Welcome back to the series “More than you ever wanted to know about Beowulf ” ! We’ve been talking about a certain Old English poem that survives in one copy that has endured fire, social upheaval, plague, and bookworms: Beowulf.
Beowulf is a living text in a dead language, the kind of thing meant to be shouted over a crowd of drunk celebrants. Even though it was probably written down in the quiet confines of a scriptorium, Beowulf is not a quiet poem. It’s a dazzling, furious, funny, vicious, desperate, hungry, beautiful, mutinous, maudlin, supernatural, rapturous shout. (Headley, introduction, p. xvi)
First, as always, language
If you remember, J.R.R. Tolkien reminded us that, since the poem is ancient and used a formal, mannered and somewhat archaic vocabulary when it was first composed, we should also respect that patina of age and decorum. Therefore, a proper translation will be reserved and in high, measured style, bowing to both the age of the poem and its own archaic mood.
As we discussed last week, Seamus Heaney doesn’t exactly follow Tolkien’s advice but draws on the rhythms of his “big voiced Scullion” relatives to produce a version that’s supple, plain-spoken, and rippling with quiet dignity. Heaney’s version brings a master poet’s sensibility to the ancient text, and gives us a beautiful gem of a poem.
Now another poet has joined the tradition, Maria Dahvana Headley. Headley explicitly disregards Tolkien’s proscription. No, Headley’s Beowulf is, as Lady Caroline Lamb once said of Byron, “mad, bad, and dangerous.” She’s well aware of all the traditions involved in translating Beowulf, and of Tolkien’s stature astride Old English literary tradition, but she writes that “perceptions of ‘literary’ and ‘traditional’ language vary widely depending on who’s doing the perceiving.” Even though she disagrees about the formality of the language of translation, she does agree with Tolkien “that the original’s dense wordplay must be reckoned with” (pp. xiv-xv), and reckon with it she does.
In contrast to the methods of some previous translators, I let the poem’s story lead me to its style. The lines in this translation were structured for speaking, and for speaking in contemporary rhythms. (p. xvi)
Her translation is a different Beowulf from any you’ve read before. It’s also thrilling. Drawing on internal rhyme, alliteration, and hip hop rhythms — all the poetic tools of today — this is a Beowulf for the 21st century.
Let me show you what I mean. First of all, the original text1:
Beowulf wæs breme blæd wide sprang,
Scyldes eafera Scedelandum in.
Swa sceal geong guma gode gewyrcean,
fromum feohgiftum on fæder bearme,
þæt hine on ylde eft gewunigen
wilgesiþas, þonne wig cume,
leode gelæsten; lofdædum sceal
in mægþa gehwære man geþeon.
(lines 18-26)
Here’s Tolkien’s prose translation:
Beow was renowned — far and wide his glory sprang — the heir of Scyld in Scedeland. Thus doth a young man bring it to pass with good deed and gallant gifts, while he dwells in his father’s bosom, that after in his age there cleave to him loyal knights of his table, and the people stand by him when war comes. By worthy deeds in every folk is a man ennobled.
Now, Seamus Heaney:
Shield had fathered a famous son:
Beow’s name was known through the north.
And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards in age when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line. Behaviour that’s admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.
Now Headley:
Beow’s name kissed legions of lips
by the time he was half-grown, but his own father
was still breathing. We all know a boy can’t daddy
until his daddy’s dead. A smart son gives
gifts to his father’s friends in peacetime.
When war woos him, as war will,
he’ll need those troops to follow the leader.
Privilege is the way men prime power
the world over.
Not only is there a progression in fewer archaisms and less formality, there’s a palpable difference when you read Headley.
Notice one thing more. In line 25, the word “lofdædum” is a compound. The first part, “lof” means “noble, worthy, praise, repute”...you get the picture. The second part, “dædum”: deeds. Those final two lines in both Tolkien and Heaney are almost gnomic verses, something that might appear in the Book of Proverbs. Not Headley’s.
