Beowulf Read online

  In the literature of Western Europe, Beowulf is by far the earliest poem of such length and distinction in any vernacular language after the fall of Rome. In it we find the earliest references to heroes of such later Icelandic works as the Völsunga Saga and the Hrólfs Saga Kraka. It is a thoroughly English poem, comparable in technique, language, patristic wisdom, and beauty to shorter poems like “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer,” yet different from and greater than any other Old English poem. Beowulf stands at the beginning of English poetry, “between the worlds” as R. W. Chambers said. It salutes the dying of the old and the birth of the new, and belongs to everyone whose native tongue is English.

  Religion

  The Beowulf poet was either a Christian or very familiar with and influenced by Christianity. The very tone of the poem in places, especially in the final third, reflects the Christian patristic influence that pervades much of Old English poetry. But some of the principal characters are historically North Germanic pagans, and much of this tradition is retained by the poet, notably in some of the characteristics of Beowulf. The poet’s skill in blending these traditions is one of the most remarkable aspects of his work.

  The way in which the poet solves the problem of religion in this heroic-elegiac poem composed for a Christian audience is one thing that leads me to believe that the poem was composed not long after 700. At that time, although the Anglo-Saxons were generally converted to Christianity, they were also strongly aware of their pagan past. Thus the poet, while introducing the idea of only one god, a kind of Old Testament god whose name is spelled exactly as today, does not push things further, makes no mention of Christ or anything else in the New Testament. Also the concepts of Heaven and Hell were ambivalent at that time, especially in a tale of Northern kings who lived in the distant past, and I have not capitalized these words in the translation.

  Not one pagan god is ever mentioned. Although the Old English word wyrd, akin to Modern High German werden and based on a concept of “that which will happen,” appears in the poem, it is used only ten times as a proper noun, and far from being the name of a god, it is rather a kind of enigmatic force—once referred to as “she”—somewhat similar to Fortune in later medieval literature. It is used twice as a verb (to injure or destroy), once as a common noun (fact or deed), and once as an adjective (destined), and it is not capitalized by any modern editor of Beowulf. A significant passage, referring to Grendel’s abduction of one of Beowulf’s men, says that Grendel would have carried off even more men “had not wise God and that man’s [Beowulf’s] courage withstood wyrd.”

  God, by contrast, is mentioned thirty-two times as God and at least sixty times (I have not tried to count them all) under several other names—Shaper, Wielder, Measurer, Father, Deemer, Glory-King, and Old English words now lost such as Frea and Dryhten. Though the pagan Germanic tradition is reflected in many ways, one god, named God and introduced through Christianity, is in charge.

  Beowulf and the Monsters

  Beowulf is obviously a creation of the poet, though partial comparisons have been made between him and somewhat similar characters in folklore and Icelandic sagas. As related to other characters in the poem, he would probably have been born shortly before 500 and died as a very old man. His “fifty-year reign” (like that of Hrothgar and Grendel’s mother) is a poetic cliché.

  That Beowulf’s origin is obscure, that he apparently never married and/or produced any children, that he returned alone from the battle that took the life of his king instead of dying by his side in the best Germanic-heroic tradition, that he was almost entirely inactive in the Geat-Swede conflicts, that he seems at times superhuman and at other times merely a remarkable man, that he is such a curious blend of pagan and Christian (compared by some with a Christian knight), that he never appears anywhere else in all the literature of the North—these things are not bothersome or difficult to understand when we realize that a major poet was trying something big and new, and that he created for his work an original character to bring together all of its complex features.

  As for the monsters, they were real enough to Anglo-Saxons ten or twelve centuries ago. Grendel and his mother were creatures of evil and darkness, feared by the Anglo-Saxons before and after conversion to Christianity, seen by Christians as descendants of Cain, God’s enemies, lurking in the night outside the firelit halls. The way the poet describes these monsters, with just a few details here and there, somehow makes them more fearful and menacing than any kind of detailed portrait would have done.

  The dragon is yet one more indication of the poet’s originality. To quote Tolkien again: “. . . real dragons, essential both to the machinery and the ideas of a poem or tale, are actually rare. In northern literature there are only two that are significant.” One is the third monster in Beowulf and the other (which is briefly referred to in Beowulf ) is found in several Icelandic works, most elaborately in the Völsunga Saga. But this dragon was once a man, a brother of Sigurd’s foster father who became a dragon in order to guard a rich treasure and was mortally stabbed by Sigurd, then carried on a lengthy conversation with his slayer before dying. Compare this with the Beowulf poet’s dragon and you have once again a sample of the poet’s inventive powers. Dragons were of course familiar to Anglo-Saxons as large flying flame-throwing serpents who traditionally guarded treasures, but nowhere else in Germanic literature is there such a dragon as this.

