: Re: Adding depth to two-dimensional heroes from myths For the recent writing exercise I wanted to tackle Beowulf's character. In the original saga, the hero Beowulf comes to the aid of king Hrothgar

On the other hand, to reveal that a hero always had a Machiavellian side, would require depth, and thus question their value as absolute reference.
My question is: in the context of a mythological tale, how to expand the dimensionality of the hero so that he can be turned into a scheming villain, without losing its value as absolute reference, nor altering the setup of the story?

You're dealing with an oxymoron. You can't have a scheming villain and an archetipical hero in the same character, at least not with some serious mental gymnastic.
You could portray Beowulf as scheming, while leaving his peers and subject in the dark. This will make the in-world inhabitants of your novel to treat him as the mitical hero he's supposed to be. Of course, the audience will notice the duality of the character and he will lose his "absolute" value.
What you can do is exploring dark sides and flaws without compromising the heroic aspects. You will still lose the archetipical hero traits, making Beowulf a tragic or modern hero rather than an archetipical one.
Regarding your options:

Boredom is actually a perfectly nice reason for him to "seek" adventure. It wouldn't make him a clown. Boredom can be interpreted as wanting something more, a longing for greatness. This can be written as an aspect of Hubris (Wikipedia): a common characteristic of both tragic and Greek heroes, loosely translated as arrogance and pride. In this instance, Beowulf does not scheme for evil intent, he schemes because he genuinely believes that he's entitled to do great things, so he seeks them out. He cannot live content of what he has.

I agree that this option requires rewriting too much of the setup, so I'd avoid this too.

This is similar to the approach taken by the CG movie about Beowulf (again a wikipedia link).
In the movie,

Beowulf never slays Grendell's mother, but lies with her in exchange for a golden horn. The dragon that attacks him later is actually is own son, a shapeshifter.

While you don't need to follow the same route, the concept here is the same. The older Beowulf realizes that his actions weren't so morally uptight, and he rises to the chance to set things right in his old age. Depending on how you do this, you could preserve the "absolute reference" value of Beowulf, at least for the modern audience.
Nowadays it is widely accepted that heroes can fail, but they are still heroes if they follow a "redemption arc" of some sort.

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