NEW POETS OF RUM-RAM-RUF: Zach Weinersmith & Boulet

In the opening paragraph of my metrical appendix to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, I raised a conundrum: how do revivalists today officially arrive at an alliterative meter? The question’s a good one. In every case known to me, at least in English, revivalists never “grow up” with alliterative poetics. They don’t – they cannot – know the meter on an intuitive cultural knowledge, not as medieval skalds or scopas did. In other words, the meter has been moribund for centuries, and if young poets today – those crazy kids – experiment with alliteration at all, it is only of the ornamental variety. That’s what tongue twisters teach you: the rum-ram-ruf of sounds jingle-jangling together. Accordingly, if revivalists know what they are doing at all, they deploy a poetic form learned only as an adult.

Someday, though, I hope to eat those words – or at least chew them slowly. The parties responsible are author Zach Weinersmith and the artist Boulet, the creators of a wonderful new graphic novel for middle-grade readers, Bea Wolf (2024).

This book has been generating a ton of buzz – glowing write-ups in The New York Times, a Hugo nomination for Best Graphic Story – and, as somebody naturally predisposed to notice such things, I’m impressed by the great blurbs on the cover: from the children’s author’s side, Neil Gaiman and “Lemony Snicket” (pen name of Daniel Handler), and, from the professional medievalist’s side, Jennifer Neville and Kevin Kiernan.

Nor are these blurbs the customary pleasantries, either. Bea Wolf combines engaging writing and mesmerizing artwork into a beguiling adaptation of an ancient Old English poem. The afterward, which Weinersmith acknowledges will predominately interest only librarians and future writers, briefly runs through the history of Beowulf and its manuscript, and it even offers a short, solid account of “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” the famous academic essay by J.R.R. Tolkien. I must confess to feeling “called out,” however, in such passages as the following:

There’s a lot more [says Wienersmith] you can learn about Beowulf and about poetry and writing in Old English. In fact, if you can believe it, there are all these people who just sit around all day learning about this stuff, then yell at each other about it in meetings and over email.

I mean, this isn’t un-true, but it seems impolite to say so explicitly.

In any event, for people who know the original poem well, the little things are what make Bea Wolf such a captivating graphic adaptation. Things like the wordplay. Upon opening page one, the text presents readers with a bare-footed child – her face shadowed by a cowl and coat far too large for her – shouting, “Hey, wait!”: a remarkably phonetic translation of hwæt. Moreover, Weinersmith has fun with Old English names. Everyone knows that the original hero, Beowulf, lost a swimming match against an opponent named Breca, but Weinersmith has his heroine – she’s Beowulf, but a girl – play a game of water-dodgeball with a childhood friend named “Becky.” And the hall in which King Roger holds Hrothgar-like court – technically, it’s a tree house – is dubbed “Treeheart,” a pun on Heorot, which in Old English means “hart” (albeit the deer, not the organ).

One of the slyer bits of wordplay involves Roger’s prior connection to Bea Wolf. In the original text, Hrothgar had met Beowulf’s father Ecgtheow through paying the wergild to resolve his blood feud with the Wulfings. Explaining “blood feuds” to children, however, is probably tricky, so Weinersmith picks the better part of valor. Instead, he has Bea Wolf belong to the “House of Heidi,” a queen whom Roger once helped through a puppy rescue gone awry. (Really.) “Heidi,” of course, is a modernized version of Beowulf’s lord’s wife’s name: Hygd.

Besides these clever adaptations, Weinersmith and Boulet skillfully narrate several understated moments from the original text. In Beowulf, when Unferth is rudely questioning the competence of Beowulf, then newly arrived at Heorot, the poet never once mentions King Hrothgar’s reaction to all this. Strangely, he stays silent while one of his thanes, a known kinslayer (Unferth had killed his brothers), insults an honored guest – one, moreover, promising to cleanse Heorot of its monstrous interloper. This silence never strikes my college students as odd until I point it out to them, but obviously, why risk alienating your kingdom’s hero? In Bea Wolf, though, when “Huffer” bring up the heroine’s failed water-dodgeball match against Becky, Weinersmith and Boulet give us the following panels: 

Thanks to these, we know exactly what is going on – Bea Wolf realizes she’s being tested, and both her own boon companions and Roger himself are waiting to see how she will react. It’s a marvelous bit of story-telling, and one that takes full advantage of the graphic-novel format.

