the presence of many other adaptations that offered their own take on it. These choices also helped them to better connect the third act to the second of their screenplay, which is divided in the poem by a 50-year gap. Some of the changes made by the film as noted by scholars include: The portrayal of Beowulf as a flawed man The portrayal of Hrothgar as a womanizing alcoholic The portrayal of Unferth as a Christian The portrayal of Grendel as a sickly-looking and child-like creature (somewhat similar to Tolkien's Gollum character), rather than a savage demon-monster Beowulf's funeral The portrayal of Grendel's mother as a beautiful seductress, more of a succubus rather, who bears Grendel as Hrothgar's child and the dragon as Beowulf's child (this is also the case in the plot of the 1999 film Beowulf, with the exception that the dragon is entirely absent there) The fact that Beowulf becomes ruler of Denmark instead of his native Geatland This is not the first time that the theme of a relationship between Beowulf and Grendel's mother was explored by Gaiman. In his 1998 collection of short stories, Smoke and Mirrors, the poem Bay Wolf is a retelling of Beowulf in a modern-day setting. In this story, Beowulf as the narrator is ambiguous about what happened between Grendel's mother and himself. Themes Drawing extensively on the theories of Freud, Kristeva, Lacan and Jung, as well as Žižek, many scholars have discussed the themes of the film. In particular, the portrayal of Grendel and his kin appeals to multiple forms of sexual unease, among them the castration anxiety, the monstrous feminine and the challenging of traditional gender roles. According to Nickolas Haydock, the film reflects the "American obsession with sex as the root of all evils," to the extent to compare Beowulf's and Hrothgar's portrayals to Bill Clinton and the history of sexual misconduct that caused his political decline. Nadine Farghaly also argues the story makes the point that unbridled desire only causes ruin. Grendel's mother is represented in the film as a castrating, monstrous female who threatens masculinity. While Beowulf embodies phallic power through his physical strength, recurrent nudity and usage of a sword, all those prove useless against her, as she symbolically emasculates him by subsuming his phallus into the feminine power. This is metaphorized by Beowulf being seduced in her womb-like cave, where his sword strike magically