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Write in your Commonplace Book and post a photo of what you wrote to Blackboard by 11:59 the night before class: Commonplace Book Entry 1. In your Commonplace Book Entry, you should write a 250ish-word reflection that does the following:Start by noting a specific moment, detail, quote, or specific theme from the text that seems intriguing, significant, provocative, or perplexing, and include that specific quote in your reflection, with a citation (citations = a line number for poems, page number for prose).Then, explain what stood out to you about this specific detail from the text. As you explain why this detail is significant, work towards developing a thesis, argument, or a question about a perplexing or confusing aspect of the reading, and explain how the text supports your point. Whichever approach you take, you should offer an insight that is not already immediately obvious to all readers. Instead, it should be an insight that will provoke the rest of us to further thought and consideration. As you develop this point, feel free to bring in additional quotes from the text to support your point.Finally, to wrap up your reading journal entry, end with a question about the text that you would like to ask the rest of your classmates. (Entries that do not end with a question will only be able to receive 2 out of 3 points, at most.)I have uploaded the text and the istruction for the Commonplace Book, don’t worry about the handwriting part because I don’t need to do it.
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ALSO
BY S E A M U S
HEANEY
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Death of a Naturalist
POETRY
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E
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Door into the Dark
Wintering Out
North
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Field Work
A
N E W V E R S E
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T R A N S L A T I O N
Poems 1965-1975
Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish
Station Island
The Haw Lantern
Selected Poems 1966-1987
A
M
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S
H
E
A
Seeing Things
Sweeney’s Flight (with photographs by Rachel Giese)
The Spirit Level
Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996
CRITICISM
Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978
The Government of the Tongue
The Redress of Poetry
PLAYS
The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New
York
•
London
N
E
Y
Copyright©2000 by Seamus Heaney
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Cynthia Krupat
First bilingual edition 2000 published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First published as a Norton paperback 2001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beowulf. English & English (Old English)
Beowulf I [translated by] Seamus Heaney. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Text in English and Old English.
1. Heroes—Scandinavia—Poetry. 2. Epic poetry, English (Old).
3. Monsters—Poetry. 4. Dragons—Poetry. I. Heaney, Seamus.
PE1383.H43 1999
829^.3—dC2i
ISBN 0-393-32097-9 pbk.
99-23209
W. W. Norton ir Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton ir Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T3QT
0
The Old English text of the poem is based on Beowulf, with the
Finnesburg Fragment, edited by C. L. Wrenn and W. F. Bolton
(University of Exeter Press, 1988), and is printed here by kind
permission ofW. F. Bolton and the University of Exeter Press.
^
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HugkeS
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Contents
Introduction
page ix
A Note on Names by Alfred
page xxxi
BEOWULF
page 2
Family Trees
page 217
Acknowledgements
page 219
David
Introduction
And now this is ‘an inheritance’—
Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked
In the long ago, yet willable forward
Again and again and again.
B E O W U L F : THE
POEM
The poem called Beowulf was composed sometime between the
middle of the seventh and the end of the tenth century of the first
millennium, in the language that is to-day called Anglo-Saxon or
Old English. It is a heroic narrative, more than three thousand
lines long, concerning the deeds of a Scandinavian prince, also
called Beowulf, and it stands as one of the foundation works of
poetry in English. The fact that the English language has changed
so much in the last thousand years means, however, that the
poem is now generally read in translation and mostly in English
courses at schools and universities. This has contributed to the
impression that it was written (as Osip Mandelstam said of The
Divine Comedy) “on official paper,” which is unfortunate, since
what we are dealing with is a work of the greatest imaginative
vitality, a masterpiece where the structuring of the tale is as elaborate as the beautiful contrivances of its language. Its narrative
elements may belong to a previous age but as a work of art it
lives in its own continuous present, equal to our knowledge of
reality in the present time.
The poem was written in England but the events it describes
are set in Scandinavia, in a “once upon a time” that is partly historical. Its hero, Beowulf, is the biggest presence among the warriors in the land of the Geats, a territory situated in what is now
southern Sweden, and early in the poem Beowulf crosses the sea
to the land of the Danes in order to clear their country of a man-
x
eating monster called Grendel. From this expedition (which involves him in a second contest with Grendel’s mother) he returns
in triumph and eventually rules for fifty years as king of his
homeland. Then a dragon begins to terrorize the countryside and
Beowulf must confront it. In a final climactic encounter, he does
manage to slay the dragon, but he also meets his own death and
enters the legends of his people as a warrior of high renown.