Linking the Ancient and the Modern, or: Politics
Headley translates “lofdædum” as “privilege,” linking the gift-giving to institutional power, since only the privileged are in the position to “prime power” when “war woos [them]” — notice: not when war comes unwanted, war is a suitor, and a smart son puts all his gear in order before it comes for the dance of seduction. If you noticed more than a drop of 21st century realpolitik in the last two lines, you’re not alone. “Privilege is the way men prime power / the world over”: it preserves the alliteration and hews close to the original. “Praiseful deeds” equals “privilege” in the same way that “fame” equals “respect,” (and maybe the way that the boast “I’m really rich” equals “worthiness to be President,” at least in the eyes of some).
Beowulf depicts edge-times and border wars, and we’re in them still. As I write this introduction, and as I worked on this translation over the past few years, the world of the poem felt increasingly relevant…
The news cycle is filled with men Hrothgar’s age failing utterly at self-awareness, and even going full Heremod. Politics twist paradoxically into ever more isolationist and interventionist corners, increasing based in hoarding and hoard-panic. The world, as ever, is filled with desolate places and glittering ones, sharing armed borders. Refugees are imprisoned. The people doing the imprisoning claim they’re persecuting criminals, monsters, but some of those are infants, and most of those are running from worse wars in their own homelands. We are, some of us anyway, living the Geatish woman’s lament, writ large. (pp. xxx-xxxi)
The Geatish woman’s lament, you ask? It’s the funeral lament that breaks out after Beowulf dies. Here it is:
Both in Headley’s introduction, and threaded through the text, is an awareness of social stratification, of the outsider, and that makes this translation feel at once ancient and yet contemporary.
Okay, you might say. So what if Headley incorporates a 21st century feel in her translation? The question is whether it’s good and whether it’ll hold up, both to other translations and to time itself.
The answer, I think, is yes. To both. This Beowulf is fundamentally different from any other, and yet it captures the spirit and swagger of the original, precisely because Headley as a poet ignores Tolkien’s advice about respecting antiquity and draws from all the tools she has at hand.
I’m going to quote liberally from her introduction, because it’s the best overview there is about her authorial intentions. She writes that Beowulf
bears the distinction of appearing to be basic — one man, three battles, lots of gold — while actually being an intricate treatise on morality, masculinity, flexibility, and failure. It’s 3,182 lines of alliterative wildness, a sequence of monsters and would-be heroes. In it, multiple old men try to plot out how to retire in a world that offers no retirement...Queens negotiate for the survival of their sons….Graying old men long for one last exam to render them heroes once and for all. The phrase, ‘That was a good king’ recurs throughout the poem, because the poem is fundamentally concerned with how to get and keep the title ‘Good.’...Does fame keep you good? No. Does gold keep you good? No. Does your good wife keep you good? No. What keeps you good? Vigilance. That’s it. And even with vigilance, even with courage, you still might go forth to slay a dragon (or, if you’re Grendel, slay a Dane), die in the slaying, and leave everyone and everything you love vulnerable. (pp. viii-ix)
And, she says, the poem is about “willfully blinkered privilege, about the shock and horror of experiencing discomfort when one feels entitled to luxury” (p. x). In that, it’s a very contemporary poem.
Back to the Language
My alliteration (and embedded rhyme) often rolls over line breaks, which would be forbidden in early English metric rules. In this translation, though, I wanted the feeling of linguistic links throughout….Language is a living thing, and when it dies, it leaves bones. I dropped some fossils here, next to some newborns [“swole,” “stan” “hashtag: blessed”]. I’m as interested in contemporary idiom and slang as I am in the archaic. There are other translations if you’re looking for the language of courtly romance and knights. This one has ‘life-tilt’ and ‘rode hard...stayed thirsty’ in it. (pp. xviii-xx)
“Rode hard...stayed thirsty.” What does she mean? It means up close and unflinching. For example: the scene is the morning after Beowulf fights Grendel. The Danes come out to survey the damage. The first example is from Seamus Heaney’s translation.
Then morning came and many a warrior
gathered, as I've heard, around the gift-hall,
clan-chiefs flocking from far and near
down wide-ranging roads, wondering greatly
at the monster's footprints. His fatal departure
was regretted by no-one who witnessed his trail,
the ignominious marks of his flight
where he'd skulked away, exhausted in spirit
and beaten in battle, bloodying the path
hauling his doom to the demons' mere.
