Intro. [Recording date: February 16, 2023.]
Russ Roberts: Today is February 16th, 2023, and my guest is cartoonist and author, Zach Weinersmith. He is the creator of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. This is his second appearance on EconTalk. He was last here in January 2018 talking about his book Soonish. Zach, welcome back to EconTalk.
Zach Weinersmith: It is very exciting to be here.
Russ Roberts: Our topic for today is a bit unusual. You have a book coming out called Bea Wolf, two words: first word, Bea, as in the short version of the name Beatrice; second word, Wolf as in the animal. Bea Wolf. I’m excited to say that, right now–it hasn’t come out yet–but it is the number one release in children’s Norse literature.
Zach Weinersmith: That’s right.
Russ Roberts: No mean feat. Amazon describes it as, quote, “A modern middle-grade graphic novel retelling of Beowulf, featuring a gang of troublemaking kids who must defend their treehouse from a fun-hating adult who can instantly turn children into grown-ups.” We’re going to talk about Bea Wolf, your book, but we’ll also talk about a lot of other things–poetry and life and whatever else comes up along the way.
So, let’s start with the fact that this book is co-authored with an illustrator, even though you are an illustrator. Can you explain that?
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. Well, I’m an American illustrator. Boulet a French illustrator, which puts him, like, an order of magnitude above us. That is changing by the way. But, there’s a much deeper French literary tradition. I’m only half joking here. The French have a much deeper comics-as-a-storytelling respectable medium, and Boulet is basically top of that, in my opinion. And so, like, for a book like this, I could have done it myself, but I could easily point to places where he, I mean other than his much higher technical competence, there are a lot of subtle things he does that I would not have done.
I give an example, actually. There’s a part early in the book, maybe we’ll read later, about a boy who turns into a teenager–and this is portrayed as a sort of terrible thing that’s happened to him. And, I think if I had done it, I could have illustrated it, but I would’ve made the teenager kind of gross and teenagery. Boulet drew him sort of handsome, and like it’s not so bad that he’s a teenager. It’s very gentle; and I just love that. I would’ve done it like a stupid, bumbling way. And, he did it in this gentle, very French way. And so, it’s been magical to work with him on this.
Russ Roberts: So, the illustrations are spectacular, and we can’t show that in the audio version of this. But they are great, and you can get online and look at–and we’ll link to the book, of course, and people can look at what the style is.
But the other question, of course, is: why would you write this book. Beowulf is an obscure, 1500-year-old poem written in–I don’t even know what it is written in. It’s been translated many times. It’s somewhat Homeric in the sense that I think it was orally delivered during its beginnings and in probably many different versions. And, you’re riffing on this totally inaccessible poem–at least in its original version–and turning it into a children’s book. What were you thinking?
Zach Weinersmith: Well, so I’m an Old English literature major, so it is part of my working knowledge as a certain type of nerd.
But I–you know, Beowulf has a reputation such that people who read it get entranced by it. And, it does have these magical qualities in part because we know very little about it. For something like the Aeneid, we have something like eight or nine, like, book versions of it–manuscripts. For Beowulf, there’s one; and it was almost lost in a fire. And so, we just have this one document. We don’t know hardly anything about it. The scribes who wrote down the copy we have don’t seem to necessarily have cared about it this much. And yet, it’s one of the lasting poems in English.
Nobody wants to read Spencer’s The Faerie Queene anymore. People find Milton very difficult. But, people will still pick up, like, the Seamus Heaney edition of Beowulf and read the first 30%–which is all monster fights–and kind of mumble through the middle part. But, there is something very compelling about it.
In terms of why I started writing it myself, I actually have a very particular story, which is I had this idea of doing a joke version where the joke is that it’s kids, but they’re getting turned into adults–which is obviously worse than death. And that just seemed funny to me.
But, it turned out to be rich because it adds this element of transition. And, the original Beowulf, I think, very clearly is a story about mortality. It’s billed as a story about monster fighting, but it’s really a story about the sort of impermanence of life and all that stuff.