We know about the poem more or less by chance because it exists in one manuscript only. This unique copy (now in the British
Library) barely survived a fire in the eighteenth century and was
then transcribed and titled, retranscribed and edited, translated
and adapted, interpreted and reinterpreted, until it has become
canonical. For decades it has been a set book on English syllabuses at university level all over the world. The fact that many
English departments require it to be studied in the original continues to generate resistance, most notably at Oxford University,
where the pros and cons of the inclusion of part of it as a compulsory element in the English course have been debated regularly in recent years.
extent (if at all) the newly Christian understanding of the world
which operates in the poet’s designing mind displaces him from
his imaginative at-homeness in the world of his poem—a pagan
Germanic society governed by a heroic code of honour, one
where the attainment of a name for warrior-prowess among the
living overwhelms any concern about the soul’s destiny in the
afterlife.
However, when it comes to considering Beowulf as a work of
literature, there is one publication that stands out. In 1936, the
Oxford scholar and teacher J.R.R. Tolkien published an epochmaking paper entitled “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”
which took for granted the poem’s integrity and distinction as a
work of art and proceeded to show in what this integrity and distinction inhered. He assumed that the poet had felt his way
through the inherited material—the fabulous elements and the
traditional accounts of an heroic past—and by a combination of
creative intuition and conscious structuring had arrived at a
unity of effect and a balanced order. He assumed, in other words,
that the Beowulf poet was an imaginative writer rather than some
For generations of undergraduates, academic study of the
poem was often just a matter of construing the meaning, getting
a grip on the grammar and vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon, and being able to recognize, translate, and comment upon random extracts which were presented in the examinations. For generations
of scholars too the interest had been textual and philological;
then there developed a body of research into analogues and
sources, a quest for stories and episodes in the folklore and legends of the Nordic peoples which would parallel or foreshadow
episodes in Beowulf Scholars were also preoccupied with fixing
the exact time and place of the poem’s composition, paying
minute attention to linguistic, stylistic, and scribal details. More
generally, they tried to establish the history and genealogy of the
dynasties of Swedes and Geats and Danes to which the poet
makes constant allusion; and they devoted themselves to a consideration of the world-view behind the poem, asking to what
kind of back-formation derived from nineteenth-century folklore
and philology. Tolkien’s brilliant literary treatment changed the
way the poem was valued and initiated a new era—and new
terms—of appreciation.
It is impossible to attain a full understanding and estimate of
Beowulf without recourse to this immense body of commentary
and elucidation. Nevertheless, readers coming to the poem for
the first time are likely to be as delighted as they are discomfited
by the strangeness of the names and the immediate lack of
known reference points. An English speaker new to The Iliad or
The Odyssey or The Aeneid will probably at least have heard of
Troy and Helen, or of Penelope and the Cyclops, or of Dido and
the golden bough. These epics may be in Greek and Latin, yet the
classical heritage has entered the cultural memory enshrined in
English so thoroughly that their worlds are more familiar than
that of the first native epic, even though it was composed cen-
I
Introduction
Introduction
xi
turies after them. Achilles rings a bell, but not Scyld Scefing.
Ithaca leads the mind in a certain direction, but not Heorot. The
Sibyl of Cumae will stir certain associations, but not bad Queen
Modthryth. First-time readers of Beowulf very quickly rediscover
the meaning of the term “the dark ages,” and it is in the hope of
dispelling some of the puzzlement they are bound to feel that I
have added the marginal glosses which appear in the following
pages.
Still, in spite of the sensation of being caught between a
“shield-wall” of opaque references and a “word-hoard” that is
old and strange, such readers are also bound to feel a certain
“shock of the new.” This is because the poem possesses a mythic
potency. Like Shield Sheafson (as Scyld Scefing is known in this
translation), it arrives from somewhere beyond the known
bourne of our experience, and having fulfilled its purpose (again
like Shield), it passes once more into the beyond. In the intervening time, the poet conjures up a work as remote as Shield’s funeral boat borne towards the horizon, as commanding as the
horn-pronged gables of King Hrothgar’s hall, as solid and dazzling as Beowulf’s funeral pyre that is set ablaze at the end.
