Eaters of the Dead
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“When Eaters of the Dead was first published, this playful version of Beowulf received a rather irritable reception from reviewers . . . But Beowulf scholars all seem to enjoy it, and many have written to say so.”
I first read Eaters of the Dead in high school and didn’t know what to do with it. I sought it out primarily because it had a famous name attached to it and because many of my friends were gaga for its film adaptation, The 13th Warrior. (I hadn’t yet taken my plunge into early medieval northern Europe, a plunge I still haven’t come up from.) I got ahold of a copy with the movie tie-in cover and alternate title somewhere and started to read it.
My reaction, per Crichton’s later comments above, wasn’t so much irritable as bewildered—and slightly disturbed. What was this? A novel? A translation of a medieval manuscript? Are all these footnoted manuscripts real? Is any of it real? It couldn’t be real—I knew enough of the story already to know that—but if not then what was this thing?
Bewilderment
What’s funny is that, at the time I was reading Eaters of the Dead, I was doing much the same thing as Crichton. I just didn’t have it published. Besotted with half-formed pictures of the Middle Ages, my recent discovery of the riches of Dante, and certain artistic preoccupations that haven’t gone away (snow; almost all my books have snow in them), I was spending my free time hammering out line after line of an epic poem about the Teutonic Knights, a brutal war, and forbidden romance made the sweeter by vows faithfully kept—and liberally peppering the manuscript with footnotes, dates, alternate translations of contested terms, and excerpts of related text from other poets and chroniclers. I had discovered the fun part of scholarship, the digging and puzzle-piecing.
I finished high school and went on to college and Eaters of the Dead mostly receded from my mind. But some part of it, the part that had unconsciously jibed with my artistic and intellectual sensibilities, stayed on. While I had been confused and unimpressed with the book at first, I never hated or disdained it—a sure sign that there was something there I had missed.
Then 2020 happened, and to pass part of last summer teaching remotely and sheltering in place with family, I revisited it. Wow.
The story
Eaters of the Dead purports to be a translation of a text by Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, a real 10th century Arab courtier and diplomatic envoy. On a journey north (up the eastern side of the Caspian Sea to modern-day Russia) on behalf of the caliph in 922, Ibn Fadlan encounters a wild pagan people called the Rus or the Northmen. While staying with them he observes their customs, witnesses a chieftain’s funeral involving brutal human sacrifice, and is present for an emergency meeting following the arrival of a high-status messenger from the north.
The messenger is Wulfgar, son of King Rothgar, and he seeks the help of the local chieftain Buliwyf in dealing with a literally nameless threat. Ibn Fadlan observes the usually cheerful Northmen’s distress and foreboding and asks for an explanation, but his translators offer little and he senses it would be unwise to inquire much further. All he learns is that, in accordance with the decree of the Angel of Death, an elderly female shaman who had assisted in the sacrifice of a slave girl at the earlier funeral, he must go with Buliwyf and his warriors on their journey as a thirteenth, and foreign, member of the party.
Ibn Fadlan therefore unwillingly joins the Northmen on their long, circuitous trip northward by river. They portage between rivers, avoiding nameless threats in certain forests and riding as swiftly as possible through others, until they reach the Baltic and sail to Denmark. Finding Buliwyf’s home destroyed—again, by a threat the Northmen refuse to name or explain except to say that it comes with “the mists”—they journey on to Rothgar’s kingdom.
Everywhere in this kingdom there are signs of violent, grisly attack, and the only clues left behind by the attackers are grotesque figurines of uncertain meaning. Ibn Fadlan’s dread only grows.
Buliwyf and his men, including Ibn Fadlan, defend Rothgar’s hall against repeated attacks by a host of bearskin-clad savages that, Ibn Fadlan finally learns, are known as the wendol or “the mist monsters.” Short, ugly, stinking horribly, but powerfully built and apparently fearless, the wendol attack en masse, kill indiscriminately, and take the heads of their victims, never leaving any dead or wounded behind—until Buliwyf takes the arm of one of their number. The fighting is ugly and the losses heavy, and Ibn Fadlan is sorely tested. He also grows to admire the Northman and forms friendships with them, especially Herger, who interprets for Ibn Fadlan until the Arab can speak the language well enough to be understood. Ibn Fadlan also learns to drink and wench—a lot.
After an nighttime wendol attack in which the monsters assault the hall on horseback while carrying torches—an attack dubbed by the Northmen “the glowworm dragon Korgon”—Buliwyf and his band ride out in search of the wendol homeland across “the desert of dread,” visit a colony of dwarves living on the fringes of Northman society, and finally infiltrate the central wendol stronghold, where Buliwyf slays “the mother of the wendol” and is in turn mortally wounded by her. He holds out long enough to repulse a final, desperate wendol attack before he himself dies, and Ibn Fadlan witnesses a second, more moving funeral. The text ends abruptly as Ibn Fadlan journeys home.