The bloodshot water wallows and surged,
there were loathsome upthrows and overturnings
of waves and gore and wound-slurry.
(lines 836-848)
Now Headley, same passage:
Bro, I've heard when dawn broke, soldiers
stampeded to the ring-hall, chieftains coming to
contemplate the cooling corpse-portion,
warriors and wild men from all over the realm,
wide-eyed with wonder, overwhelmed at the sight
of Grendel's tracks in the dirt, no sorrow there
for those who'd suffered him, but satisfaction at the marks
of misery where he'd conveyed himself from hall door
to mere shore, bleeding out. He'd left a river of gore,
and the warriors had no regrets, imagining him
dropping, a doomed carcass, into those wicked waters,
which even now were blood-clotted, scarlet drifts.
In both versions the verse is plain, no soaring rhetoric (I picked Heaney because his translation is the next-most recent and a natural for comparison) but where Heaney declaims, Headley moves.
I am not, repeat not, comparing the two translations to proclaim one better than the other. They’re both great. They’re different — different poetic voices channeling the same poem. Heaney prefers to keep a formal distance from the action, while Headley gets up close and personal throughout.
Reading it aloud, you’ll catch internal rhymes and rhythms inflected by modern poetic devices, even as the subject and language is faithful to the original. Even when Headley is being revolutionary in this translation, she’s faithful to the original, sometimes more faithful than previous translators.
What do I mean by that?
Traditional treatment of Beowulf’s supernatural enemies (Grendel, his mother, the dragon) all emphasize their monster-ness. Grendel is such a fiend that he’s often depicted as not-human in form.
In the text, however, Grendel is a descendant of Cain (and actually that’s subject to interpretation. There are two scribes who wrote the Beowulf text. The first scribe, introducing Grendel, calls him a child of Ham (Noah’s son, whom Noah cursed and drove away, and that curse became the impetus for justifying all Ham’s progeny be condemned to slavery which led to institutionalized slavery being sanctioned by the Christian church and we all know how that turned out). The other scribe crossed out the name and changed it to Cain which, in all fairness, is more probable and more theologically defensible. Therefore, Grendel carries Cain’s original sin and is an outcast (also a giant who can carry 30 men at a time. But this is in a time when Beowulf can hold his breath for a whole day, so hyperbole is very much a thing).
Point is, though, that in Headley’s translation, Grendel is not a mad monster — he’s an outcast warrior who’s enraged because the sounds of men celebrating in Heorot particularly offend him:
He listened, holding himself hard to home,
but he'd been lonely too long, brotherless,
sludge-stranded. Now he heard and endured
the din of drinkers. Their poetry poisoned his peace.
Every night, turmoil: raucous laughter from Heorot,
howling of harps, squawking of scops,
Men recounting the history of men like them.
The Almighty made Earth for us, they sang,
Sun and moon for our (de)light,
fens full of creatures for our feasting,
meres to quench our thirst.
(lines 88-96)
What should a lonely, grieving, outcast son of Cain do, other than declare war on the men who are so privileged that they think the earth is theirs for the taking? Grendel shows them that they are not the masters of creation that they think they are. He takes them down a notch or three. Now, his war with men may be extreme, but it’s not random. And he’s not a mindless monster.
Similarly, and here Headley breaks with tradition, the treatment of Grendel’s mother.
Other translators have imagined Grendel’s mother as a monster, a fiend, a troll. Headley writes that the tradition of her being defined so started early with Frederick Klaeber’s 1922 glossary, which
defined the word used to reference Grendel’s mother, aglaec-wif as ‘wretch, or monster, of a woman.’ Never mind that aglaec-wif is merely the feminine form of aglaeca, which Klaeber defines as ‘hero’ when applied to Beowulf, and ‘monster, demon, fiend’ when referencing Grendel, his mother, and the dragon. Aglaeca is used elsewhere in early English to refer both to Sigemund and to the Venerable Bede, and in those contexts, it’s likelier to mean something akin to ‘formidable.’ (p.xxiii)
I added this just in case you suspect Headley of deviating too far from the original. No, she knows her Old English. So why would aglaeca mean something positive when applied to the hero and its opposite when applied to his foes? I mean, the language is flexible, but this is positively contortionist.
