The Sex Demon Catch 22

An Incubus; Colour print [19th century?] after a painting by Georg Kininger, 'The Dream of Queen Eleanor', 1795.

What is a folklorist to do when a US president makes it hard to write about incubi and succubi without elevating dangerous medical advice or seeming to poke fun of immigrants from African nations?

The moment “Demon Sperm,” struck my social media feed, the sirens went off at Practical Mythology. And the Practical Mythology sirens going off at any time is a bit akin to that moment when the Ghostbusters get their first paying job in the 1984 film. Annie Potts’s voice went off in my head: “We got one!” Thanks to domestic tensions in the US, this has happened twice in a few weeks. I was able to write a timely sheela na gig article a week ago--possibly the first and last timely sheela na gig article ever--thanks to a protester in Portland. As my wife pointed out, this would be my second timely post that dealt with religion and genitalia.

So I dutifully began trying to research the dangerous quack doctor the president just elevated, but I've struggled with the angle and what I would bring to it. It turns out that there is a lot of relevant information about folk beliefs in spirit spouses and you don’t have to travel far afield to read about it. Religious and secular leaders you've heard about from history have spoken and written on them (King James I of England, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas). Connecting the president to a king who wrote a book about witchcraft and officially made it illegal isn’t the point of my blog, even it a folk belief in witches and sex demons conveniently traveled to the early US colonies and flourished in the theocracy the puritans sought to create only about 20 years after James I's Daemonologie hit the shelves. Old world fear of witches is entirely an American thing.

This also seems an opportunity to delve into the folk belief systems of the country this doctor hails from, and despite my interest in that, somehow I don’t think Cameroonians here or abroad will really want to be associated with her at the moment.

The strange thing is that the president has both made incubi and succubi relevant and tainted them simultaneously. Was ever a folklorist in such a sensitive situation? Probably not since the time of James I.

On the Challenges of Adapting Beowulf and My Suggestions for a Richer Experience

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy in the early 2000s and Michael Crichton's 1999 The 13th Warrior understood the visual nature of dramatizing epic heroism.

Having recently reviewed a stage adaptation of Beowulf, and found it lacking, I find myself thinking about the possibility of doing the work justice on stage. I have never seen a dramatic adaptation of Beowulf that truly lived up to the excitement I feel when I read or study it. This is not entirely the fault of the four live productions I’ve watched or the films, most of which I could not sit through. I would submit that the Beowulf many have been exposed or subjected to is not the lively, passionate, funny, and painful work of literature I know. I hope this essay will not be seen as the work of someone who thinks he knows better, but rather an attempt to no longer stay silent by a lover of the material who wants others to see the beauty in it that he does.

The most straightforward elements of the Beowulf narrative happen to be physical conflicts, fights between a man and a series of monsters. Stage fights can be handled well and creatures offer wonderful design challenges. It is possible to do these things well, but fight scenes, for people interested in character-driven conflict, need proper motivation in order for us to feel a stake in them. And in Beowulf, that’s a problem. The main character’s motivation in fighting these creatures is not personal and for that reason, Beowulf generally does not come across as a sympathetic character. His actual motivation in the story, furthermore, gaining fame for his king, is culturally bound up in the values of a Northern Germanic warrior society in the middle ages. For this reason, the character Beowulf will frequently come off as arrogant to modern audiences.

The most exciting writing in the parts of Beowulf that adapters choose to draw does not translate easily to stage drama because it lies in the physical description and sounds of the men and their armor. It is essentially the world building element of fantasy. Michael Crichton’s 1999 The 13th Warrior, to my taste the most successful Beowulf adaptation to date, understands and dramatizes this pageantry with a moving score. I always told students that Beowulf should always be imagined moving along with a stirring theme song. Unfortunately, nothing happens in these scenes, other than heroes moving from one setting to another, and that is difficult to achieve this on stage, which has traditionally been thought of as less a visual medium than an aural one because so much information flows to the audience through dialogue. In a way, the scenes from The 13th Warrior that dramatize this stirring element of the writing well, are similar to scenes from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and will also be among the most difficult to transfer to stage. Some of the most recognizable images from Jackson’s films are of a line of people walking, and are effectively montages in the films. It would be hard to imagine the films without these montages, which give dramatic weight to the imagery of heroism.

