The ancient Anglo-Saxon poem “Beowulf” was written by an unknown poet sometime around 1000 AD, and the movie that was based off of that, “The 13th Warrior”, was produced by McTiernan, Crichton, and Ned Dowd, with Andrew G. Vajna and Ethan Dubrow back in 1999.
Due to the fact that “The 13th Warrior” is a loose retelling of “Beowulf” one can expect to see some similarities between two works, however, there is one key difference that separates “Beowulf” from “The 13th Warrior”: the role of the 13 warriors within the two works. In the movie “The 13th Warrior”,the producers decided to portray each conflict as a group conflict, not just as Beowulf’s alone, whereas in the poem “Beowulf”, the group is almost completely ignored and Beowulf alone is seen as the sole-protagonist up until his death.
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The dynamic between the two works shifted from a singular conflict (Beowulf and Unferth) into a group one (Beowulf’s men and Unferth’s men).
This also happened at the “Battle with Grendel” scene. In the poem, Beowulf single (and bare) handedly “killed Grendel, ending the grief, the sorrow, the suffering forced on Hrothgar’s helpless people”. Yet, in the movie “The 13th Warrior”, it wasn’t a single entity that had to be defeated, but rather an it was an entire village of raiders who were harassing Hrothgar’s people, and Beowulf required the assistance of the community and his men in order to defeat the