The rest of the story
So much for the plot. If you’re just reading Eaters of the Dead for the story, you should finish it satisfied—it’s a real rip-snorting adventure tale, a classic quest full of exotic locales, strange customs, plenty of action, and a splash of horror.
But don’t some elements of that story sound familiar?
The movie tie-in edition I read in high school
It’s Beowulf. Crichton, as he writes in “A Factual Note on Eaters of the Dead” included in some editions of the book, wrote Eaters of the Dead on a dare, as a demonstration that, viewed with fresh eyes or from a new angle, the “bores” of English literature survey classes are still exciting, dramatic, and meaningful.
To do so, Crichton took an actual text about a real journey by the real Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, deftly interwove elements of fiction into the early parts, and from the first funeral scene forward constructed an entirely new, fictitious story for the cosmopolitan Arab narrator. This story positions Ibn Fadlan as the foreign observer in a party of warriors led by a brave and charismatic nobleman responding to a crisis in a faraway kingdom beset by bloodthirsty attackers. Later, our reading of Ibn Fadlan implies, these events would become the story of Beowulf saving Hrothgar and his people from the depredations of Grendel.
All of this makes Eaters of the Dead, in addition to an adventure story:
a euhemeristic take on Beowulf, a “real” version of what happened “before” the development of the mythic one that has come down to us in the poem;
a parallel story, one retelling familiar events from a different perspective; and
a fictional book, a version of Ibn Fadlan that, according to the story, Crichton and previous scholars cobbled together from multiple fragmentary manuscripts in several languages.
There are plenty of other examples of all of these things, but what I notice about many others is their often po-faced ideological didacticism. Witness the recent rash of deconstructive parallel novels about “marginalized voices” (i.e. minor characters) in famous stories. What sets Eaters of the Dead apart from so many of these is how much fun it is. Not only is it, again, a rip-snorting adventure, but it’s a fun send-up of scholarship, containing as it does an introduction, information on the provenance of Ibn Fadlan manuscripts, parodically pedantic footnotes (some of them much longer than the passages they seek to illuminate), explanations of variant readings, a bibliography, and an appendix on the “predictable debate” surrounding the wendol.
Jazzing around
Crichton is—as John Gardner, author of another parallel novel about Beowulf, put it in one of his books on writing—“jazzing around.” And it’s a hoot.
It’s even more of a hoot if you know the period or something about history and anthropology generally. Crichton tucks away lots of “Easter eggs” as bonuses for those in the know to enjoy. He has Buliwyf’s party visit the ring fortress of Trelleborg, which Ibn Fadlan describes in unmistakable detail, and of course the wendol are relict headhunting Neanderthals who worship bears and shamanic fertility goddesses, as evidenced by the instantly recognizable figurines they leave behind.
This is an anachronism stew—whatever historical events lie behind Beowulf probably occurred in the 6th century and Trelleborg wasn’t built until at least sixty years after Ibn Fadlan’s real journey, and that’s not even to address the survival of Neanderthals—and Crichton admits as much in his “Factual Note.” What makes all of these things fun is the little thrill of recognition you get when they come along, a bit of authorial irony that stays fun by never coming at the characters’ expense. Crichton knows and enjoys this stuff and wants us to play along.
Again—jazzing around.
What was most remarkable to me about Eaters of the Dead, as I reread it last year and listened to the audiobook this week, is how many levels it works on. It’s a satisfying historical action adventure. It’s a genuinely creepy horror story, with a carefully structured buildup and wonderful atmosphere and tension. It’s an engaging, vividly imagined, and just-barely-realistic-enough science-fiction story—the kind of book Crichton would become famous for—pitting Vikings against prehistoric headhunters. It’s a fun—and sometimes hilarious—pastiche of modern scholarship. And it is, in the end, a great celebration of Beowulf, definitive proof of Crichton’s assertion that great literature isn’t boring.
It took me twenty years to grow into, to see what Crichton was doing and to enjoy it, but I’m thankful that I did. Check out Eaters of the Dead sometime soon and see what level it works on for you.
More if you’re interested
There is, of course, the film adaptation, The 13th Warrior, which I haven’t watched since high school and can’t really comment on except to say that it has one of the best cinematic attempts to tackle the language barrier I’ve seen. I intend to rewatch it soon.
You can read the real Ibn Fadlan’s account of his travels among the Rus in a recent translation for Penguin Classics, Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North. Jackson Crawford has an excellent short video on the “Viking funeral” witnessed by Ibn Fadlan, described in his writings, and dramatized in both Eaters of the Dead and its film adaptation, The 13th Warrior. You can watch that here.
I reread Eaters of the Dead for the first time since high school last year. As I mentioned above, I just revisited it again in the form of Simon Vance’s excellent audiobook performance. Vance narrates Ibn Fadlan with a slight accent, which actually sounds more Indian than Arab but that helps differentiate Ibn Fadlan’s narration from the footnotes. I didn’t know how well this work work going into it, but I greatly enjoyed it.
