A review by dayface
Beowulf by Michael Morpurgo

3.0

Morpurgo's novelisation of Beowulf removes many of the nuances that I adore - Unferth, swimming, poetry, scop, Beow, Scyld's funeral, etc - and plays the interpretation explicitly safe. Even to the point of including illustrations which rid the reader of their own relative ideation of the characters, striving to paint an accurate and dogmatic image of every aspect of the text. The prose is fantastic, though, and aims to adapt the narrative style and flow of the poem in a way universally understandable. It's trope-laden (even moreso than the defining source material), and removes many of the graces of the original, but is perhaps the best novelisation I've experienced so far.

This was a quick summarisation of my thoughts, as I'm researching Beowulf for my upcoming trilogy of grimdark fantasy epic poems: KING MONSTER.