's nearsightedness and disproportionately short legs, neither of which are in the original text. Nye's liberties with the original include making the Dane warrior Unferth a villain -- in the original, Unferth is at first jealous of Beowulf's courage until he sees it first-hand, at which point his jealousy turns to respect, and Beowulf respects him in return. In Nye's version Unferth is a treacherous villain throughout -- for example, in the original it is Grendel's mother who kills the king's friend Esher, but in Nye's version Unferth stabs him in the back. According to Nye, Unferth is then killed by Grendel's mother; in the original Unferth gives Beowulf his own sword to fight Grendel's mother, and this is the scene where Unferth and Beowulf become friends. Nye took a great supporting character and turned him into a cardboard villain. I could go on listing ways in which Nye damages the saga, but I will instead cut to his most heinous crime -- Beowulf versus the dragon. In the original text, Beowulf gathers a band of his best warriors along with his friend Wiglaf to battle the dragon. When they see it, the warriors turn and run away in fear, and Beowulf attacks the dragon with only the loyal Wiglaf behind him. Beowulf succeeds at the cost of his own life, and dies at Wiglaf's side. In Nye's version, Beowulf is a part-time beekeeper, and he kills the dragon by having a bag of bees fly down its throat and sting it to death from the inside (I'm not making this up). There is no battle. Beowulf is never injured. Beowulf then simply dies on the mountain for no apparent reason other than his age. I bought this book to read to my kids, but there is no way I will ever read it to them. It is a very easy read -- Nye tells a lively little tale, and his idea of using bees to kill the dragon is smoothly set up throughout the story -- but the major points of this so-called "new telling" are all Nye's, and run counter to the themes in the original. Anyone who reads this and thinks they've read Beowulf is VERY sorely mistaken, and their mistake will be immediately obvious to anyone who is familiar with the original text.