Ahaha!

But--thinking of the success of "300"--it seems to me that enough swords and killing (which Beowulf has) should also get adolescent boys interested.

If the movie version of Beowulf has some good repeatable lines, it should be all set. My 18-year-old goes around saying "This is SPARTAAA" and "Tonight we dine in HELLL" all the time and I'm not even sure he actually made it to see "300"

It's been a few years since I last read Beowulf (whenever the Heaney translation came out), but as I recall, nothing was said about the Playboy potential of Grendel's dam.

sad but true!

I enjoyed the movie (just came back from seeing it).

I mentioned the cartoon here to the friends I went to see it with and earned a rant on how "Beowulf wasn't English literature, the English didn't exist".

Which left me ranting back that most English departments that I knew of did begin Old English literature with Beowulf in translation and reuptable schools were not dumb enough to assume that literature only existed after Chaucer. But I was floundering. I probably could have come up with a better counterrant.

And both friends in question had been to college rather than university. College english courses apparently tend towards grammar and/or business English. And neither of their heigh schools even mentioned Beowulf. I remember a teacher in high school doing a little Beowulf with us, but only in passing.