In 2017, I was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and two of the award jurors, Betsy Mitchell and Elizabeth Engstom, attended a reading at which I read from The Mere Wife and talked about my research for the novel, the translations of Beowulf I’d read, and the ways in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century translations by men had shaped our understanding of the female characters in the poem. During the Q&A, they asked when my translation would be out. I laughed and said there wouldn’t be one—I wasn’t qualified—and both jurors laughed back and said it sounded like I was as qualified as many of the other people who’d translated it over the years. “Qualified,” to my mind, meant I’d certainly need a PhD, perhaps a Nobel Prize. This perception, obviously, didn’t come from nowhere. Despite the significant work of female and other marginalized scholars, despite several excellent translations by women, the fact remains that Beowulf, at least for publication, has longstandingly been aggressively marketed as an off-limits area. I’d adapted it into a novel, but somehow it still seemed off-limits for me to dig into the actual poem. Well, fuck that. The notion of Beowulf through the lens of the bro-story had been rattling around in my head for a decade. I took the idea to a writing retreat a few weeks later and pitched it to a group of fire-breathers: Kelly Link, Amal el-Mohtar, Brooke Bolander, Sarah McCarry, Libba Bray, Holly Black, Caitlyn Paxton, Catherynne Valente, Ysabeau Wilce, Kat Howard, and Annalee Flower Horne, and they had the faith I wasn’t sure I had. In the scholarly realm, I owe special thanks to Carolyne Larrington, who generously invited me to Oxford University to read from the in-progress translation, and to Emily Wilson, with whom I had a public conversation about her own translation of The Odyssey in the summer of 2018, and whose comments on both translation and translator’s perception inspired and informed this work.
I owe specific thanks to every woman who’s ever published a translation of Beowulf—I read as many of those translations as I could over the course of working on this one. As well, I pored over everything from Clara Thomson’s 1899 Adventures of Beowulf, a detailed paraphrase for English schoolchildren, to William Morris’s glitteringly bonkers 1896 experiment in archaically toned berserkery; Burton Raffel’s 1963 verse translation; Marijane Osborn’s 1983 verse translation; Seamus Heaney’s 1999 verse version; Meghan Purvis’s 2013 translation, which breaks the book-length poem into a series, enabling voices once muffled beneath the original’s narrative umbrella to be realized; and the Beowulf By All project, spearheaded by Elaine Treharne, for which more than two hundred translators each translated fifteen lines—I read and learned from them all as I worked on this. Particularly of help and inspiration to this translator: articles and essays by Catherine A. M. Clarke, David Clark, Kevin Kiernan, Carolyne Larrington, Clare A. Lees, Adam Miyashiro, Toni Morrison, Marijane Osborn, Gillian R. Overing, and Elaine Treharne. Kiernan’s “Grendel’s Heroic Mother” was my introduction to the notion of Grendel’s mother as Germanic heroine (which helped inspire The Mere Wife), and from there, I considered the rest of the women of the poem using similar standards. The poets Danez Smith, Miller Wolf Oberman, Jos Charles, and Anne Carson inspired me with their takes on notions of the epic, and with their transformations of similar materials, and I thank them for providing the light during some inevitable moments of darkness.
I owe great thanks to my team on this book: my editor Sean McDonald at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and MCD, who said yes to this, as well as my editor Marika Webb-Pullman at Scribe Publications, and everyone at Scribe. At FSG and MCD × FSG, special thanks to Daniel Vazquez, Brian Gittis, Carrie Hsieh, Nina Frieman, Songhee Kim, Ellen Feldman, Logan Hill, and Debra Fried, and to Keith Hayes for the magnificent cover, and at MacMillan Audio, thanks to Robert Allen, Tom Mis, and Steve Wagner for shepherding this book into the version I wrote it to be—something a person might play loud. Thanks as well and as ever to my agent, Stephanie Cabot, who for ten years has been telling me I can do whatever I set my mind to doing, and to the entire Gernert Company team, including Ellen Goodson Coughtrey, Rebecca Gardner, Anna Worrall, and Will Roberts for believing in this ever-more-twirling dragon of a career. Thanks once more to the heroic Beowulf Sheehan, who took the magnificent author portrait with assistance from Sami Schneider, and to Mandy Bisesti and Greg Purnell, whose makeup and barbering made me look proper.
Gratitude to China Miéville, who’s volunteered his extraordinary brain to my service for nearly a decade. Gratitude to Matthew Wimberley, who was willing not only to read this in manuscript but also to listen to a long audio file in which I muttered this into my phone. Deep thanks as well for supports both mental and material to Cindy and Bill Badger, Kurt and Kat Badger, Jim Batt, Jess Benko, Kim Boekbinder, Brooke Bolander, Chris Bolin, Mike Brand, Tammy Brand, Alexander Chee, Matt Cheney, Molly Crabapple, Kate Czajkowski, Kelley Eskridge, Isaac Fitzgerald, Jeffrey Ford, Craig Franson, Larisa Fuchs, Neil Gaiman, Nicola Griffith, Adriane Headley, Mark Headley, Molly Headley and Idir Bencaci, Benjamin Henry, Mary Hickman, Dani Holtz, Coco Karol, Doug Kearney, Joseph Keckler, Alice Sola Kim, Meghan Koch, Ben Loory, Carmen Maria Machado, Juan Martinez, Téa Obreht, Erin Orr, Amanda Palmer, Hadrien Royo, Frances Schenkkan, Joshua Schenkkan, Sarah Schenkkan, Jesse Sheidlower, Sxip Shirey, Elizabeth Senja Spackman, Danielle Trussoni, Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, Henry Wessells.
Most profound gratitude and love go to William Badger, my in-house maker of magic, who over the course of my work on this translation read perhaps ten drafts, going over every line to the extent that he, too, began dreaming in Old English; brought me rhymes, reversals, and corrections I’d never have found on my own; and, as if that were not enough, also embarked on the epic quest of having a baby with me. Grimoire gets the dedication of this book, but the fact that this translation got done while I was pregnant and during the first year of Grim’s life is in large part due to Will’s work.
Thank you, finally, to those encountering Beowulf for the first time through this version, the teachers teaching it, the librarians recommending it, and the scholars shaking things up, enabling works like this translation to find their place on the shelves. You are the warriors in my home-hall, the wolves in my favorite fens, and the gold in my hoard.