I used to drive my daughter to preschool and we had a 20-minute drive in the morning. And, my daughter is very smart, but just will not pay attention to me–still doesn’t pay attention to me. And, I swear she would ask me a question, she would be gone–before the question escaped her mouth, she would be somewhere else as I was talking.
But, for some reason, I started telling her this kid’s version of Beowulf, and she was just utterly enthralled. She wanted to know what happened next. You could see her clenching her fists at different moments, like, appropriately. And weirdest of all–originally, I was just doing a sort of, like, okay version. And then, I started dipping into poetic techniques from the original, these little thins called kennings and alliterative verse with breaks between lines and stuff. And, she just seemed to it more. And, it was like the more I poured on the fifth-century quality, the more engaged she got. And, there were whole scenes I was going to cut out, but I did a version for her and she was so utterly braced by it that I felt I had to keep them.
And so, it just kept going. And then, eventually, I had a poem I thought was unpublishable. And, through a genuine series of coincidences, we managed to land it somewhere. And, I could go into that. That’s probably too inside-baseball for people.
Russ Roberts: I want to go back to the line–I don’t mean to alarm you, Zach–but you said she’s really smart, but she doesn’t pay attention to you. The word ‘but’ could be replaced by ‘therefore.’ You have to be careful. Certainly, for children, that’s not uncommon.
Russ Roberts: But, coming back to the book–Beowulf the original–is the story of a king who needs a savior because there’s monsters that come out of the lake and dismember his men, his warriors. And so, Beowulf is this warrior king hires to kill Grendel.
SPOILER ALERT, by the way. If you want to skip the next 30 seconds because you want to read it, find out yourself what happens.
But, Grendel is this monstrous thing that comes out of the water and it turns out that that’s the least of Beowulf’s problems. His real problem is Beowulf’s–excuse me–is Grendel’s mother.
And, I have to just say–we’re not going to go into this in detail, but I want to mention it–David Whyte, W-H-Y-T-E, wrote a wonderful book a while back called The Heart Aroused. And, The Heart Aroused is an attempt–very ambitious–it’s an attempt to use poetry to deal with corporate life. A bit of–unimaginable, really. But, it’s a wonderful book and he has a chapter on Beowulf. And, he argues that what Beowulf can help you see is that lurking below the surface of the lake are your real demons. They’re hidden, they’re in the darkness.
And, not only do they come to get you, but there’s a mother of those demons, the thing that spawned them. And that is even scarier. Now I know your book doesn’t deal with the mom, it just sticks with Grendel, at least for this edition.
Russ Roberts: I’m sure there’ll be a sequel. But, you want to comment on that at all, or is that too weird?
Zach Weinersmith: No, that’s interesting. No, no, no. Like I said, we don’t know anything about Beowulf. The strong suspicion, as you said, is it’s an oral poem and then it gets written down. But, what people often don’t know, it gets written down finally in the 11th century, and then it’s just in the attic of English literature. And, for many years, it was not considered good. It was considered this kind of weird thing, like, fit for finding references and philology and this thing. And, it’s generally considered that J.R.R. Tolkien and another guy named Kerr [?W.P. Kerr?–Econlib Ed.] kind of said, ‘No, no: This is really, really good.’ And, they had their own interpretations of it.
And, what’s interesting is it makes a great substrate for these sorts of interpretations, because we have no idea what–like, there are whole parts and it’s not clear why they’re there. There’s a sort of mystery quality to it. And so, that is an interesting interpretation to me. It’s not mine.
I would say, one of the most interesting things I’ve read about Beowulf, is there’s a modern perspective that is, like: Maybe this is just not meant to be metaphorical. Maybe this is just like UTU [?utu? maybe meaning reward or retribution?–Econlib Ed.]–the fact that someone dies as a modern person as a universalized metaphor. But in fact, the people who have listened to it would’ve just been, like, ‘Oh, it’s sad that he died’–this real guy in this story.