These opening and closing scenes retain a haunting presence in
the mind; they are set pieces but they have the life-marking
power of certain dreams. They are like the pillars of the gate of
horn, through which wise dreams of true art can still be said to
pass.
What happens in between is what William Butler Yeats would
have called a phantasmagoria. Three agons, three struggles in
which the preternatural force-for-evil of the hero’s enemies
comes springing at him in demonic shapes. Three encounters
with what the critical literature and the textbook glossaries call
“the monsters.” In three archetypal sites of fear: the barricaded
night-house, the infested underwater current, and the reptilehaunted rocks of a wilderness. If we think of the poem in this
way, its place in world art becomes clearer and more secure. We
can conceive of it re-presented and transformed in performance
ii
I
Introduction
in a bunraku theatre in Japan, where the puppetry and the poetry
are mutually supportive, a mixture of technicolour spectacle and
ritual chant. Or we can equally envisage it as an animated cartoon (and there has been at least one shot at this already), full of
mutating graphics and minatory stereophonies. We can avoid, at
any rate, the slightly cardboard effect which the word “monster”
tends to introduce, and give the poem a fresh chance to sweep
“in off the moors, down through the mist bands” of Anglo-Saxon
England, forward into the global village of the third millennium,
Nevertheless, the dream element and overall power to haunt
come at a certain readerly price. The poem abounds in passages
which will leave an unprepared audience bewildered. Just when
the narrative seems ready to take another step ahead into the
main Beowulf story, it sidesteps. For a moment it is as if we have
been channel-surfed into another poem, and at two points in this
translation I indicate that we are in fact participating in a poemwithin-our-poem not only by the use of italics but by a slight
quickening of pace and shortening of metrical rein. The passages
occur in lines 883-914 and lines 1070-1158, and on each occasion
a minstrel has begun to chant a poem as part of the celebration
of Beowulf’s achievement. In the former case, the minstrel expresses his praise by telling the story of Sigemund’s victory over
a dragon, which both parallels Beowulf’s triumph over Grendel
and prefigures his fatal encounter with the wyrm in his old age.
In the latter—the most famous of what were once called the “digressions” in the poem, the one dealing with a fight between
Danes and Frisians at the stronghold of Finn, the Frisian king—
the song the minstrel sings has a less obvious bearing on the immediate situation of the hero, but its import is nevertheless
central to both the historical and the imaginative world of the
poem.
The “Finnsburg episode” envelops us in a society that is at
once honour-bound and blood-stained, presided over by the
laws of the blood-feud, where the kin of a person slain are bound
to exact a price for the death, either by slaying the killer or by re-
Introduction
xiii
‘v
ceiving satisfaction in the form of wergild (the “man-price”), a
legally fixed compensation. The claustrophobic and doom-laden
atmosphere of this interlude gives the reader an intense intimation of what wyrd, or fate, meant not only to the characters in the
Finn story but to those participating in the main action of Beowulf
itself. All conceive of themselves as hooped within the great
wheel of necessity, in thrall to a code of loyalty and bravery,
bound to seek glory in the eye of the warrior world. The little nations are grouped around their lord, the greater nations spoil for
war and menace the little ones, a lord dies, defencelessness ensues, the enemy strikes, vengeance for the dead becomes an ethic
for the living, bloodshed begets further bloodshed, the wheel
turns, the generations tread and tread and tread. Which is what I
meant above when I said that the import of the Finnsburg passage is central to the historical and imaginative world of the
poem as a whole.