Neither Jackson nor Crichton had trouble devoting screen time to what these literary works privilege above drama that is derived from interpersonal conflict, but they also managed to include the variety of personal stakes that are to be found. Most of the opening of Beowulf is dedicated to courtly behavior, acting the appropriate way in the appropriate settings. Proper manners in Beowulf are probably more important than in Pride and Prejudice. If you can’t effectively show the exchanges between Beowulf and the various gate keepers, or show Hrothgar’s response to the visual presence of Beowulf, then you lose the human element of the story in an episode (the Grendel section) that is the hallmark of the story. I believe that these exchanges are also more difficult to carry off on stage because it requires the kind of support for the audience that curated shots can produce, but one does not get on stage.

That these elements have been cut from most of the stage versions of Beowulf I’ve seen, means that most of what Beowulf is as a dramatic story has not made it to the stage. However, as a lover of the entire literary work, let me point out how other significant moments of value never make the cut. Beowulf has been described as a miscellany as much as an epic story. Large portions of the text do not follow the rules of linear storytelling, but rather jump back and forth in time, introducing stories within the story. As I’ve shown, a major percentage of the most utilized sections of the story act almost as an etiquette book for would-be heroes. But the poem Beowulf is almost cluttered with passages about other emotionally explosive situations that no one seems to know how to include in a dramatic rendering of the poem. These moments, to borrow from theatrical parlance, are set pieces in the poem and most of them derive far more drama from human conflict than anything in Beowulf that has ever been shared with an audience.

The eleven o’clock number in Frank Loesser’s musical Guys and Dolls is “Sit down You’re Rockin’ the Boat.” It may be the most well known and beloved number from the musical and it helps keep the audience excited when the rest of the story is winding down. Yet, it is tangential to the plot and if it were as difficult to follow as analogous set piece passages in Beowulf, a shortsighted director might cut it from the show. The story of the last survivor (and I would argue the description of the funeral pyre of the Hildeburh scene, the father’s lament, and the Battle of Ravenswood) is just as important in Beowulf. An aged King Beowulf is about to die fighting the dragon and by this point in script development most adapters are probably hard pressed to argue to anyone why an audience needs to see Beowulf fight another monster, even if it is the end of the story. The dragon fight usually doesn’t make it into stage adaptations, which seem afraid to try to hold an audience for longer than about 50 minutes.

A Postmodern Take on an Medieval Poem

American 20th century theater was no stranger to narrative complexity, jumps that broke the Aristotelian unities of time and space. Willy Loman’s escapist jumps into past memories, which come with little warning or explanation, are an example of that. Surrealist moments in A Streetcar Named Desire, and many of the most popular musicals of the mid-century, offer more examples of a theater audience’s ability to navigate difficult narrative jumps. The tangential moments in Beowulf are at least as related to the main thrust of the tale as some of the stranger psychedelic moments of Gene Kelly films when Kelly is magically transported from the reality of the narrative, or even as related as Gene Wilder’s terrifying paddle boat scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. No one could argue for those scenes to someone who did not understand their import and yet it's hard to imagine those films without their alternate reality moments. The poem Beowulf interjects stories that are arguably linked to the main narrative more for thematic reasons than as a means to further the plot in a meaningful way. They are challenging to read because they include new characters and take place before the action of the main plot. They are separate, but several of them contain the dramatic conflicts that a modern audience finds lacking in Beowulf. Others are simply big dramatic set pieces that could wow an audience with all the potential ways to bring them in. All act as stand alone morality tales that would challenge an audience, but if you don’t challenge your audience, I question whether you have achieved much in a theatrical performance.

