![]() ![]() My job was to give the director what he wanted with as much accuracy as I could manage given the constraints I was set. For example, as I originally translated it, Grendel's Mother uses the dual pronouns wit and unc when she refers to Grendel and herself. ![]() And using full Old English would have given me the opportunity to throw in some subtle things for those who know Old English to appreciate. They weren't particularly long, and many other movies have successfully used subtitles for scenes of this length. Personally, I liked the idea of subtitles for these scenes. Grendel's Mother would speak something closer to Present-day English, although we would try to put in some Old English features. If we had to trample on the grammatical fine points to make him understood, that was OK because Grendel was supposed to be mentally defective anyway. Instead, the idea was to have Grendel speak a version of Old English that was somewhat accurate and yet still at least mostly intelligible without subtitles. Bob vetoed the use of any subtitles, which precluded truly authentic Old English. By the time of my first meeting with Bob Zemeckis, however, the plan had changed. When I received the script I set to work translating the Grendel scenes into as accurate a version of Old English as I could manage. If you've seen the movie, you'll know that plans changed somewhat. When Steve Boyd, one of the producers, called me to discuss the nature of my work on Beowulf, he told me that they wanted Grendel (Crispin Glover) and Grendel's Mother (Angelina Jolie) to speak in Old English, an opening voice-over of a scop reading from the opening of the original poem, and the occasional word here and there in other places. I am not planning to post a review (since I worked on the film, I wouldn't exactly be objective) but I did want to make a few remarks on the use of language. I saw a screening of Beowulf last week but have been holding off commenting on it until it opened. ![]()
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