So, for me, I take the same interpretation as Tolkien had, which is it’s the story about–he referred to it as heroic, elegiac, meaning it is a story about dying and a kind of particular, you might say Northern or, that would’ve been his perspective on it.
It’s interesting to think this idea of Grendel and his mother as sort of metaphor for lurking psychology. I guess the main reason I’m hesitant–and I don’t want to get on too much of a tangent here–but we know there’s a whole class of Norse stories in which there’s just a second monster. It’s like a standard storytelling technique.
And so, you can get–you have to be a little careful. You can press whatever metaphor you want onto it because it’s your choice: it’s how you feel about this poem. But there is a kind of anthropological aspect to it.
Russ Roberts: No, it is kind of cool, though. It’s certainly a standard modern trope that you kill the thing you think you need to kill and then, oh, my gosh, there’s this giant thing looming behind it. The fact that it’s a mom is really unusual and I like that interpretation–David Whyte, and he does a lot more with it that goes on for pages, and very thoughtfully. I recommend that book, generally. It’s a lovely book.
Russ Roberts: But, let’s go back to what you mentioned quickly in passing. You said there’s certain stylistic aspects of Beowulf–there’s alliteration. There are what are called kennings, and you’re going to tell me what that is in a second. And then, there’s sort of the spacing.
Talk about what kennings are, and then read us an excerpt, the opening of your poem, your book.
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. One of the things these old poems do–and there’s several traditions that do it–is they use these little phrases that are almost like riddles. And they get used repeatedly so you know what they are. For example, a classic one is ‘battle sweat’. And, if you’re a person from this time period and you hear ‘battle sweat’, you know they’re talking about blood. That’s what they’re saying. Or if you hear ‘battle adder’–there’s another one: adder, like a snake–which means an arrow. I believe that’s right.
And so, one of the games they would play that makes the story very compelling, and I think it still really works as a reader, is you come up with these little phrases that allude to something else.
Another classic one is, I think ‘seawood’ means boat. ‘Whale-road’ is one of the often-used ones. It means the sea. It just adds a lot of richness to the text.
And, it’s especially handy–I know this now–if you’re trying to make alliterative lines: that is to say, lines that usually have at least two or three words that are important that start with the same letter in a short line, it is very hard to do that.
But, if you can, instead of–in my book, I have an original kenning which refers to a river as a ‘sliding-sea,’ and I needed that ‘s’ sound. That’s the only reason it’s called that. I think it sounds nice. Yeah, it’s one of my favorite just because it also sounds like a kid thing. You can imagine a Viking saying it, but you can also imagine a kid saying it.
Russ Roberts: And, these kennings, these phrases which modern poets, of course, use as well, they’re typically hyphenated, at least in your book. I don’t know if they’re hyphenated in the original.
Zach Weinersmith: I’m not an expert in Old English. I know in translation, that’s usually what’s done. I don’t know if a guy in the 7th century would’ve done that.
Russ Roberts: Okay, so let’s hear the opening of Bea Wolf.
Zach Weinersmith: All right, let’s do it.
Listen to the lives of the long-ago kids, the world-fighters,
The parent-uminding kids, the improper, the politeness-proof,
The unbowed bully-crushers, the bedtime-breakers, the raspberry-blowers,
Fighters of fun-killers, fearing nothing, fated for fame.There was Tanya, treat-taker, terror of Halloween,
Her costume-cache vast, sieging kin and neighbor,
Draining full candy-bins, fearing not the fate of her teeth.
Ten thousand treats she took. That was a fine Tuesday.And Shawn, peace-shatterer, shrieked he’d never depart the park.
His shame-blasted parents bargained: ice cream for silence.
But there lay no bargains between lion and lamb.
Forty sunsets they stayed, sleepless and sorrowing.And Sonya, foam-slinger, shot so many skyward darts,
The summer blaze was blotted out, licorice-black,
And beneath that sun-starved night, no certainty reigned,
Save this: that Sonya would never assist the dart cleanup.