Because so much of the emotional drama of Beowulf is to be found in the episodes that are not about fighting monsters, I argue for including them, particularly if the production is already including music and original lyrics. One of my favorites involves a princess married to a foreign prince in order to save her people from bloodshed. The story ends tragically, with a fight breaking out between her husband and her brother and ends with both men and her son killing each other. The set piece is the description of the funeral pyre, where the woman burns the three men together with all of the other warriors. A modern audience can understand this woman’s loss better than anything Beowulf feels in the entirety of the poem. The design potential for a funeral pyre is great. The central image of the flames taking up all combatants also simplifies the details of the extra episode. The Princess Hildeburh's story is told in the poem by a bard after the slaying of Grendel and thematically sets the scene for Grendel’s grieving mother. Another important set piece is the story of the last survivor. Again, there is a central symbolic and unifying image in the pile of treasure, hidden away to rot by a people destroyed by the genocidal feuding that recurs in Beowulf, but never makes it to the stage. And again, it raises important human issues that set the scene for another monster fight. Neither Grendel’s mother nor the dragon can speak, but these other scenes speak for them.

It is likely that experimenting with the tales of Hildeburh and the Last Survivor would bring an emotional dimension to Beowulf that the hero’s battles with monsters and courtly interactions with Scandinavian thanes lack, but there are further tales in Beowulf of family and domestic drama to be mined for meaning. I would finally suggest that a Beowulf adaptation be presented as a series of stories surrounding a theme rather than the narrow story of a monster killer. Beowulf has been given credentials as a tale for the ages by the academy, but stripping it down to its physical conflicts will surely lead the theater-going to shake their heads and wonder what it is they missed.

An Anglo-Saxonist Reviews Another Beowulf Rock Opera

Stage adaptations of Beowulf from 2019, 2013 and 2005. (Left to right) The Met Cloisters, A.R.T's Oberon and New York's Irish Repertory Theatre.

Glorious eye shadow, red spandex and spangles, and lots of attractive exposed dancer bodies. To say that very little of The Ninth Hour: The Beowulf Story is Beowulf, the medieval poem I have studied for years, is probably reductive and missing the point. My thirty year interest in the poem is borne of a love of many elements of the work, from the linguistics, to the historical and folkloric elements, to the poem’s unusual compositional structure and beyond. But people seem to like Beowulf because it is at once a story that celebrates and criticizes the victor and both hates and sympathizes with the villian. They also seem captured by the taboo psycho-sexual conflict that is probably more received from a memory of the 2007 film and a computer-generated Angelina Jolie than the source material. Sexual conflict, and even a bit of an Electra complex may be found, or at least read into Beowulf, but I submit that one has to do the work to cultivate those details and in this production, it seems a copy of a copy. Unfortunately the recent Met production uses Beowulf more as a canvas on which to project cliches and the echoes of drama.

An educated swathe of the public, those that attend and create live theater, have indulged in theatrical Beowulf adaptations since Seamus Heaney’s 1999, award-winning, best-selling translation of the untitled 3,182-line English poem of disputed age that exists solely in the pages of an 11th century manuscript. Heaney must be credited with shepherding Beowulf from British Literature textbooks and the halls of dusty academia and into the public consciousness. Without Google, I can count at least three feature film adaptations of Beowulf, though each of questionable merit, since the year 2000, as well as countless graphic novels and references in video games and other media that welcomes monster-slaying heroes. Thanks to Mr. Heaney, Beowulf has certainly arrived.

