Beaucoups of Beowulfs

One of these days, when I finish and post the last two installments of “The Greatest Swordfight Movies of All Time,” I’ll get around to the long awaited “Beowulf Translation Cage-Match Smackdown,” in which various translations will square off against Seamus Heaney’s award-winning rendition. Boy, that’ll get my Site Meter whirring, you just wait and see.

All I can say in my defense is that the ancient poem Beowulf has fascinated me for decades (along with the Icelandic sagas) and the fixation extends to the movies based on the story. The most recent,Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel, was a pretty worthwhile revisionist take on the story. I have no idea what the CGI-intensive adaptation coming in November from Robert Zemeckis is going to be like — nothing like 300, please God — but this collection of advance posters is, shall we say, intriguing. Scroll down to the bottom for an image of what I presume is Grendel’s gnarly back. And Angelina Jolie is playing Grendel’s mother? I look forward to hearing the explanation for that.