Crichton wants to invent ‘real’ versions of as many Norse myths and legends as he can, and does not know when less is more.

Herger’s duel remains a high point, and though the novel is more evenly balanced than the film, it suffers the disadvantage of including a scene involving cave-dwelling prophetic dwarfs. I’ve said my piece on the actual ‘eaters of the dead’ in my movie review, and the same applies here, but it’s even more anti-climactic. His cultured Muslim outsider is able to express shock and awe at the distant Norse society he - and the audience - encounters, which neatly excuses all manner of exposition. Crichton enjoys his charade a lot though, sprinkling footnotes and explanations along the way as he apes the dry prose of the chronicler.

You can see the kernel of the character that Antonio Banderas brings to life with such charm in The 13th Warrior, but there’s little of the measured, keen intelligence of the historical Ibn Fadlan, despite Crichton’s pseudo-academic posturing. I approached both of these retellings with degrees of caution, therefore.Ĭrichton approaches his epic via the eyewitness account of the tenth-century Arab ambassador and explorer Ibn Fadlan. We roundly mocked Telemachus and figured the suitors had what was coming to them. Additionally, I am a big fan of The Odyssey, and thoroughly enjoyed reading it (in English translation) in a school class that appreciated Odysseus as a different type of hero, while also making him a healthy figure of fun. His approach in fact becomes less about bringing out the best of what’s there, and instead about showing off Crichton’s cleverness in academic nose-tweaking. It’s my favourite surviving Old English composition. I agree with Crichton - the epic poem is not boring. Atwood wants to tell the untold version of The Odyssey, unpicking clever words and formulae and turns of phrase and revealing the cruel foundations of the society the poem depicts Crichton confesses in his afterword that he merely wanted to prove that Beowulf wasn’t as boring as a friend claimed it was. Two very different authors approach a similar task with two very different aims. Michael Crichton, in his afterword to Eaters of the Dead I was furious to have wasted my time, but I had only myself to blame.

Michael crichton beowulf