I have also seen three other live treatments of Beowulf, two set to music, and each, purposefully, lived up to sharing the poem’s title to a greater or lesser degree. New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre in 2005 aimed at a fully staged Beowulf, complete with large-scale puppets, masks, and muscled men heaving against oars, and Boston Poet’s Theatre’s more recent, 2015 treatment, adapted Heaney’s own translation in a more intimate scale, with multiple narrators telling a story to be heard more than seen. The American Repertory Theatre’s Oberon-produced 2013 Beowulf--A Thousand Years of Baggage, announced its intention to deviate and have fun in its title, and was a funny and enjoyable evening, although definitely enhanced by the open bar. These productions provided a wide range of live Beowulf experiences to be had and The Ninth Hour: The Beowulf Story, though it takes itself more seriously, falls closer to Oberon’s intentionally comic take by the looseness with which it handles the material. What Oberon’s production lacked in verisimilitude to the original, though, it partly made up for in humor, and again, the open bar.

The Metropolitan Museum’s The Ninth Hour: The Beowulf Story, was produced and recorded in front of a live audience sometime in the spring of 2019 and was made available online for free at the end of June. The 48-minute production was held at the Fuentidueña Chapel, a hall boasting a 13th Century Romanesque apse from a Spanish church, carefully disassembled and reconstructed in the 1940s at The Met Cloisters, the museum’s medieval satellite installation in Fort Tryon Park, way-the-hell-uptown Manhattan. The performance features a live band, six dancers, and two principal performers, who share singing duties with the instrumentalists.

The production dramatizes the opening episodes of the poem Beowulf, but only in broad strokes. The problem of Grendel and his Mother are introduced, without the trappings of a court or the presence of the Danish characters. Then a Beowulf figure arrives, defeats Grendel, and then his Mother. The plot is simple and follows the basic order of events of the poem. The story is told entirely through song, with original lyrics that touch upon discernible themes in Beowulf in a general way. The notion of the passage of time is addressed in the opening number, “Listen to the sea” and returned to at times with references to the tide. The issue of heroes writing history and the necessity to win admiration are also touched upon. The only dramatic relationship hinted at in the production is between mother and son. That relationship is expressed through the words, “We’re all that we’ve got; We’re family.”

The lyrics, in the register of American rock songs, only hint at meaning, and are often weighed down by cliche. The performers promise “a story of good and evil, hell and glory.” The Grendel figure, played by Shayfer James, informs us, “I would rather be a monster than a fool.” The Beowulf figure, played by Kate Douglas, warns us, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” If it’s not Beowulf, it is also not thought provoking in the manner of well written modern music. It’s not Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchel or even Taylor Swift. The melodies are more frequently catchy or moving. James’s “Lullaby,” is one of the more dramatic numbers, sung ostensibly while Grendel is dying. Douglas’s “I Believe in Peace, but I’ll Go to War for You” sticks in the ear.

The performance itself is polished and professional, but lacks the excitement of powerful storytelling. The singers and the band are able with the material, but the dancers are not used well. At one point they move as if structurally part of a larger Grendel monster, but, at least from the perspective of the camera, not in a convincing or exciting way. The two performers (Manelich Minniefee and Zachary Eisenstat) who, in tandem, played Caliban in American Repertory Theatre’s 2014 The Tempest were continually fascinating to watch as they linked themselves together and moved with the awkward grace of a gymnast with eight limbs and two torsos. Unfortunately, as with much of the direction, it is possible to find precursors that do it better. The huddle that the performers make at the beginning of the performance, ostensibly to decide who would play which part, has become a cliched theatrical convention: these are players--they will now entertain us. It was done more effectively in Bob Fosse’s 1972 Pippin and even in Trevor Nunn’s 1979 Macbeth. By the end, even the sensual red of the spandex and vinyl and eyeshadow that hint at a sexual energy (and are the most striking element of the production) never really come to fruition.

The idea of Beowulf will continue to draw artists and audiences, but if all they understand is a notion of the masterpiece, or an already loose reconstruction of it, they will only contend with its shadow. As a Beowulf lover, I should feel lucky that my literary love is still in vogue twenty years on from Heaney’s seminal work, but during this production at least, I wished for more creativity and attention to detail.