hall of his “ring-giver,” Hygelac, lord of the Geats, the hero discourses about his adventures in a securely fortified cliff-top enclosure. But this security is only temporary, for it is the destiny
of the Geat people to be left lordless in the end. Hygelac’s alliances eventually involve him in deadly war with the Swedish
king, Ongentheow, and even though he does not personally
deliver the fatal stroke (two of his thanes are responsible for
this—see 11. 2484-89 and then the lengthier reprise of this modent at II. 2922-3003), he is known in the poem as “Ongentheow’s killer.” Hence it comes to pass that after the death of
Beowulf, who eventually succeeds Hygelac, the Geats experience
a great foreboding and the epic closes in a mood of sombre expectation. A world is passing away, the Swedes and others are
massing on the borders to attack, and there is no lord or hero to
rally the defence,
The Swedes, therefore, are the third nation whose history and
One way of reading Beowulf is to think of it as three agons in
the hero’s life, but another way would be to regard it as a poem
which contemplates the destinies of three peoples by tracing
their interweaving histories in the story of the central character.
First we meet the Danes—variously known as the Shieldings (after Shield Sheafson, the founder of their line), the Ingwins, the
Spear-Danes, the Bright-Danes, the West-Danes, and so on—a
people in the full summer of their power, symbolized by the high
hall built by King Hrothgar, one “meant to be a wonder of the
world.” The threat to this gilded order comes from within, from
marshes beyond the pale, from the bottom of the haunted mere
where “Cain’s clan,” in the shape of Grendel and his troll-dam,
trawl and scavenge and bide their time. But it also comes from
without, from the Heathobards, for example, whom the Danes
have defeated in battle and from whom they can therefore expect
retaliatory war (see 11. 2020-69).
destiny are woven into the narrative, and even though no part
of the main action is set in their territory, they and their kings
constantly stalk the horizon of dread within which the main protagonists pursue their conflicts and allegiances. The Swedish dimension gradually becomes an important element in the poem’s
emotional and imaginative geography, a geography which entails, it should be said, no very clear map-sense of the world,
more an apprehension of menaced borders, of danger gathering
beyond the mere and the marshes, of mearc-stapas “prowling the
moors, huge marauders / from some other world.”
Within these phantasmal boundaries, each lord’s hall is an actual and a symbolic refuge. Here is heat and light, rank and ceremony, human solidarity and culture; the dugud share the
mead-benches with the geogod, the veterans with their tales of
warrior kings and hero-saviours from the past rub shoulders
with young braves—pegnas, eorlas, thanes, retainers—keen to
Beowulf actually predicts this turn of events when he goes
back to his own country after saving the Danes (for the time being, at any rate) by staving off the two “reavers from hell.” In the
win such renown in the future. The prospect of gaining a glorious name in the wael-raes, in the rush of battle-slaughter, the
pride of defending one’s lord and bearing heroic witness to the
I
Introduction
Introduction
|
xv
integrity of the bond between him and his hall-companions—a
bond sealed in the gleo and gidd of peace-time feasting and ringgiving—this is what gave drive and sanction to the Germanic
warrior-culture enshrined in Beowulf.
Heorot and Hygelac’s hall are the hubs of this value system
upon which the poem’s action turns. But there is another, outer
rim of value, a circumference of understanding within which the
heroic world is occasionally viewed as from a distance and recognized for what it is, an earlier state of consciousness and oilture, one which has not been altogether shed but which has now
been comprehended as part of another pattern. And this circumference and pattern arise, of course, from the poet’s Christianity
and from his perspective as an Englishman looking back at
places and legends which his ancestors knew before they made
their migration from continental Europe to their new home on
the island of the Britons. As a consequence of his doctrinal certitude, which is as composed as it is ardent, the poet can view the
story-time of his poem with a certain historical detachment and
even censure the ways of those who lived in Mo tempore:
Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed
offerings to idols, swore oaths
that the killer of souls might come to their aid
and save the people. That was their way,
their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts
they remembered hell. (II. 175-80)
At the same time, as a result of his inherited vernacular culture
and the imaginative sympathy which distinguishes him as an
artist, the poet can lend the full weight of his rhetorical power to
Beowulf as he utters the first principles of the northern warrior’s
honour-code:
It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
vi
I Introduction
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will he his best and only bulwark. (II. 1384-89)
In an age when “the instability of the human subject” is constantly argued for if not presumed, there should be no problem
with a poem which is woven from two such different psychic
fabrics. In fact, Beowulf perfectly answers the early modern conception of a work of creative imagination as one in which conflicting realities find accommodation within a new order; and
this reconciliation occurs, it seems to me, most poignantly and
most profoundly in the poem’s third section, once the dragon enters the picture and the hero in old age must gather his powers
for the final climactic ordeal. From the moment Beowulf advances under the crags, into the comfortless arena bounded by
the rock-wall, the reader knows he is one of those “marked by
fate.” The poetry is imbued with a strong intuition of wyrd hovering close, “unknowable but certain,” and yet, because it is
imagined within a consciousness which has learned to expect
that the soul will find an ultimate home “among the steadfast
ones,” this primal human emotion has been transmuted into
something less “zero at the bone,” more metaphysically tempered.
