There’s a raging argument about Beowulf going on in the British press. Or perhaps that’s not the way to put it. There’s certainly a raging argument, precipitated when Jerry Hall — the former fashion model and wife of Mick Jagger, and a woman not previously celebrated for the beauty of her literary judgments — cast the deciding vote to give the prestigious Whitbread literary prize to Seamus Heaney’s new translation of the Old English epic poem. But what it all has to do with Beowulf remains a question.
One judge pointed out that the Whitbread prize (set up by a British brewery) was supposed to go to the “most enjoyable book of the year,” which obviously couldn’t be anything to do with Beowulf. Another judge countered that the runner-up, J. K. Rowling’s latest children’s novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is “derivative, traditional, and not particularly well-written.” A British writer complained that Beowulf is merely “a boring book about dragons,” while William Safire weighed in from America to predict the death of Western culture if Harry Potter were touted as anything other than children’s reading — which seems to cast Jerry Hall in the role of Beowulf himself, saving us all from the monsters.
In the midst of the brouhaha, however, there seems to have emerged a curious consensus that Beowulf is boring: either a dull classic we must — for the good of civilization — keep pretending to like, or a dull classic we can — after hundreds of years of hypocrisy — finally admit bores us to tears. It’s all very odd, for you would think that if there were ever a story that wasn’t dull, it would be the tale in Beowulf.
The plot is easily summarized. Young Beowulf — a favorite in his home court — sails to Denmark from southern Sweden to rid a splendid hall called Heorot of a giant in human form who for twelve years has come in the night to slaughter and devour anyone who sleeps in it. Beowulf and fourteen companions arrive in Denmark and are feasted in Heorot. That evening, as the visitors settle in, the giant Grendel enters, bursting the iron doors of the hall with a single blow, and kills one of Beowulf’s companions. But the young hero rises up to wrestle the monster, and Grendel, his arm torn from his shoulder, staggers off to die.
The next day, his bloody tracks are found running off into a distant lake, and everyone celebrates — the Danish King Hrothgar and his court spending the night in Heorot for the first time in twelve years. But to everyone’s surprise, Grendel’s monstrous mother turns up to avenge her son and kills one of the Danish nobles.
Beowulf goes to the lake, swims down to find Grendel’s mother in a vaulted chamber under the waves, kills her, and cuts off the head of Grendel’s corpse to bring back in triumph. The whole court rejoices, and the king loads Beowulf with the interlocking gold rings that served as money. (“Ring” in Old English is beag, and King Hrothgar is thus given the title of “ring-giver” or beag-gifa — which generations of graduate students have mockingly rendered as “bagel bestower.”)
Laden with bagels, Beowulf goes home to Sweden, where he eventually receives the throne and reigns in peace for fifty years. But then his land is ravaged by a wyrm, a serpent or dragon. With some companions, Beowulf journeys to the dragon’s barrow, stands by its steaming entrance, and gives the dragon a challenging shout.
The dragon comes out breathing flames. Beowulf is almost overpowered, but the single companion who has not run away comes to his aid, and together they slay the dragon. This time, Beowulf is mortally wounded, but he lives to see the treasure brought out of the dragon’s barrow — its wergild, so to speak. His people give Beowulf a splendid funeral pyre and celebrate him in the last lines of the poem (as Heaney renders them):
They said that of all the kings upon the earth,
he was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.
What a story! The only thing it lacks is a love interest. And what a hero! Beowulf is both magnanimous, like a good Christian, and magnificent, like a good pagan. But then, he can be both pagan and Christian, because the people who told the story were Christians who considered themselves the descendants of this pagan hero.
Beowulf survives in only one manuscript, written around A.D. 1000, but neither the author nor even the exact century of composition is known. It is written in the Anglo-Saxons’ Old English, but there are historical names, places, and events preserved in Beowulf from before the pagan Germanic Anglo-Saxons overran the Celtic people of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. Perhaps the poem is the sole survivor of a thriving epic tradition. Its Old English is a simple language and uses simple tenses in simple clauses for the most part. (There is nothing in Beowulf like, for instance, the complex grammatical tenses, moods, and voices of Virgil’s Aeneid.)
