One of the best DVD videos you are likely to see this year is a solo production of Beowulf. Yes, Beowulf.

Philip Larkin is reputed to have moaned a litany of the turgid works of English literature that he was forced to study in college, each more boring than its predecessor, in defiance of chronology and mounting sophistication, works from Beowulf to Paradise Lost. Today, in the popular imagination Beowulf is just a Woody Allen punch line. But once upon a time there was a thing called literature, then in its infancy. It dealt with the doings of great men, men the auditors of this “literature” were meant to admire, literature in those days being spoken, or rather sung, by roving scops, who were rewarded with food and shelter for their efforts. History was presumed to be scripted by great men doing great things, and their deeds needed recording so that the public could know how they got where they were now, and perhaps appreciate it. Though just as influenced by his Roman and Greek antecedents, Shakespeare surely, whether consciously or not, maintained the same vigilant scrutiny of the masters, it being easier to tell tales of mass appeal when the characters are “known” and their doings of vast importance. Over time, the masses were taught to read, it being believed that this would make them better employees. In the event, it increased their appetite for stories (and political change), and when the novel was the art form, it still told of the doings of the great. Eventually, the professors took over, and literature became a game, one designed to thwart the efforts of the dominant society to “inscribe” within the “text” the prevailing and imprisoning ideology. Thus taught, students of this new “literature” go on to write what they know, which is about seduction at the hands of their hypocritical professors.

Beowulf lies at the very birth of this literature as we know it, or at least once knew it. Though most people affect boredom with the poem, it has had a great and insinuating influence. Tolkien, for example, translated Beowulf (that’s where he got the noun Orcs), and its impact on the most popular film cycle so far of the 21st century is pronounced. Another contemporary fascinated by the text is Benjamin Bagby, a Medievalist and musician, whose musical ensemble, Sequentia, formed in 1977, recreates music from all periods of the pre-recording era. Starting in 1990, Bagby began mounting solo performances of Beowulf, accompanying himself on an Anglo-Saxon harp, a long, thin square of hollowed out wood with short strings attached.

I know this is going to sound a little PBSy, but Bagby’s performance is amazing. He doesn’t read the poem, so much as sing it, to melodies that emerged to him over the course of his study of the work (the music can even change from performance to performance). Bagby’s voice is a beautiful instrument, capable of doing almost anything, and his interpretation of the poem inspires a wide range of emotions, but wistful romanticism to rage in battle. Bagby’s stated goal is to recreate the experience of the poem as medieval audiences might have from a traveling storyteller. Bagby is utterly engaging, despite the fact that he is sing-speaking a poem in an early form of English that sounds Scandanavian.

Bagby captures the masculine urgency otherwise invisible in the lines on the page. Following along with the subtitles, the viewer is dropped into the mead halls and battlefields via Bagby’s marvelous instruments, both the harp and his voice. Listening, one realizes how the TV show 24 gets it right. By concentrating on the doings, both nefarious and well-meaning, of our leaders, their court battles and their power jockeying retinues, the show’s creators have made a suspenseful show that in essence harks back to the concerns of the theatrical literature from the Greeks to Shakespeare.

Beowulf captures on video Bagby’s performance of the poem in a Swedish culture center. Sitting the whole time, his harp on his left thigh, a subtly lighted blue curtain behind him, the full emphasis of the show falls on Bagby’s voice and facial expressions. which carry us powerfully through the narrative, indeed making us see that it is powerful. It’s one huge song. You may not understand the words, but then, how many songs have you heard on the radio without understanding the words?

This disc from Koch Lorber, which hit the street February 13th for $29.95, comes with two extras, each about 20 minutes long, neither of which explain how Bagby fell in love with Beowulf. In the first, Bagby is joined in a bookstore called the Poet’s House in New York, by three scholars, Mark Amodio Vassar, John Miles Foley of the University of Missouri, and Thomas Cable of the University of Texas, who served as a close advisor to Bagby in his creation of the stage show. They discuss the likely genesis and history of the poem, Cable guessing that it might have been written down by a monk remembering performances from his youth.

In the second extra, Bagby attempts to answer the difficult question of how he comes up with the music and melody of his piece. In the end, it is unanswerable because it is so embedded in his process, but he at least does go into detail about the structure and unusual facets of his harp.

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