  Old English Verse Forms and This Translation

  Old English poetry has no stanzaic form and no rhyme (with the exception of a few later poems) except by accident. It consists of lines which run on to form sentences, each line composed of two half-lines, or verses, with a natural pause between them, so that the sentences may conclude at line-end or between half-lines. There is no set number of syllables per line—in Beowulf a normal line contains between eight and twelve. The half-lines are tied together by alliteration of consonants or vowels, any vowel alliterating with any other vowel through an emphatic pronunciation of stressed words that causes a sharp release of breath approximating a consonantal sound.

  Each half-line has two strong stresses. Alliteration occurs only on stressed syllables. The first stress of the second half-line, called the “head-stave,” cannot alliterate with the second stress of that half-line, but it must alliterate with one or both stressed syllables of the first half-line. Recitations of Old English poetry were accompanied in some way by a harplike instrument—indeed, it is called a hearpe in Old English—which may have been used to accentuate stresses, possibly to “fill in” for a missing stress in a defective half-line, but there is no way of knowing just how this was done.

  Old English half-lines contain clearly defined stress patterns, bunching the two strong stresses at the beginning and then stepping down through secondary to weak, or bunching them both in the middle between weak stresses, or separating the two strong stresses with descending steps through secondary to weak, or approximating the Modern English iambic or trochaic measures. There are five of these patterns with a variation on one, some of them difficult to achieve in Modern English since secondary stress is not as clear or frequent today as it was a thousand years ago. These half-lines, or verses, with their clearly defined rhythmic forms, are the primary building blocks of Old English poetry and derive from a strictly oral tradition of pagan Germanic poetry at a time when there were no manuscripts, when minstrels carried tales in their heads and recited long poems, partly from memory and partly through the use of an oral-formulaic system which permitted them to compose as they went along, drawing upon a large store of “prefabricated” half-lines or entire lines and mixing them with fresh inventions. Some entire lines are pale clichés, adding nothing to the poem, like “on that day of this life” (which occurs three times in Beowulf ), but they give the minstrel time to think ahead. This is not peculiar to Germanic poetry—such lines are more frequent in the Odyssey, another poem derived from an ancient oral tradition, than in Beowulf.

  Because of the primar
y importance of the half-lines, which must have been recited slowly and clearly with distinct stresses and a natural pause between them in most cases, they are separated in this translation by a space, as editors print the original. There is often a contrast between both the rhythm and the content of half-lines which also brings them together in a way difficult to describe, and sometimes they seem to float, repeating each other with variation and usually contrasting in rhythm, or acting as brief clauses with an absence of coordinates or subordinates that seems natural because of the pause between them in an oral presentation.

  Since I am unaware of any translation of Beowulf that makes a serious attempt to imitate the original, I have tried in this translation to accomplish three things—to adhere strictly to the rules of alliteration, to imitate as closely as is practical the stress patterns of Old English half-lines, and to choose Modern English words and compounds that give at least some idea of the strength and radiance of the original while also reflecting the tone of the poem. A few restrictions upon the placement of unstressed syllables and requirements of quantity have been noted by modern scholars, and though these were certainly observed by the best poets, I have relaxed them at times to accommodate the stress patterns of Modern English and occasionally ignored other “rules” for the sake of a clear and forceful verse. I have often given up the secondary stress in one type of half-line (strong-secondary-weak-strong) because I had to choose between an awkwardly contrived verse and good words, and I usually chose the good words. Also, some “formulaic” half-lines are lacking a syllable when translated into Modern English (e.g., “Beowulf spoke” and “Ecgtheow’s son”) because I have preferred their simplicity to syllable counting.

  Old English poetry cannot always be translated line by line, though this is sometimes possible if the words survive in Modern English. I have therefore not hesitated to translate words or half-lines from one line and place them two or three lines below or above in order to achieve the best effect. Beowulf is a poem, and what I have tried to produce here is another poem, closely reflective of the original. A line like tholode thrythswyth thegnsorge dreah cannot be literally translated into prose or verse with anything like the effect of the original. It literally means “he suffered strength-strong thane-sorrow he suffered,” so that thrythswyth, a superb compound invented by the poet and composed of noun and adjective, is completely lost, and only the second compound may be salvaged. I have therefore translated “stooped in shadows stunned with thane-sorrow”—not literal but (I hope) decent poetry. I have also freely invented my own compounds, always attentive to both meaning and Old English poetic form, and have never misrepresented in any important way what is said or done in the poem.

