Beowulf (Heaney translation)

[redbird]

I wanted to read Beowulf, and the recent Seamus Heaney translation had gotten a lot of good reviews, so I took a copy out of the library. It's a bilingual edition, with Old English on the left and the translation on the right, and an introduction and note on pronunciation at the front.

I liked the story, and the way it's told, including the digressions where someone quotes another poem (I don't know whether those other poems survive elsewhere, or even whether they existed as independent works before the Beowulf poet decided to have someone recite them as part of this work). Words matter to the people the poem presents: the tales told and how they're told, reputation and boasting. Beowulf is not a modest man, but the poem never suggests that he's exaggerating, even in the episodes that cannot be true in the terms of mimetic fiction (swimming in his armor for hours, wrestling in the water while armored, and fighting sea monsters thus, including the fight with Grendel's mother, which seems to require him to breathe under water).

The characters, and the poem, are very Christian: the monster is explicitly a demon descended from Cain, and God is credited and thanked, by narrator and characters alike, for helping them. I hadn't expected that; I hadn't read much about the story, and what I did either considered that obvious or unimportant.

Heaney's English isn't quite mine, which led me to either guessing at meanings, when I was reading on the subway, or pulling out the dictionary, which didn't always suffice. After I finished the poem, I went back and skimmed his introduction. Not only is he Irish, but he deliberately used some old-fashioned and Ulster dialect words, because they helped him connect to both the poem and his own ancestry, literal and linguistic. (There's a nice paragraph talking about þolian; that I recognized, in its modern form (thole), thanks to Josephine Tey.) Heaney's introduction also glossed graith, which neither my (American) dictionary nor Google's define function knew. (I have the OED, but in the microprint version, and decided to just keep going rather than drag that down and interrupt myself further.)

Heaney's word choices sometimes led me to looking at the Old English. I didn't find the meanings I was looking for there, in part because the translation isn't word-for-word, so I might easily have been looking three lines up or down from the original of the word I was trying to find. I did stop to muse on the oddities of what words have survived, as so much else shifted or was displaced: "God," yes, I knew that, and gōd for "good," but not that "bolster" has been in our speech, unchanged, for at least a thousand years.

While I knew that Tolkien was familiar with the poem, it was startling to come across the basis for some of Bilbo's adventures, specifically the theft of a goblet from the dragon's hoard, and the dragon's reaction when he found it gone.

(This makes ten new books so far in 2007.)

Comments

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

When the Heaney came out, a friend wrote a rant/review, complaining that it wasn't nearly as good as the bits Tolkien translated, and wishing that Tolkien had published a complete Beowulf translation.

[fuzzygabby.livejournal.com]

I read Beowulf 4 times as an undergrad between 1986 and 1990. So it's been a while, but what I remember from one or more of the classes was that Tolkien was hugely important in changing the way that academia read Beowulf. And a few years ago, I was riding in a friend's car and he played some of an audio version LOTR, which I haven't read since 1986. It was a battle scene and I was struck by how much the language reminded me of Beowulf.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Tolkien was not only familiar with the Beowulf poem, he really cleared the deck for modern studies of it in a 1936 lecture saying "Look, this is a work of art, and not just a source for historical nuggets about Anglo-Saxon civilization."

Like the Norse Eddas, Beowulf was the work of a Christian who still loved the old pagan culture, so he put this Christian overlay on it to ease his conscience or something. Not everybody thinks it works very well.

At least some of the digressions are real. The story of the sons of Finn, sung by Hrothgar's bard, exists also in a tiny fragment, the same tale expressed in entirely different words, that someone found in a library around 1700, and transcribed and published. The original manuscript has since disappeared. Tolkien did a lot of research on those texts, too, and reproduced the same effect in his own fiction: for instance when Aragorn sings the tale of Beren and Luthien to the hobbits, that particular poem had been written decades earlier, and is only one short version of many longer ones in both verse and prose of the Beren and Luthien story.