BEOWULF

Beowulf: translation

(eighth–10th century)

The best-known and most admired text in OLD ENGLISH literature,Beowulfis an epic poem in 3,182 lines of ALLITERATIVE VERSE recreating the heroic age of Germanic culture, an age in which the lord—“ring-giver” or “gold-friend”—distributed treasure to his retainers from his gift-stool in a mead hall, and the retainers pledged their loyalty and their support in the lord’s wars, even to the point of dying with him on the battlefield. It was also a world in which vengeance for the death of one’s kinsman or lord was a sacred obligation.And it was a world that the Christian poet responsible for the poem seems both to value and to criticize. The poem survives in a single manuscript in the British Library (COTTONVITELLIUS A.XV), and presents its protagonist in three great battles against monstrous foes, separated by some 50 years. This first great English poem has no scenes set in England. It begins with a genealogy of Danish kings, going back to Scyld Scefing, a good king who subjugated the Danes’ neighbors and left a good treasure for his heirs. His descendent Hrothgar builds Heorot, the greatest mead hall ever seen. Here the order of civilization reigns, and the sCOP or bard, sings a song of creation. But in the outer darkness, Grendel, a monster of the dark and the chaos, is maddened by the song of the scop. Grendel attacks Heorot at night. He kills 30 of Hrothgar’s warriors, and makes the mead hall a place of fear for the Danes. After 12 years Beowulf, a young warrior of the Geatish nation in southern Sweden, hears of Hrothgar’s troubles and comes with a band of warriors to win fame by ridding Heorot of the monster.Over the drinking of mead, his credentials are challenged by the Danish retainer Unferth, but Beowulf makes hisbeot(his boast or vow) to destroy Grendel. That night, Beowulf and his men sleep in Heorot. The monster skulks in and devours one of the sleeping Geats, after which Beowulf, scorning to use armor against a monster that has no knowledge of such things, battles Grendel hand-to-hand.Ultimately Beowulf overpowers the monster and tears off his arm. Grendel slinks home to die, and the Danes make a great celebration of Beowulf ’s victory. The Danish scop composes a song in praise of Beowulf, and Grendel’s arm is hung up in Heorot as a sign. But the Geatish hero has little time to rest. Grendel’s mother, seeking to avenge her son, attacks Heorot that night and kills one of the Danes. Beowulf must seek the new monster in the dark mere where she lives. He swims under the surface in full battle gear, tracking her to her home in an underwater cave. His sword proves useless against her, and he is nearly killed as she pins him to the ground and brandishes a knife, but he finds a magic sword hanging in the cave and kills the monster. He also finds the body of Grendel, and cuts offer the monster’s head to bring back to Heorot.

Beowulf bids farewell to Hrothgar, who gives him many gifts and much advice, and Beowulf sails back to Geatland and reports on his activities to his own king,Hygelac. Beowulf’s final battle occurs 50 years later. Hygelac and his heirs having been killed, Beowulf has become the Geatish king. His own people are being threatened by a fire-breathing dragon, who has been stirred to vengeance after sleeping for hundreds of years when a luckless intruder steals part of the dragon’s cursed treasure. Beowulf, taking 11 retainers, says he will fight the dragon alone and enters the lair while all his men except a certain Wiglaf run off to the woods. In the ensuing battle, Beowulf, aided by his young kinsman, is able to defeat the dragon, but is mortally wounded himself, burned by the dragon’s fire. He dies of his wounds, and Wiglaf chastises the Geats for leaving their king, predicting that they will now be destroyed by neighboring tribes because of their failure to support their gold-friend. The poem ends with Beowulf’s burial.

A brief summary of the poem does not capture one of the most remarkable aspects of the narrative, which is the background of Germanic history constantly put before the audience through the socalled digressions in the poem. The two longest of these are the story of the Danish king Hnaef, who, despite the marriage of his sister Hildeburh to Finn, king of the Frisians, is caught up in a feud with Finn’s tribe that ends finally in the deaths of Hnaef, of Hildeburh’s son, and of Finn; and a story from Beowulf’s own lips concerning the disastrous marriage of Hrothgar’s daughter Freawaru to Ingeld the Heathobard, another unsuccessful attempt to settle a tribal feud through marriage. These tales, plus the allusion to the murder of Hrothgar’s son by the boy’s own uncle, and the ultimate fiery destruction of Heorot, may be suggestions by the Christian poet that the monstrous vengeance of Grendel’s mother, a monster from outside of Germanic society, is in fact a destructive force within the society itself.

This is certainly a question for critical dispute. A number of other points have proven matters of debate for scholars, not the least of which is the question of oral composition. Beowulf clearly is in the style of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry that predates the first written compositions in English in the seventh century. Early in the 20th century many scholars believed that the poem was a pure Germanic heroic oral composition, made up of poems similar to the one that the scop in the poem sings after Beowulf ’s first victory. These scholars believed that Christian elements in the poem were interpolations from a monkish scribe. It was later suggested that the poem was composed extemporaneously in oral-formulaic fashion similar to that of Yugoslav oral poets in the 20th century, and written down by a scribe. Few scholars hold these views any longer: It seems likely thatBeowulfis a text whose author was literate, but who used the traditional language of oral heroic poetry to create his own epic-length poem.

The other most hotly debated issue inBeowulfcriticism has been its date. It is known, from GREGORY OF TOURS’sHistory of the Franks, that the Geatish king Hygelac was killed in a raid on the Frisians in 521; therefore, the action of the poem must take place in the sixth century. Early scholars assumed an early date for the poem’s composition: Some claimed it was as early as the late seventh century, attributing it to the golden age of Northumbrian culture at the time of the Venerable BEDE. Some suggested a later date, in the later eighth century, during the reign of the powerful King Offa of Mercia. More recent criticism, however, has argued for an even later date, one closer to the date and place of the Wessex manuscript itself in the late 10th century.While some of the language of the text would be archaic, these critics argue that it is deliberately so because of the conservative word stock that was conventional in heroic poetry.

The sublime tone of the poem, its sustained epic grandeur, and the power of its presentation of a characteristic hero of Anglo-Saxon heroic age, all serve to makeBeowulfthe most important poem in Old English. In addition, it is highly significant as the first major poem in a vernacular European language.

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■ Heaney, Seamus.Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. First bilingual ed. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000.

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■ Whitelock, Dorothy.The Audience of Beowulf. Corrected ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958.