Ok, so I went & saw the new Beowulf film last night & already own the Beowulf & Grendel film that came out of Iceland a few years back.  I wanted to ask opinion of the folks here.  How do you feel about the portrayal of Anglo-Saxon Heathen practices & systems in these two films?  What works & what doesn't?

I'm putting this question here on the discussion board because one of the issues that comes out of Beowulf is the transition and conflict and confusion between Heathen and Christian perspectives at the time of the poem's writing.  Although not in its original telling, given that it was probably told for several hundred yeard prior to being written down & as I understand it, the oral version would have had very little of the Heathen/Christian dichotomy...or perhaps the dichotomy grew slowly over several tellings until it came to the scribe that wrote it down for the first time.

Another question occurs, although I am not entirely certain how to phrase it...How do you react to the portrayal within the films of that very dichotomy, of that process of change, between Heathen and Christian belief?

Curiously,
paks

cool!  looking forward to hearing your responses. :) paks

responded in comment :)

[FONT="Book Antiqua"]I thought it was absolute rubbish. Judging from the trailer, I thought that Hollywood might actually do right by us for once, but boy was I wrong. The movie took the Germanic ideals of heroism, honor, etc. present in the original written story and screwed it all up in favor of some post-modern, relativistic parable about pride, vigor, Germanic values, etc. being bad. As much as I usually like Neil Gaiman, he seems to ALWAYS portray anything Germanic horribly. Just look at Thor's portrayal in Sandman. The movie did nothing but further confirm the feelings that our values will never be fairly represented in any mainstream entertainment. It's always some overly sentimentalized vision (peace-loving earth mommas or noble savages) or stereotypical slovenly degenerates who didn't have any good morals or values until Christianity came along. It's ridiculous. /end rant. Needless to say, two thumbs down.

Uuela.[/FONT]

Germanic is primarily a linguistic term that gets used culturally, it includes the peoples of central Europe (Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, Holland), Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland), and England. So Germanic is a broad term for any peoples who are linguistically "Germanic." Norse refers to the Norwegians of a particular time period. Scandinavian refers to the aforementioned modern nations, and Danish is an adjective to describe a noun, referring to it being of or from Denmark.