A similar transposition from a plane of regard which is, as it
were, helmeted and hall-bound to one which sees things in a
slightly more heavenly light is discernible in the different ways
the poet imagines gold. Gold is a constant element, gleaming
solidly in underground vaults, on the breasts of queens or the
arms and regalia of warriors on the mead-benches. It is loaded
into boats as spoil, handed out in bent bars as hall gifts, buried in
the earth as treasure, persisting underground as an affirmation of
a people’s glorious past and an elegy for it. It pervades the ethos
of the poem the way sex pervades consumer culture. And yet the
bullion with which Waels’s son, Sigemund, weighs down the
Introduction
xvii
hold after an earlier dragon-slaying triumph (in the old days,
long before Beowulf’s time) is a more trustworthy substance than
that which is secured behind the walls of Beowulf’s barrow. By
the end of the poem, gold has suffered a radiation from the
Christian vision. It is not that it yet equals riches in the medieval
sense of worldly corruption, just that its status as the ore of all
value has been put in doubt. It is lsene, transitory, passing from
hand to hand, and its changed status is registered as a symptom
of the changed world. Once the dragon is disturbed, the melancholy and sense of displacement which pervade the last movement of the poem enter the hoard as a disabling and ominous
light. And the dragon himself, as a genius of the older order, is
bathed in this light, so that even as he begins to stir, the reader
has a premonition that the days of his empery are numbered.
Nevertheless, the dragon has a wonderful inevitability about
him and a unique glamour. It is not that the other monsters are
lacking in presence and aura; it is more that they remain, for all
the s e a around cliffs,” utterly a manifestation of the Germanic
heroic code.
Enter then, fifty years later, the dragon. From his dry-stone
vault
> from a nest where he is heaped in coils around the bodyheated gold. Once he is wakened, there is something glorious in
the way he manifests himself, a Fourth of July effulgence fireworking its path across the night sky; and yet, because of the
centuries he has spent dormant in the tumulus, there is a foundedness as well as a lambency about him. He is at once a stratum
of
the earth and a streamer in the air, no painted dragon but a figure
of real oneiric power, one that can easily survive the prejudice
which arises at the very mention of the word “dragon.”
Whether in medieval art or in modern Disney cartoons, the
dragon can strike us as far less horrific than he is meant to be, but
in
the final movement of Beowulf, he lodges himself in the imaginat
ion as wyrd rather than wyrm, more a destiny than a set of reptilian vertebrae.
their power to terrorize, creatures of the physical world. Grendel
comes alive in the reader’s imagination as a kind of dog-breath
in the dark, a fear of collision with some hard-boned and immensely strong android frame, a mixture of Caliban and hoplite.
And while his mother too has a definite brute-bearing about her,
a creature of slouch and lunge on land if seal-swift in the water,
she nevertheless retains a certain non-strangeness. As antagonists of a hero being tested, Grendel and his mother possess an
appropriate head-on strength. The poet may need them as
ures who do the devil’s work, but the poem needs them more as
figures who call up and show off Beowulf’s physical might and
his superb gifts as a warrior. They are the right enemies for a
Grendel and his mother enter Beowulf’s life from the outside,
accidentally, challenges which in other circumstances he might
not
have taken up, enemies from whom he might have been distracted or deflected. The dragon, on the other hand, is a given of
his home ground, abiding in his underearth as in his understandin
& waiting for the meeting, the watcher at the ford, the questione
r who sits so sly, the “lion-limb,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins
might have called him, against whom Beowulf’s body and soul
m
u s t measure themselves. Dragon equals shadow-line, the
psalmist’s valley of the shadow of death, the embodiment of a
knowledge deeply ingrained in the species which is the very
knowledge of the price to be paid for physical and spiritual sur-
young glory-hunter, instigators of the formal boast, worthy
trophies to be carried back from the grim testing-ground—
Grendel’s arm is ripped off and nailed up, his head severed and
paraded in Heorot. It is all consonant with the surge of youth
and the compulsion to win fame “as wide as the wind’s home, /
xviii
|
Introduction
as
fig-
vival.