Russ Roberts: That’s awesome. You sustain that–I’ll call it bardic, that over-the-top style through the whole book. Am I right?
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. And, I’ve had a number of people who I showed the first chapter to tell me they were terrified to read the rest. Like, it would get boring. And they were surprised that they kept enjoying it. So, that was very reassuring.
Russ Roberts: Let’s talk about poetry generally. Poetry is a bit out of fashion these days. I think you’re one of a handful of poets to appear on EconTalk. I’m a huge poetry fan, especially for children: spent a lot of time reading poems–literally poems, but also rhyming books, Dr. Seuss being an obvious example, but also one of my favorite books, I’ll just mention here, for children, Seven Silly Eaters, magnificent book. And, poetry has a musical quality to it. It seems almost designed, when it’s rhyming or rhythmic, to worm its way into our brains in a way that prose does not. Tell me what you think about that, both for children and for adults. What are your thoughts on that?
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. Poetry has gone through a similar process that comics have actually, where, at least in our culture–that is to say, like, Anglophone culture generally–it is considered either a kind of derelict art form for academics, or it is for children. And, I think that’s unfortunate.
It’s funny. What’s strange to me–and I can speculate about this but I don’t know why–is if you go back and you read a book from, as late as like the 1940s or 1950s, a regular person will pop in some lines of verse just to be, like, ‘Oh, I was reading this recently.’
One thing I think about, there’s an almost forgotten author who I quite a bit, named Lilias Haggard. And, she was a woman who just wrote sort of, like, country writing. And, she would slip in little bits of verse.
But that’s not the fascinating part. I remember–I think I can recite it from memory–there’s a bit of poetry she put in a book and it was addressed to, I think she said it was addressed to a hawk and it was,
Oh, have you quite forgot
those flights out[?] resting thought
before this homely lot[?] half-tamed your opinions.The flowers and the stars
were once your only bars
and where the north wind soars[?] were your dominions.
And, the fascinating thing–I mean wonderful–but also, she just put it in: I remember her saying something like, ‘I heard this recently.’ And it’s like unimaginable culturally, right?
Russ Roberts: Yeah.
Zach Weinersmith: People don’t do this anymore. We don’t write letters where we’d say, ‘By the way, I came across this,’ or ‘By the way, here’s a little poem I wrote for you.’ But, for her, it was just normal. It wasn’t a flourish or anything like that. It was just a thing she would do.
And, what was fascinating, too, is she didn’t know where it came from. I was able, with the modern Internet, to find it. I actually bought the book by the guy; and all the other poems were terrible. She somehow got the good poem.
And, the other funny part is actually addressed to a goose, which kind of ruins the whole thing.
But, you can see it was engaged in this kind of process of sharing stuff. This used to be part of our culture. And somehow it got murdered; and I don’t know why. And, I think it’s unfortunate. It’s not just like a genre went away: it’s not like country music went away. It’s like music went away. It’s a whole type of art that no one engages with.
Russ Roberts: Yeah, it’s a bit of a mystery. Obviously–we’ll get to this later–poetry often, not always, but often requires work. And, work is a bit of out of–it’s a bit out of fashion. I love the poems that I have at my fingertips. I wish I had more. We’ve talked a little bit about this before on the program. But, last night, I was at dinner and I had an urge to quote “Ulysses,” by Tennyson. And, I know–I don’t know–I probably know 20 lines of “Ulysses” by heart. I once knew the whole thing. I recited in eighth grade–thank you, Miss Keneen, which I’ve mentioned before. But, it’s lovely to have it at your fingertips. I looked it up and I read it off my phone, the piece I wanted that was not at my fingertips–but just the thing I love.
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. I’m curious to ask: I know you are now at a university whose goal is to have people actually read the books people talk about. And, it’s an interesting idea. I don’t know–it may never have been tried. But I’m interested in: Do you force them to memorize? Because that’s another thing you’re not supposed to do that I think is extremely valuable. I think Harold Bloom said somewhere, ‘You basically cannot understand a poem you haven’t memorized.’ I think that’s a little much, but I would at least say there’s–you will never get deep understanding.
