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| | Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Hollywood films Old English epic |
 | | The film, one of two in the pipeline based on the epic Old English poem, is directed by Robert Zemeckis and financed by the millionaire American Steve Bing through his company Shangri-La Entertainment. |
 | | Ray Winstone, the British actor, is to play the hero Beowulf, who kills the man-eating monster Grendel and his equally nasty mother ("the swamp thing from hell, the tarn-hag in all her terrible strength", in Seamus Heaney's translation). |
 | | Apart from Grendel's mother, the monstrous "tarn-hag", the female characters in the original poem, thought to have been composed in England between the 7th and 10th centuries, are largely jewellery-adorned, gracious queens who are liberal with the mead. |
| www.guardian.co.uk /international/story/0,3604,1552061,00.html (353 words) |
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