Teaching Beowulf through Cultural Studies: Heroism and Adaptation across Historical Conjunctures

Abstract

This article examines Beowulf through the lens of Cultural Studies, arguing that the figure of the hero offers a productive entry point for exploring how texts articulate relationships between language, culture, and power across different historical conjunctures. Beginning with the Old English poem, the analysis reconstructs the heroic ideal and the value systems encoded in the epic, focusing on its negotiation of wyrd and Christian providence, its emphasis on communal bonds and the politics of the hall, and its depiction of monstrosity at the margins of human society. The discussion then traces how this heroic pattern is reworked in later appropriations, from Victorian efforts to establish Beowulf as a national epic to Reagan-era science-fiction rewrites to early twenty-first-century film adaptations such as Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel (2005) and Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf (2007), which variously humanise Grendel, question martial heroism, and stage the decline of the protagonist. On this theoretical basis, the article presents a teaching-learning unit for Italian upper secondary schools that combines socio-constructivist approaches with the conceptual tools of Cultural Studies. The unit invites students to read Beowulf and its adaptations as culturally situated representations of heroism, community, and otherness instead of as isolated ‘heritage’ texts. Conceived as an example rather than a prescriptive template, it offers a methodological model that teacher candidates in Concorsi and Percorsi abilitanti can adapt in designing their own units and illustrates how Beowulf supports the development of literary, cultural, and digital competences in contemporary classrooms.