Instead, to create its poetry, Beowulf uses a compact and weighty four-beat line that naturally divides into two. In the first half of the line, two formal alliterative beats — words beginning with the same sound — are used, and in the second half one more is used, usually falling on the third beat.
Thus the fourth and fifth lines of the poem read: Oft Scyld Scefing Sceathena threatum / monegum magthum Meodosetla ofteah. Transliterated word for word, this means Often Shield Sheafson [of] enemies crowds / [from] many peoples meadseats off-tugged. Heaney renders it in modern English alliteration thus: There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes, / A wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes. (It’s too bad Heaney left out the oft; wrecking mead halls wasn’t the only thing Sheafson did. But for the interested reader, this new edition prints the original text opposite the translation.)
Beowulf also uses a system of asides, digressions, references to future and past events, and epithets — kennings — that make the tale more formal and sophisticated. The sea is the “swan’s road,” for instance, and Beowulf the “prince of the rings.” We know that the reciting of the poem was accompanied by a lyre, but we do not know just when the lyre was plucked, whether on the beat or during pauses in the lines. In his 1922 scholarly edition, Frederick Klaeber advises that “in order to appreciate the poem fully, we must by all means read it aloud with due regard for scansion and expression. Nor should we be afraid of shouting at the proper time.”
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nationalist sentiments encouraged folklorists to claim a great deal for Beowulf, elevating it above such “artificial” southern European inventions as the medieval romance legends or the Aeneid. (The further north, the more authentic the folklore, it was claimed; on such grounds German scholars exalted the decidedly inferior Niebelungen Lied.) And since Beowulf was first taken up by the folklorists, some readers have chafed at its asides and digressions. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for instance, complained in 1910 that “the general impression produced . . . is that of a bewildering chaos.” But the same could be said of the Odyssey; it’s just that we know its cast of characters better: Circe is instantly recognizable; Wealhtheow is not.
Cambridge University decided in the 1930s not to examine undergraduates in Beowulf on the grounds that it was not a great work and was not even written in English (English being defined by such critics as F. R. Leavis to have begun only after the Normans invaded in 1066 and finished off Anglo-Saxon). Oxford is presently in the throes of dropping the poem, and American universities have long rejected it as too difficult even for Ph.D. candidates.
Thus it is all the more peculiar that Seamus Heaney has chosen to translate Beowulf. Heaney is not English but one of the Celts driven out by the Germanic tribes. It’s astonishing to realize that tiny Ireland has produced four winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, but it is perhaps even more astonishing to realize that Seamus Heaney is the first of them to be an Irish Roman Catholic. (The other three — George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, and Samuel Beckett — came from Protestant backgrounds.)
Heaney was born in 1939, the eldest of nine children of a farmer in County Derry in Northern Ireland. He was educated locally and attended college in Belfast, where he subsequently became a schoolteacher. But by 1972, after gaining some renown as a poet, he had moved south to the Republic of Ireland, and he has not lived in the North since. In 1981, he became a visiting professor at Harvard and in 1984 was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Robert Lowell called him “the most important Irish poet since Yeats,” and he is remarkably popular. His books of poetry sell in the tens of thousands, and “Heaneyboppers” flock to his readings.
Heaney explains his interest in Beowulf by saying he wanted to keep his English ear while he was teaching in un-English America. His translation (commissioned by the Norton Anthology of English Literature) was “a way of ensuring that [his] linguistic anchor would stay lodged on the Anglo-Saxon sea floor,” a “region where one’s language would not be a simple badge of ethnicity or a matter of cultural preference or official imposition, but an entry into further language.” (A cynic might also observe that, however Irish he may see himself, Heaney has written and taught for forty years in English — and the readers and money to be garnered from the widely used Norton Anthology are also not to be sneezed at.)