And, part of that is because, in order to memorize, you have to make sense of it. Like, because it’s very hard to remember something that’s just gibberish. It would be very hard to remember a 100 lines of nonsense. But, like, 100 lines of the Iliad is quite doable.
Russ Roberts: As far as I know–I can’t speak for every faculty member–we teach The Iliad and The Odyssey here, and I don’t know whether people memorize any bits of it or chunks of it. But here’s what your observation reminds me of: An actor who memorizes, say, Shakespeare for a role has to understand it to be able to speak it. And, as you say, otherwise, it’s just gibberish, especially in that weird Shakespearean sort-of English, but not the English we speak exactly, but somewhat related. And, to memorize it and to be able to deliver it must give an actor–a serious, Shakespearean actor–a tremendous insight into the meaning. Or should.
Zach Weinersmith: I think so. Yeah, it should. I feel that way. Like you, I’ve far too few verses committed to memory. But I do have some. And, I do feel like, when you read it, it’s fine. When you commit it to memory, it’s like putting a little room in your personality.
The other thing–like, non-trivially, by the way–I imagine a lot of people being hesitant about this thing, but, like, it’s very easy to memorize a lot of verses. You’ll surprise yourself. If you start trying to memorize something and just add a line a day, you would think would top out somewhere. And, it just becomes very natural. It’s part of your working knowledge.
And, the other thing–and this is getting dangerously close to talking about ROI [Return on Investment] for poetry, which I don’t want to say–but like, for instance, you’re on a walk by yourself and you’re not sure what to do with yourself. And, you can sum it up, this whole story and you can do it and there’s something very engaging about it. Like, you don’t feel bored. It feels almost like it’s part of the human brain that’s supposed to be there.
If you were a farmer in a field a few 100 years ago, you would have probably had a large collection of ballads in your head–well, most of which would have just been stories. You just had these: it’s like a quality-of-life thing. It makes your life better that you can do this for yourself.
Russ Roberts: Well, I think that[?] song does that for most modern readers–excuse me–modern humans. But, there’s something–I mean poetry, part of it is, what I’m trying to say here about parenting, I think, is interesting. If I play you, my child, the music, the soundtrack of my life–so, for my children, I would be playing them Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, some Madama Butterfly, some Frank Sinatra a little bit later–did not Sinatra when I was young, but loved him and still like him quite a bit: They don’t like any of that. I don’t know whether I’m a big exception or not, or an exception. But, I think often, children–teenagers–want their own soundtrack, and their lives are different and their soundtrack is different. Their friends are listening to free music.
There are kids who have old souls: They want to listen to Sinatra. But generally, they want their own music.
And so, the music that my kids got immersed in–that was mine–tended to be musicals that spoke to them–Wicked, Hamilton, and [?] Les Mis–those that would be our big three. And then, a little bit of Barenaked Ladies, and some other fun songs that we loved.
But poetry is totally different. So, poetry, they have as part of their soundtrack. It’s just not with the melody. It’s their own melody.
So, all I’m trying to say in a long roundabout way is that I think it’s nice to give your kids poetry because they’re more likely to take it with them than they’re likely to take your favorite music of your teenage years, say. Whereas the poems that you loved as a child, because your parents read them to you, they may love them just because you read those poems to them.
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. That’s interesting.
I wonder why that is, though. Why should music be so temporal and poetry as this–I mean, I guess because they can apply their own way to sound it as part of that. But that’s an interesting point.
Russ Roberts: No, I think the reason–actually, I don’t think it’s so different. I think most of the poems–my dad loved Keats. I have a lot of trouble reading Keats. I can read him a little. And, I like to read him, to remind me of my dad. But, the poems I love that my dad read to me or told me about were more Kipling, which are rhythmic, rhyming poems. Or Lochinvar by Sir Walter Scott, what are sometimes called story poems. And, those tend to stay around, unlike I think the music part.
