NP Beowulf and Harry Potter

Doug Millison millison at online-journalist.com
Tue Feb 1 20:14:54 CST 2000


Dragons Vs. Wizards: Whitbread Flap Over Beowulf and Harry Potter

Will winning Britain's top Whitbread Prize last week mean a whit for U.S.
sales of Noble laureate Seamus Heaney's new translation the epic poem
Beowulf?

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, publisher of the U.S. edition, thinks so. The
house went back to press for an additional 5,000 copies to supplement the
15,000-copy first printing of the book, which goes on sale February 23. The
208-page, $25 hardcover will be stickered with notice of the award. Heaney
is expected to come to the U.S. in March, allowing for some extra
promotion.

The award prompted a nasty debate in the U.K., since Beowulf just beat out
J.K. Rowling's blockbuster Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

"If Harry Potter had won the Whitbread Book of the Year, it would have been
sending out a signal to the world that Britain is a country that just can't
grow up," said Anthony Holden, one of nine award judges, who voted 5-4 in
favor of Heaney.

On the other hand, A.N. Wilson, another Whitbread judge, said that Beowulf
is simply a "boring book about dragons." In a January 30 Sunday Telegraph
article, he said he wasted years of his life teaching the poem at Oxford.

He also argued that giving the award to Rowling "would have demonstrated
the cheering fact that in an age of videos and computer games, there are
still tens of thousands of children who still enjoy reading books. This is
much more interesting than the fact that there are four or five Whitbread
judges who are so uncertain of their own judgment that they want to be
thought highbrow, and therefore give a prize to an Anglo-Saxon dunderhead
rendered into Irish blarney."

Rowling certainly doesn't need to worry about sales, but all the hoopla,
which has received international coverage, has helped catapult Heaney's
book to the top of Amazon.com's U.K. besteller list. The Faber & Faber
edition has some 75,000 copies in print.

The controversy has traveled across the pond, although without the same
intensity as in the U.K. In the New York Times last week, William Safire,
not surprisingly, found Harry Potter a nattering nabob of infantilism and
stands firmly with the effete, impudent snobs.

In any case, Heaney may well revive readers' interest in the story of
warrior prince Beowulf and his quest to slay the monster Grendel. The
Independent recently recommended Grendel, John Gardner's 1971 classic novel
with the creature's point of view (available in a Vintage 1989 paperback
edition) as well as David Wright's prose translation (a 1957 Penguin
Classics edition is still in print). Since Heaney originally was
commissioned to do his translation for the Norton Anthology of English
Literature, readers will also find it in the anthology's seventh edition,
just out.--Judy Quinn

--PW Daily for Booksellers from Publishers Weekly, February 1, 2000

d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n
http://www.millison.com
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