Often in his poetry, Heaney is a provincial concerned solely with the Irish land and his ancestors. He is regularly accused of having fled the troubles of Northern Ireland for comfort and success in the South, but his work is filled with images of the death of friends and family members, and he remains firmly rooted in the land.
When asked recently about his abiding interest in memorializing, he replied, “The elegiac Heaney? There’s nothing else.” In this sense, he is perfect as a translator of Beowulf — which takes elegy as its tone, a pervasive sense of loss, the individual being subject to a fate he cannot evade. At its close, Beowulf celebrates the hero in his very defeat, much as Heaney celebrates those who people his poetry.
But in other ways, Heaney is not at all the ideal translator for Beowulf. Perhaps no one nowadays can convey the unadulterated admiration for a male, physical, hierarchical hero that the poem requires. Truth to tell, Beowulf’s main job is to beat up “spurned and joyless” freaks. As Heaney translates it,
Grendel was the name of this grim demon
haunting the marches, marauding round the
heath
and the desolate fens; he had dwelt for a time
in misery among the banished monsters,
Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlawed
and condemned as outcasts.
Beowulf must then kill the creature’s mother who had been forced down into fearful waters / the cold depths, after Cain had killed / his father’s son and was grief-racked and ravenous, desperate for revenge at her child’s death. (The tale has been modernized by retelling it from the monsters’ point of view by John Gardner in Grendel and Michael Crichton in The 13th Warrior.) Even the dragon begins its ravages because its barrow has been robbed; otherwise it would have continued its inherited job of guarding its treasure hoard for many more centuries.
Heaney is more accurate than some in rendering what the Old English means to convey. Translators frequently ignore the magnanimous/magnificent paradox of Beowulf; the 1963 translation by Burton Raffel, for instance — untrustworthy, but with a singing feel for the syntax and rhetorical strategies of the original — represses Beowulf’s yearning for praise and translates the end of the poem as
No better king had ever
Lived, no prince so mild, no man
So open to his people, so deserving of praise.
Heaney’s Beowulf is better rendered as kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.
The Harvard Classics’ 1910 translation by Francis B. Gummere is so artificial in syntax and diction that it can hardly be said to be modern English:
Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings
won!
Of Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,
from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore.
Heaney begins instead:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and
greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
This is solid, straightforward contemporary English. But even so, it isn’t perfect. The first word of the poem is Hwaet (whence our word “what”). The obvious translations — Lo or Behold or Hark — were archaic even by the time Gummere was writing in 1910. But Heaney’s So suggests that some of the story has already been heard — that it’s beginning in medias res — which is not true. A word that means “Listen up” or “Look” is what’s needed. Heaney writes that he used So because that is how some of his formidable Irish relatives — “big-voiced Scullions” — would begin conversations. Unfortunately, it is a Scullion who utters Beowulf’s appraisal of his chances with Grendel:
If Grendel wins, it will be a gruesome day;
. . . Then my face won’t be there
to be covered in death: he will carry me away
as he goes to ground, gorged and bloodied.
. . . No need then to
lament for long or lay out my body:
if the battle takes me, send back my mail-shirt,
this breast-webbing that Weland fashioned
and Hrethel gave me, to Lord Hygelac.
Fate goes ever as fate must.
One expects better than these dull lines from a Nobel laureate. Heaney’s kings might as well be local accountants. Heaney wrongly believes his Scullions’ “small talk” will do the job, but Beowulf needs a translator more blood-thirsty and ceremonial than Heaney, like the young Thom Gunn or Sylvia Plath. In short, Heaney’s translation is too domestic.
For all its virtues, this is not a Beowulf for the twenty-first century. Fate goes ever as fate must will not do to state the overwhelming sense of doom in the poem. Indeed, one fears that this bland translation by Seamus Heaney, now taking pride of place in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, is what convinced so many recent readers in England — other than Jerry Hall — that Beowulf is merely a boring book about dragons.
Margaret Boerner is a writer and teacher in Philadelphia.