More likely it has to do with the received presumptions of the translators, and the extent to which traditions become iron-bound when those presumptions are allowed to become canon. Headley notes that, while Grendel’s war with the Danes might be excessive and frankly gross, his mother conducts herself as a noblewoman who “lives in a hall, uses weapons, is trained in combat, and follows blood-feud rules” (p. xxiii). “Grendel’s mother doesn’t behave like a monster,” Headley writes. “She behaves like a bereaved mother who happens to have a warrior’s skill” (p. xxv).
This is a radical re-visioning of Grendel’s mother (and of Grendel, for that matter), and yet, one that’s grounded firmly in the Old English text. This version requires a more nuanced view of what makes a monster, and draws closer correlations between the “monsters” and the “heroes” than is perhaps comfortable (this was the main point of debramagai’s diary), that the digressions and the main action scenes are linked, that they comment on and modify each other. “My own experiences as a woman,” Headley writes, “tell me it’s very possible to be mistaken for monstrous when one is only doing as men do: providing for and defending oneself” (p. xxvii).
If we are invited to re-evaluate Grendel’s mother and her role (and the dragon, in this version rendered as female, a female whose bedroom and peaceful sleep have been violated by a man instead of a male dragon mad about a missing trinket), we should also take another look at the human women and what they have to do, not in pursuit of power and wealth, as men do, but to protect themselves and their children.
Which brings me to my final point, echoing Headley’s, about just whose text this is.
Beowulf is usually seen as a masculine text, but I think that’s somewhat unfair. The poem, while (with one exception) not structured around the actions of women, does contain extensive portrayals of motherhood and peace-weaving marital compromise, female warriors, and speculation on what it means to lose a son. In this translation, I worked to shine a light on the motivations, actions, and desires of the poem’s female characters, as well as to clarify their identities. While there are many examples of gendered inequality in the poem, there is no shortage of female power. (p. xxiii)
In all the years that I’ve been reading Beowulf, when I thought of the anonymous author, I always envisaged a man. Now, after reading this translation, I’m not so sure. Yes, the poem is still about heroes and “good” kings — how to become a good king and then how to stay that way. Yes, of course. But history is full of narratives about good kings that are just stuffed with men, texts where women are mere decoration and plot device (that goes for a goodly portion of Arthurian romance, too, by the way). How likely is it that a male poet would have thought through the difficulties and fraught choices that women have to make, especially in a poem centered on a male hero?
In Beowulf — in this Beowulf — there’s a presence of women and female power that cuts against the all-male world we’ve traditionally envisaged. The skillful speech of Wealtheow, the suffering of Hildeburh, the foreseen doom of Freawaru — all, you have to admit, would pass unnoticed by most male poets through history, poets for whom women have been either muse or plot device. I mean, look—who gets the last word? The Geatish woman who speaks without permission:
She tore her hair and screamed her horror
at the hell that was to come: more of the same.
Reaping, raping, feasts of blood, iron fortunes
marching across her country, claiming her body.
The sky sipped the smoke and smiled.
lines 3150-3154
For the first time, I wonder if the Beowulf poet wasn’t a woman.
Next time: works inspired by Beowulf. Pull out those old poems and polish ‘em up! See you there!
1This text is from the Poetry Foundation’s edition of the poem, but I added the half-line structure from Heaney’s translation. Heaney includes long vowels indicators and hyphenations to ease the reader’s and translator’s experience. Poetry Foundation doesn’t. All translations add commas and periods, which are not present in the originals (the half-lines, hyphenations, and line breaks aren’t, either.) Point is, every time you read an “original” version of Beowulf, or any text that first appeared in manuscript form, unless you’re reading the manuscript itself you’re reading someone’s edited version, someone’s idea of what the text should be. Take a text as badly damaged as Beowulf, and you get wildly variant readings, name changes, and all sorts of editorial decisions that just get folded into the “official” versions. Tl;dr: there’s a lot more about these texts that’s provisional than you would think.
Previous Installments
References
Headley, Maria Dahvana. Beowulf. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020.
Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf. New York: Norton, 2000.
Tolkien, J.R.R. Beowulf. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2014