Is This Your Next Big Thing?

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Zach Wiener-Smith: I spent after news just kind of walking, wondering about it because I wrote this book. It has been the genuine shock of a lifetime how many people not only enjoyed it, but enjoy it for the right reasons like they didn't before. He says he's had several people tell him that if they had read it as teenagers they would be informative for them.Wiener-Smith on EconTalk: "I feel like the world is very different than I thought it was"

Tolkien read it as a tale about mortality. The poet David Whyte said it was a metaphor for the psychological demons deep in our minds. And that, insists the cartoonist and writer Zach Weinersmith, is precisely Beowulf's appeal: Its richness opens the door to endless interpretation. Listen as the author of Bea Wolf, a graphic novel for children based on the Old English poem, speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about poetry in general, Beowulf in particular, whether we should require students to memorize poems, and the value of stories for children even without a moral lesson.