A veritable industry of popular Beowulf adaptations and spin-offs has been in evidence in recent years, bringing our hero to life on the page, on the stage, on the cinema/television screen, and on the computer/game-console screen. Beowulf has made it into popular culture at last. There is supposed to be no such thing as bad publicity, and so this unprecedented popular attention to the story of Beowulf and its hero should be taken as good news for the poem. The new versions of Beowulf may even eventually bring some people to the poem itself, curious to sample the original.

There have been notable adaptations of the Beowulf story in novelistic form, by Frederick Rebsamen, John Gardner and Michael Crichton, all three of these dating from the 1970s. Rebsamen's Beowulf Is My Name takes the form of a retelling of the story in the voice of Beowulf himself, who speaks from an imagined position outside his life and is thus able to include his own death in the narration; this appropriation fills in details about Beowulf and his story which are not given in the poem and includes additional narrative and descriptive material derived from other sources and from the imagination of the adaptor. Gardner's Grendel relates the story from the point of view of the monster Grendel, who becomes a conflicted anti-hero, suffering anguish in his hostility to humankind.