I suppose you don't absolutely have to read Beowulf first, but so many of the references and allusions would fly over your head. Being fresh off of the classic work, I think I caught most of them, and I especially liked how the Dragon got worked into the story. I'm not a lit-crit scholar, but it seemed like the Dragon was not intertwined with Grendel or Mommy (though the mightiest monster of them all he was).Modern re-tellings of classic works are a cottage industry of sorts with some better than others, and right now I'm looking at you, ridiculous amount of Jane Austen quasi-fan fiction. Gardner's fiction is all over the map, so he didn't fall into the Gregory Maguire/Wicked trap. Some of other titles look pretty interesting and I might go check them out in the future.
Finally, to those who just want to give up and watch the movie, let me just say that Grendel's mom, from the prose here, looks nothing like Angelina Jolie, not even one molecule of one iota.
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