Anglo-Saxonist Madness
Madness has clearly overtaken the Anglo-Saxonist community. In the same electronic breath, there are people attacking the very notion of creating back-story or doing any form of rewriting when adapting a literary text into a movie while at the same time holding up adaptations of Shakespeare's plays as evidence as to how such acts are violence committed against these literary texts. The fact that Shakespeare himself happily pillaged other works for material, creating back-stories and rewriting what he found, is somehow being forgotten here. One might compare, for example, the story of Amleth in Saxo Gramaticus' History of the Danish People and Shakespeare's Hamlet, or one might compare Macbeth to Holinshed's Chronicles. Or one might wonder about Shakespeare's decision to make Richard III a deformed humpback. Of course, the problem with my argument here is that Shakespeare is himself sacred and, therefore, he is allowed to do what mear mortals should not dare to attempt.

Any way, I offer these two posts, "Neil Gaiman, Roger Avary, and Robert Zemeckis are spitting on our grandmothers" and "I'm 'an overly literal twit'," as evidence that some of the Anglo-Saxonist community has gone mad.