Ir
has often been observed that all the scriptural references in
Beowulf are to the Old Testament. The poet is more in sympathy
with the tragic, waiting, unredeemed phase of things than with
any transcendental promise. Beowulf’s mood as he gets ready to
Introduction
|
xix
The wisdom
°fa8e is worthless to him’
8
fi
Z’ he wakes to remember
that his cMd has
8one; he has n0 interest
in livin
heir
8 on until another
rS born in the Ml
” •’
fight the d r a g o n – w h o could be read as a projection of Beowulf’s
own chthonic wisdom refined in the crucible of experience-recalls the mood of other tragic heroes: Oedipus at Colonus, Lear at
his “ripeness is all” extremity, Hamlet in the last illuminations of
his “prophetic soul”:
Mornin
„ „„„,, u
.•
no easy bargain
would be made in that place by any man.
The veteran king sat down on the cliff-top.
He wished good luck to the Geats who had shared
his hearth and his gold. He was sad at heart,
unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.
His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain. (II. 2415-21)
a er mornin
Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed
° 6
and sin s a lament;
2
^ything seems too large,
the steadings and the fields.
Such
P a s s a § e s m a r k a n u l t i m a t e s t a S e i n P o e t i c attainment; they
^aginative equivalent of Beowulf’s spiritual state at the
are the
end
‘ w h e n h e t e l l s h i s m e n t h a t ” d o o m o f b a t t l e w i l 1 b e a r [theirl
y ‘ ” i n the s a m e w a ^ t h a t t h e ^a-journeys so vividly de-
lord awa
scribed in lines 210-28 and 1903-24 are the equivalent of his exHere the poet attains a level of insight that approaches the visionary. The subjective and the inevitable are in perfect balance, what
is solidly established is bathed in an element which is completely
sixth-sensed, and indeed the whole slow-motion, constantly selfdeferring approach to the hero’s death and funeral continues to
be like this. Beowulf’s soul may not yet have fled “to its destined
place among the steadfast ones,” but there is already a beyond,1
. . 1.
.
,.. , . 1 .
, ,
the-grave aspect to him, a revenant quality about his resoluteness.
This is not just metrical narrative full of anthropological interest
and typical heroic-age motifs; it is poetry of a high order, in which
passages of great lyric intensity-such as the “Lay of the Last Survivor” (11. 2247-^6) and, even more remarkably, the so-called “Father’s Lament” (11. 2 4 4 4 ^ 2 ) – r i s e like emanations from some
fissure in the bedrock of the human capacity to endure:
KX
”
e
‘
A t these m o m e n t s of l
Y™ intensity, the keel of the poetry is
P*y
° n w h i l e t h e mind’s l o o k ° u t
swa s
y metrically and far-sightedly in the element of pure cornprehension. Which is to say that the elevation of Beowulf is alwa s
y ‘ Paradoxically, buoyantly down to earth. And nowhere is
Ms m o r e o b v i o u s l
y a n d memorably the case than in the account
of the hero’s funeral with which the poem ends. Here the inexdee
s e t i n the
e l e m e n t of s e n s a t i
r
o r a b l e a n d the
ele
S i a c c o m b i n e i n a description of the funeral
re b e i n
ot read
Py
SS
y – i h e body b e i n § b u r n t ‘ a n d ihe b a r r o w b e i n §
constructed-a scene at once immemorial and oddly contempoT h e Geat w o m a n w h o cries o u t in d r e a d as
^
^ flames c o n ”
sume the bod
of h e r d e a d l o r d c o u l d c o m e s t r a i h t f r o m a
y
§
late-twentieth-century news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo; her
keen is a nightmare glimpse into the minds of people who have
It was like the misery felt by an old man
who has lived to see his son’s body
swing on the gallows. He begins to keen
‘ e v e n monstrous events and who are now bein
S e x P o s e d t o a comfortless future. We immediately recognize
her
Predicament and the pitch of her grief and find ourselves the
and weep for his boy, watching the raven
gloat where he hangs: he can be of no help.
better for havin
I T , , ,.
