The Massachusetts Medievalist on Beowulf, lines 1-1254
The Massachusetts Medievalist's summer reading group 2021 kicks off with the first third of Beowulf, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley - and this translation defies our usual understanding of Beowulf as that overly long and occasionally tedious poem that many of us learned to hate in a deadly high school English class.
Before we jump into the delicious first third of this translation, a quick primer on the poem and its context:
Beowulf is a modern editorial name for a poem that exists in only one manuscript; that manuscript was created in c.1000 CE in England, but the setting of the poem is a chronologically distant sixth-century Scandinavia, with quasi-historical and blatantly-fantastic elements thrown in. The dating of the poem is an academic blood sport in which I refuse to engage, but many scholars agree that Beowulf, or at least its component parts, comes from a basis in oral tradition from the very early medieval period. That oral tradition was refined and sculpted (this is where the blood sport comes in) until the "final" version was recorded in the manuscript.
That manuscript, held in the British Library as a national treasure, was almost destroyed in a fire in 1731, so its mere existence is somewhat miraculous. The poem's language is Old English (OE), a forerunner of our contemporary English but largely unintelligible to modern users of the language (students of Lesley's CLITR 3320 know a bit about this item!), so we tend to meet this very unfamiliar text in translated form.
(folio 132r of the manuscript: note that the charred vellum is the darker surface, while the cream-colored frame is the modern paper support for the fragile medieval artifact)
And it's in the translation that we get bogged down. Most of the available translations are just terrible, in deadly confusing prose or painfully literal poetics. Translators have had to deal with the odd OE poetic form that uses rhythm and alliteration but (usually) no rhyme as well as the tortured syntax allowed by an inflected language - syntax prohibited by the largely non-inflected Modern English we're used to. I can't say whether Headley's translation will still be popular in 2121, but I can say that it is definitely a translation for this moment of chaos of 2021. It won't make it into the high school classroom, alas -- too many f-bombs.
You can read reviews in lots of places about Headley's "feminist translation" (the phrase is on her website), so I want to focus here for our reading group's start on two crucial items: Headley's poetics and Beowulf's character.
Headley's poetics: I am enthralled by her use of internal rhyme throughout. She definitely is using alliteration as in the original: "browbeating every barstool brother" (l.5) is just one early example. But she also uses internal rhyme in such a way that her lines sound almost like rap, drawing on that oral performative tradition so that we can hear the narrator performing in a bar or on a patio, wearing a t-shirt and jeans and holding a beer. When Beowulf introduces himself to Hrothgar and the Danish court, listen for the almost-hidden rhymes of blessed, quest, best, and test (ll.414-423). Unferth accuses Beowulf of being "swole as a troll" (l.512), and Beowulf's reply to him includes "….battle…You're cattle, / and I'm a wolf" (ll.585-6). Headley defies the Beowulf translator's convention of avoiding rhyme, adding its seductiveness to her arsenal of contemporary phrasing and belligerent, mocking asides.
Speaking of those mocking asides: much has already been written about her first word of the poem,"Bro!" Her first word both acknowledges and ridicules the hyper-masculinity undergirding this most iconic of English poems. But her Beowulf is indeed a bro, a bragging, swaggering star athlete, adding platitudinous philosophical comments ("Bro, Fate can f*ck you up," l.454) while narrating his own adventures in which he is inevitably the hero, the winner, the focus of all attention. I don't particularly admire Headley's Beowulf, who's a version of that guy we all know -- he's basically just a self-centered jerk, but he's good to have around when you need a monster killed.
Please add your thoughts, ideas, and questions about the first third of the poem via the comments function! Some ideas in case you need a jump start:
How is the poem different for you in this translation / this time around?
How are Beowulf and Grendel acting as foils for each other? How are they hero and monster but also thematic brothers?
What are the power dynamics in play at the Danish court banquet after B defeats G?
In my revisit of the first section of this story, there were two elements that I kept coming back to. The first was the similarities in Grendel, and Scyld Scefing's final places of rest.
The correspondence between the mythical forefather of the Danes appearing mysteriously on a ship full of treasure as a baby, and then being put to rest on a ship full of treasure after his death draws attention to these pre-story details, that might otherwise be tempting to just gloss over. Which allows them to more easily be compared to Grendel’s death later in the narrative. The creature (giant, demon, ogre, whatever you want to call him, googling “what is Grendel” sent me down a major rabbit hole) is mortally wounded by the title character, but that isn’t what kills him. It’s said that he goes into the swamp to die, that he drowns. This creates a parallel between Hrothgar’s fabled ancestor, and his people’s great enemy, as well as stressing the idea of death as an equalizing force. A watery grave can claim a king as easily as a beast.
The other thing that I was compelled by was the presence of religion in the story. I find it interesting that the christian god is supposedly protecting Hrothgar’s throne from Grendel, but can’t be bothered to do anything about all the Danes at Heorot Hall (presumably including children and elders) who he slaughters. God’s supposed role in this story in general really intrigues me, the entity’s selective interventions in the hardships faced by the characters seems random in a way that’s almost funny, but also deeply disturbing from an in-text perspective.
If god has the ability to ensure Beowulf a victory, then why did they let Grendel’s reign of terror last as long as it did? And if god has the ability to ensure Beowulf a victory, then is the character’s own greatness even attributable to himself? The narrative does a lot to hype him up, but in a way that the presence of an ultimate higher power kind of undercuts.
If in the world of a particular text there is a god or other being who is both all powerful and all good then shouldn’t that supersede the need for heroes?