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. Kipling is a very good example, I think. So, my understanding is he would literally listen to folk music in his head and sort of tap on his table as he wrote. And you can–I don’t recommend it because it’s not for everyone. This guy named Peter Bellamy, who actually tried to reconstruct what he might have been listening to and sing it with it. It’s not beautiful music. It’s very English, very screaming, bleeding, shouting ballads. But, you could almost feel like you’re in a–like, you’re really there dying of cholera, too. Yeah. That’s interesting. Yeah. Kipling is an interesting one to me because he’s obviously, being an arch-colonialist, is very much on the outs now. But you just–he’s so unreasonably good.
And, just the sound of words–I mean, the only Kipling people know is If, which I considered to be fairly mediocre Kipling. Like, it’s Kipling doing life advice, like, ‘Be your best self’-type of stuff. Which is fine because it’s Kipling: He’s the best at it.
But, there’s so much more depth there, it’s almost astonishing. And, yeah, Kipling is one–I have memorized a bit of–he’s, he’s–no, not in this one. I was planning to steal a line from him if I get to do a sequel. There’s a poem he wrote called “Gentleman-Rankers.” Which is just–so, one of the very best poems ever written, to my mind. And there’s a part that–I’ll probably get this slightly wrong, but it goes something like:
If the home we never write to, and the oaths we never keep,
And, all we hold most distant and most dear
Should cross the snoring barrack room and return to wake our sleep,
Can you blame us if we soak ourselves in beer?
And, here’s the really good part:
When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard-lantern gutters,
and the horror of our fall is written plain,
Every secret, self-revealing on the aching white-washed ceiling,
Can you blame us if we drug ourselves from pain?
And so, I love that.
I want to be clear. It’s: ‘Every secret, self-revealing’–that’s: self, hyphen, revealing–Every secret is revealing itself.
So, the theme is there’s this guy, is a gentleman ranker, meaning he should have been in a higher social status in this weird 19th century British system. And, for whatever reason–either his parents were broke or there was some fall from grace–he’s now with the regular men. And this is an impossible position to be in, in this culture. It’s hard to relate to and specific now, but I think it’s very easy to relate to in general that feeling of, like, being not in the place you thought you would be.
And, that scene of him looking at the ceiling–“every secret, self-revealing,”–it’s, like–like, only Kipling. It rhymes and alliterates. You could see all of his shame is just dancing above his head. And so, I was trying to steal that line, ‘every secret, self-revealing,’ but I don’t know where to put it. I just wanted–
Russ Roberts: Let’s talk about the original Beowulf, the 1500-year-old poem. Is it worth reading?
Zach Weinersmith: Oh, yes.
Russ Roberts: I mean, Bea Wolf is worth reading. That, we’ve established.
Zach Weinersmith: Good[?], Bea Wolf.
Yeah, let me talk about that. So, what is Beowulf? Beowulf, like you said, is an oral poem, we think. It has element–we think that because it has elements that are oral poem-ish, but we don’t know.
But, it seems plausible that, because there was this story that, probably had its origins in a lot of different traditions, somewhere in medieval Northern Europe.
And in the 11th century–the version we have gets written down, probably copied from a copy of a copy–but, anyway, it’s a story–it is usually presented as a kind of monster fight in three acts. Which I think is basically wrong. It’s how you will mentally condense it if you read it, is: There’s this–Hrothgar, the King, builds a great hall. Then this monster from hell, Grendel, comes and trashes it and eats a bunch of his friends. And, this is very sad.
And, they don’t know what to do. And, for 12 years, everything is sad. And then, this guy Beowulf comes over the sea and he’s just stronger than any man and he rips the monster’s arm off to kill it. And then, his mother comes and gets the arm back, and I think eats somebody while she’s there. And then, so, Beowulf has to go fight that monster alone.
And then, the next part that people remember is usually later: Then you flash forward. Beowulf is, like, seventy years old, about, and he has to fight a dragon. And it’s his last fight. [More to come, 29:47]
