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From Work to Text: Reading The Raven Waits as Beowulf Tan
Fiction
I f we compare fan fiction to mythological andfolkloric
retellings, we can see how it functions as the cultural
equivalent o f collective storytelling. Fan fiction often
retells the same events and scenes, but from different
points o f view, with myriad extensions and elaborations.
Other versions o f the same story may be just as
important to the fan artwork as the original source. (The
Fan Fiction Studies Reader^)
Beowulf, the “Ur-text” of English literature, has been faseinating
readers for centuries and has long inspired fictional revisitations as well
as scholarship. June Oldham’s Beowulf-based 1979 novel The Raven
Waits has garnered little notice in the United States unlike some other
retellings of Beowulf (such as Sutcliffe’s Dragonslayer: The Story o f
Beowulf, Gardner’s Grendel, and Crichton’s Eaters o f the Dead*) that
receive widespread attention and a substantial readership. Nevertheless,
people are still reading Oldham’s book more than thirty-five years after
its first publication. The Raven Waits was reprinted as recently as 2001
by the former Hodder Children’s Books (now Hachette Children’s
Books). It is now available in e-book formats through Hachette in the
U.K and Australia, and comes recommended on several U.K. websites on
books for young readers.^ Beowulf scholars have not historically
considered such novels as serious topics for examination. Recently,
however, there has been increasing interest in such “Medievalisms,” or
“the study of responses to the Middle Ages at all periods since a sense of
the mediaeval began to develop.”^ These responses can include such
popular culture representations as film, video games, poster art, comics
and mass-market fiction from people who have not formally studied Old
English, poetry or the critical history of Beowulf but who count
themselves as fans of the 1,000-year old poem.
“Fan Fiction” might be broadly defined as “the imaginative
interpolations and extrapolations by fans of existing literary worlds”
(Busse and Hellekson 6), though a growing body of scholarship
discusses much more complex and diverse