In order to qualify for the Modern Revival, though, the verse-making is what matters, and this is what makes Bea Wolf such a powerful gateway into alliterative poetics. Of course, alliteration already appears in children’s literature in an ornamental fashion. It’s even more natural than rhyme, in some ways – one need only imagine Harry Potter and the founders of Hogwarts’s wizarding houses: Godric Gryffindor, Rowena Ravenclaw, Helga Hufflepuff and Salazar Slytherin. Yet revivalism requires structural alliteration, and this is where Bea Wolf goes further than any other book for younger readers.

For instance, Weinersmith’s afterword freely acknowledges that he avoids the finer points of Old English poetics, by which he means Sievers types and the meter’s classic compactness. Nonetheless, several lines in Bea Wolf follow a nearly proper alliterative patterning. Discussing King Carl – the child counterpart to Scyld Scefing – ageing out of his role, the text reads

But time courses on. Coarse hair claimed the kid-king’s chin.

A crack crossed his voice. He called for the pyre.

Although the initial line overloads on strong stresses and alliteration, the second line – complete with caesura – mostly follows a satisfying aa/ab alliterative pattern. Similarly, after a young Roger aids Heidi during her puppy-heist gone wrong (hint: the puppies are actually pigs, and their adult owner isn’t happy about the vandalism), Weinersmith writes,

There would be no pig-related punishment. Parents knew nothing.

Needless to say, the majority of lines in Bea Wolf take advantage of the freedom afforded them by our language, but most impressionists in the Modern Revival do nothing less.

Yet what I find most impressive are the kennings, that special class of poetic compounds prized by Old English and Old Norse poets. Generally speaking, kennings are rarely well done within revivalist verse. They seem obtuse and plodding, at least in Modern English – a jarring poetic diction. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis both avoid them, quite noticeably so, and I myself rarely encounter a kenning that pulls its textual weight. It’s like when a novelist attempts to write dialect by using dialect-specific words instead of (rather than in addition to) the core grammar or syntax. The end result seems superficial and distracting. Same goes for Old English poetic diction.

In Bea Wolf, though, the kennings work. They evoke a delightful mock-heroic style, a comic admixture of the grandiose with the ridiculous. These kennings appear quickly in the text. In the catalogue of great kids who have preceded Carl, we read such things as “Tanya, treat-taker, terror of Halloween, her costume-cache vast,” and “Shawn, peace-shatterer, shrieked he’d never depart the park; his shame-blasted parents bargained” (5, 6). Although perhaps not always true kennings in the technical sense – Old English has a wide array of creative compounds, of which kennings are only one kind – these phrases succeed on a level that other revivalists have not (yet) managed to imitate.

And these kennings do quite well when describing the “age-withered night-walker” who haunts Roger’s hall: the demonic Mr. Grindel, the Faërie-world’s version of a malevolent tax accountant. In a book intended for children, scholars will naturally wonder how Weinersmith will handle the monster’s reign of terror, but we are told that from “Grindle’s family grew all the fun-grinders. The grim-faced joy-gobblers!” (29). Grindel is gloom’s guardian, the teacher of grief; the mustache-mouthed, tie-bound Baron of Boredom. He adultifies every child or creature he touches. He renders them dull, and his worse villainy is tidying up Treeheart and hanging up bland posters that read “Brush Your Teeth” and “Healthy Vegetables are Good for You.”

Aided by Boulet’s vivid illustrations, Weinersmith thus finds a remarkably effective way to portray Beowulf’s original blood-gurgling hall-haunter, striking a note perfect within a graphic novel intended for children. The result is the Modern Revival’s best current opportunity to hook some budding young poet – some future Tolkien or Auden – on an archaic medieval poetics.