"Over the final four months of 2007, there was no position player more valuable to the Red Sox than Pedroia, who played his position like a 10-year veteran and who every time to the plate swung the bat like someone out of Beowulf."
Okay, I'm willing to go along with this one; I think carving a swathe through the Colorado Rockies can, in the interests of colorful sportswriting, be compared to decapitating Grendel's mother. Others are free to disagree, I suppose. But I think we can unanimously assert that, however dubious, this usage pales in comparison to Karl Rove's forays into the field.
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I am actually inclined to agree. While I know almost less than nothing about sports, what I do know is that we strive to make connections between the past and the present. The more interesting, and literary, the connection, the, hypothetically, greater the chance of confirming not only what is being compared as something worthy of the past (i.e. baseball and Beowulf warriors), as well as proving how smart we are. Those who get the reference are rewarded with the pride of knowing why Pedroia is like Beowulf, and those who do not will, hopefully, read the book to find out why the connection is being made (or go see the movie).
Amelia I think you are right. I can't help but thinking this is a shameless plug. Don't we all find it oddly coincidental that the 2007 post season is so nicely compared with "Beowulf?" Can we say target audience? We've all seen the trailer and it's apparent that "Beowulf" will attract many young men who probably know more about sports stats than medieval literature.
"Perhaps Anglophilia continues to play its part, but if I were one of the few surviving teachers of Anglo-Saxon I would rejoice at the way in which such terms as muggle and Wizengamot, and such names as Godric, Wulfric and Dumbledore, had become common currency. At this rate, the teaching of “Beowulf” could be revived. The many Latin incantations and imprecations could also help rekindle interest in the study of a “dead” language."
Max, I found this in a article about J.K. Rowling's 7th Harry Potter novel! I guess there really is plenty more!
Although I'm absolutely positive this is a coincidence, reading the article about Rove, I did get the same sense of confused morals and ambiguous alliances we get in Beowulf. At one point, Alessandro Stanley says "Mr. Rove, who is leaving the White House at the end of the month, didn’t cut an especially heroic or villainous figure." And even Rove doesn't know if he's the sword-toting hero or the red-eyed monster.
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