[Mediterraneo10]

> That film would likely not have happened if not for the success of the Lord of the Rings films

That particular film may not have been made, but it’s not hard to imagine an adaptation being made by someone even in the absence of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, which riffs on the Beowulf story, got a film adaptation (as The Thirteen Warrior) in 1999. The Beowulf story isn’t The Dream of the Rood or other esoteric Old English literature; it has adventure elements that will attract ordinary audiences from time to time.

> Coverage in literature sections of the newspapers or dedicated literary sites are far from mainstream.

Literature sections of mainstream newspapers are mainstream reporting, even if many readers are going to skip over those columns. And are you seriously arguing that mags like e.g. The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books are not mainstream? Those may be bought by a certain demographic of bookish people, but those mags are sold at ordinary newsagents. They are not specialist journals.

[krapp]

>And are you seriously arguing that mags like e.g. The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books are not mainstream?

Maybe. Most people read neither nowadays. Unless my understanding of the definition of "mainstream" is flawed, that makes them essentially niche publications.

But that wasn't actually my argument. My argument is that most people don't care about literature beyond anything not tied into a popular media franchise, non-literary books or books by famous authors, and Beowulf is none of those things.

[dwringer]

Whether "most people ... care about [it as] literature", I'm not sure, but most people in many school districts and universities were at least forced to read Beowulf as part of a standard curriculum, possibly more than once over the years. Isn't the question merely whether they would've cared enough to upvote or comment on the HN posting without seeing "Tolkien" in the headline? Beowulf is part of what one might call literary canon. What constitutes a literary canon is always going to be subject to debate, as it is ultimately subjective at some level. How one is to define "popular" media franchise, "literary" books, or "famous" authors can only pose an even greater challenge in forming any consensus.