J Introduction
survived traumatic
^
S ^em expressed with such adequacy and digand
^forgiving truth:
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xxi
On a height they kindled the hugest of all
funeral fires; fumes ofwoodsmoke
billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
and drowned out their weeping, wind died down
and flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
burning it to the core. They were disconsolate
and wailed aloud for their lord’s decease.
A Geat woman too sang out in grief,
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.
(11. 3143-55)
ABOUT THIS TRANSLATION
When I was an undergraduate at Queen’s University, Belfast, I
studied Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon poems and developed
not only a feel for the language but a fondness for the melancholy and fortitude that characterized the poetry. Consequently,
when an invitation to translate the poem arrived from the editors
of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, I was tempted to try
my hand. While I had no great expertise in Old English, I had a
strong desire to get back to the first stratum of the language and
to “assay the hoard” (1. 2509). This was during the middle years
of the 1980s, when I had begun a regular teaching job at Harvard
and was opening my ear to the untethered music of some contemporary American poetry. Saying yes to the Beowulf commission would be (I argued with myself) a kind of aural antidote, a
way of ensuring that my linguistic anchor would stay lodged on
the Anglo-Saxon sea-floor. So I undertook to do it.
Very soon, however, I hesitated. It was labour-intensive work,
scriptorium-slow. I worked dutifully, like a sixth-former at homework. I would set myself twenty lines a day, write out my glos-
xxii
I Introduction
sary of hard words in longhand, try to pick a way through the
syntax, get the run of the meaning established in my head, and
then hope that the lines could be turned into metrical shape and
raised to the power of verse. Often, however, the whole attempt
to turn it into modern English seemed to me like trying to bring
down a megalith with a toy hammer. What had been so attractive
in the first place, the hand-built, rock-sure feel of the thing, began
to defeat me. I turned to other work, the commissioning editors
did not pursue me, and the project went into abeyance.
Even so, I had an instinct that it should not be let go. An understanding I had worked out for myself concerning my own Iinguistic and literary origins made me reluctant to abandon the
task. I had noticed, for example, that without any conscious intent on my part certain lines in the first poem in my first book
conformed to the requirements of Anglo-Saxon metrics. These
lines were made up of two balancing halves, each half containing
two stressed syllables—”the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
/ My father, digging. I look down”—and in the case of the second line, there was alliteration linking “digging” and “down”
across the caesura. Part of me, in other words, had been writing
Anglo-Saxon from the start.
This was not surprising, given that the poet who had first
formed my ear was Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins was a chip
off the Old English block, and the earliest lines I published when
I was a student were as much pastiche Anglo-Saxon as they were
pastiche Hopkins: “Starling thatch-watches and sudden swallow
/ Straight breaks to mud-nest, home-rest rafter” and so on. I
have written about all this elsewhere and about the relation of
my Hopkins ventriloquism to the speech patterns of Ulster—especially as these were caricatured by the poet W. R. Rodgers. Ulster people, according to Rodgers, are “an abrupt people / who
like the spiky consonants of speech / and think the soft ones
cissy” and get a kick out of “anything that gives or takes attack /
like Micks, Teagues, tinkers’ gets, Vatican.”
Joseph Brodsky once said that poets’ biographies are present in
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:iv
the sounds they make and I suppose all I am saying is that I consider Beowulf to be part of my voice-right. And yet to persuade
myself that I was born into its language and that its language
was born into me took a while: for somebody who grew up in the
political and cultural conditions of Lord Brookeborough’s Northern Ireland, it could hardly have been otherwise.
Sprung from an Irish nationalist background and educated at a
Northern Irish Catholic school, I had learned the Irish language
and lived within a cultural and ideological frame that regarded it
as