  I have respected the Old English spelling of names to retain the flavor of the original, but have stuck to one spelling throughout. I have silently compensated for manuscript corruption and destruction and have chosen what I consider to be the best interpretation of perplexing words, phrases, and sometimes entire sentences.

  I have reluctantly inserted into the translation, at the beginning and in other places throughout, a few prose explanations of obscure passages that are important to the poem and were obviously clear enough to an Anglo-Saxon audience. I can think of no other device for solving this problem except the use of footnotes, which I dislike, or rewriting, expanding, and clarifying these passages, which would violate the poem and destroy their effect.

  My debt to those who came before me is profound. The translation is based upon five modern editions of Beowulf —those of F. Klaeber, C. L. Wrenn, E. V. K. Dobbie, A. J. Wyatt as revised by R. W. Chambers, and the standard German edition by three successive editors referred to as the Heyne–Schücking–von Schaubert edition. And now I have the new Mitchell-Robinson edition as well. My thinking over the years has been influenced by scores of essays, monographs, and books. Old English scholarship during the past century has been magnificent, and I would be lost without it.

  One request: If readers will pause from time to time and read a few lines aloud, slowly and emphatically and with slight pauses between half-lines, they may find a faint echo of what a recitation probably sounded like, though the harp is forever silenced.

  In “The Making of Beowulf,” an inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Durham in 1961, G. V. Smithers said that “English literature begins with a masterpiece, which has no comparable Germanic antecedents in the same literary kind or form.” Beowulf is indeed the first masterpiece in English, and it also had no followers, Germanic or otherwise, in the same literary kind or form. As I have said elsewhere, it seems to me that the poet is here presenting his personal elegy for the demise of an old and in many ways admirable tradition at the moment when it was giving in to and merging its best qualities with a new one. There is no other poem quite like it, and this translation has been done in honor of the nameless poet who created it, in an attempt to make his poem live again for the modern reader.

  SCYLD SCEFING, the first name mentioned in the poem, seems to come from the mists of legend. Later in the poem, a Danish king named Heremod, who died without an heir, is mentioned. Thus the mysterious arrival of Scyld, an unknown child drifting ashore in a boat, began a new dynasty. Yrse, the fourth child of Healfdene (whose name, not in the poem, is supplied from Norse tradition), was married to Onela, a Swedish king who plays a part in the final third of the poem.

  The ominous words “Gables . . . waiting for hate-fire” refer to another Norse tradition, not developed in Beowulf, of a long-lasting feud between Danes and Heathobards. According to this tradition, Hrothgar marries his daughter to Ingeld, the new young king of the Heathobards, but this merely postpones hostilities, and the Heathobards attack, burning Heorot, though they are finally vanquished. Upon Hrothgar’s death, his nephew Hrothulf takes the throne and kills Hrethric, Hrothgar’s elder son. Hrothgar’s younger son Hrothmund and his other nephew Heoroweard are also in line for the throne. These four people are merely referred to in the poem with portentous overtones.

  The descent of Grendel and other monsters from Cain after the biblical flood is explained in the early Middle Ages by the corruption of Noah’s son Ham, whose offspring continued the breed of monsters begun with Cain.

  One important note for pronunciation: The initial consonant cluster “sc-” should be pronounced as “sh” in “show.” Thus “Scyld Scefing” (above) should be pronounced like “Shyld Shefing.”

  I

  Yes! We have heard of years long vanished

  how Spear-Danes struck sang victory-songs

  raised from a wasteland walls of glory.

  When Scyld Scefing shamed his enemies

  measured meadhalls made them his own

  since down by the sea-swirl sent from nowhere

  the Danes found him floating with gifts

  bound to their shore. Scyld grew tall then

  roamed the waterways rode through the lands

  10

  till every strongman each warleader

  sailed the whalepaths sought him with gold

  there knelt to him. That was a king!

  Time brought to him birth for his people

  a gift to the Danes who had grieved too long

  cold and kingless—the Keeper of men

  shortened their longing with Scyld’s man-child

  sunlight for darkness. To this son the Wielder

  Life-Lord of men loaned a king’s heart

  banishing the ache of a barren meadhall.

  20

  Beaw was renowned his name went traveling

  sung wide and far by seafaring minstrels.

  So should a prince show his heartstrength

  by his father’s side share gold-treasures

  forge friend-warriors to fight against darkness

  in his last winters. With love and action

  shall a man prevail in memory and song.

  At the hour shaped for him Scyld took his leave

  a kingly departure to the King’s embrace.r />
  They bore their savior back to the sea

  30

  his bones unburned as he bade them do

  child of the mist who chased their mourning

  loved and led them through the long winters.

  Ready at seashore stood a ring-prowed ship