Beowulf is a badass, and to appreciate the poem named after him, you need simply squeeze the bicep of the second biggest stud in literary history (after Achilles). If there’s such a thing as Man Lit, this is it: a plot-driven, action-brimming, hero-of-heroes story line, man vs. monster, battle to the death—just the thing to get your blood flowing and make you feel a little like a rampaging medieval Viking.
The setup, in a nutshell, is this: a group of Dark-Aged Scandinavian warriors are being assailed night after night by a monster called Grendel. Each morning they wake to find men (called thanes) dead in the mead hall. Eventually Beowulf comes from a neighboring tribe to fight Grendel and then later his gorgon-like mom—yes, his mom (more on this later)—en route to a few more heroic deeds, including a death-duel with a dragon. It’s among the first literary works composed on Britain’s green isle, and it’s still the most macho.
Literary, yes, but let there be no mistake: this is no Pride and Prejudice; the only significant female character in the poem is Grendel’s mom, and Beowulf has to go whup up on her. This is no Remembrance of Things Past; psychology in Beowulf runs about as deep as the pools of blood Grendel leaves on the floor of the alehouse. And this is no Iliad even; it’s like a shotglass-sized, white-lightning distillate of the action, machismo, and inexorable all-consuming Fate of its great forebear (which the author of Beowulf couldn’t have known), a single barroom roundhouse to the jaw compared to The Iliad’s floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee.
Did I say it was short? The whole thing amounts to only seventy or so pages, so it can easily be read during a baseball rain delay (I told you it’s Man Lit …). So if you have any desire to check some world classics off your to-do list (and that’s probably why you’re reading this book), Beowulf is definitely among the quickest and easiest.
That’s not to say, though, that we can read it in the original. Although it was written in the place that in the year 927 came to be called England, the action takes place in Scandinavia, and the “Old English” it was composed in is actually Anglo-Saxon, a Germanic/Scandinavian precursor even to the precursors of what we now call our mother tongue. I’m a trained medievalist and can read Chaucer’s 14th-century Middle English pretty effortlessly, but even so, I still can’t make heads or tails of the language of Beowulf (though if I spoke Icelandic or Danish I’d have a better shot).
So clearly almost everyone has no choice but to read it in translation, and, as always, which translation you pick makes all the difference. The edition I like best is E. Talbot Donaldson’s prose version—much better in my opinion than Seamus Heaney’s verse rendering. Donaldson is regarded as one of the foremost English medievalists, and I feel very safe in his hands. (Yes, Heaney owns a Nobel Prize for poetry, but somehow I suspect he’s been too busy attending award ceremonies to have developed Donaldson’s Anglo-Saxon chops.) What the Donaldson translation manages to capture that Heaney doesn’t is the staccato rhythms of Beowulf’s language, a kind of thudding, working-the-heavy-bag tattoo that matches perfectly with the subject matter. By trying to beautify the language, Heaney loses some of its clipped, rough, cut-knuckled charm. Donaldson was capable of hearing the testosterone in the cadence of the original and does an incredible job of delivering it in his translation.
Once you can hear how Beowulf’s poetry works, there are only a few more things you need to get the full effect of England’s first and fiercest lit. One is to get a clear sense of the milieu being described and how we learn in passing that it’s, well, not quite as touchy-feely as the one we live in today. When Beowulf is being praised, we hear that “drunk, he slew no hearth-companions.” Drunk, he slew no hearth-companions? Well, he really is quite the fine fellow. Clearly here’s a culture where evenings are spent with the guys sitting around the alehouse swilling mead and occasionally offing each other. Nor is this all; over and over we are reminded of the austerity and severity of Beowulf’s Dark Ages Scandinavia: “The one whom death takes can trust the Lord’s judgment;” “Fate always goes as it must;” “Afterwards, he will walk who may,” etc. It’s a warriors’ world, and much of the enjoyment of Beowulf consists in shouting, “Holy shit!” after every Y-chromosome jaw-dropper (and nowhere more so than in the “Best Line”).
The other stylistic element you need to recognize and savor is the recurring locution “That was a good _____” (insert “king” or “nation”)—more evidence of the mentality of Beowulf’s author and the stud culture that he was part of. Beowulf sets up this construction (or its negative) to describe some bellicose, merciless, dominant power, as in: “It was their custom to always be ready for war whether at home or in the field, in any case at any time that need should befall their liege lord: that was a good nation.” And, my friends, that is the way to write Man Lit.
There is a minor apology one has to make on behalf of the great Beowulf: it has a rather odd, highly anticlimactic plot structure. The best monster is Grendel, and the most gripping (as it were) scenes are when he and Beowulf fight. But Grendel comes at the beginning, and from then on the action sort of goes downhill (see “What to Skip”).
Apart from that, love Beowulf for what it is: the first major literary work in the English tradition, and a highbrow, 1,000-year-old precursor to The Predator.
The Buzz: Beowulf is generally considered to be the earliest extant English literary work, but that’s not quite true. There are fragments of a poem called “The Dream of the Rood” on an 8th-century cross, but Beowulf is the earliest “complete” poem (only a little bit of it is missing) and is by far the most literary and compelling of the Anglo-Saxon works that have come down to us.
What People Don’t Know (But Should): Although your professor probably didn’t want to admit it, there are parts of the language of Beowulf that nobody understands. So next time someone tries to call it Old English, you’re better off ignoring the English part and thinking Anglo-Saxon.
Best Line: How’s this for manly? “Now for a time there is glory in your might; yet soon it shall be that sickness or sword will diminish your strength, or fire’s fangs, or flood’s surge, or sword’s swing, or spear’s flight, or appalling age; brightness of eyes will fail and grow dark; then it shall be that death will overcome you, warrior.”
Quirky Fact: In my understanding of action adventures, this is the only one where the hero, having vanquished his ferocious enemy, then has to go and fight the enemy’s mom. That’s a twist that doesn’t seem to have caught on.
What’s Sexy: Despite Angelina Jolie being cast as Grendel’s mom in the 2007 film version, in the poem itself, the dam’s a terrifying old hag-monster. Nor is there a whole lot of sex in Beowulf, for, as you’ll notice, it’s a little bit of a boy’s club around the old mead-house.
What to Skip: A number of sections can be skipped to no ill effect: the second half of XIII (an unimportant description of another warrior), all of XVI and XVII (the side story of the warrior Finn), and the confusing and unnecessary XXVII.