Beowulf

Beowulf the current tv show was a surprise to me.
I looked forward to watching it not least because it has been shot in the north of England. Eastgate in Weardale - also known as Heorot - is no more than thirty miles from where I live. The landscapes shown on screen are fairly typical of my area.

Unhappily I wasn't very taken with the production. The sets are fabulous, if a trifle overdone. The mead hall would have taken a team of carpenters years and the amount of gold decoration is way over the top. I was puzzled by the number of coloured actors, puzzled by a thane being a woman, puzzled that the blacksmith was a frail looking woman, by the amount of fantasy creatures hanging about and so it went on. Slowly it began to dawn on me that this Beowulf is not a retelling of the Beowulf poem. It would have been better to have named it something else and removed all references to the original.

As a fantasy it probably works well, but I have to say I'm not enamoured of the actors or the story line. All told it isn't for me. But then I'm one of the few people who got bored a third of the way through Game of Thrones Vol 1 and midway in the Tolkien saga. That sort of Fantasy is not my thing though I'm happy to read Time Slip novels, which may be considered another kind of fantasy.