The present chapter takes us back to Beowulf itself, presenting a discussion of its poetry and poetics in the historical context of the larger tradition to which the poem belongs. Having briefly explored key poetic features of Beowulf in general terms, it will go on to focus on two specific illustrative passages from the poem (lines 1–11 and 867b–74). In subsequent chapters we will be considering the responses of modern verse translators to the features covered in this chapter and we will also be looking at versions of the illustrative passages in some translations.
Beowulf is viewed in the modern criticism of Old English poetry, as it has developed in the last seventy years or so, as a work of great artistry, originality and depth. It is ‘solid and dazzling’, in Seamus Heaney’s memorable phrase,1 as critics continue to demonstrate through close study.2 It is also, however, a work of a highly traditional kind, participating at all levels in what has insightfully been referred to as ‘the aesthetics of the familiar’.3 It stems from the oral culture of the Anglo-Saxons and their continental ancestors: it is traditional in its metrical and syntactic structures, its ‘word-hoard’ of poetic vocabulary and its formulaic patterns of phrasing; and it is traditional too in the themes that it deals with and in the value-system that motivates its action. Beowulf is the work of a Christian poet and its written transmission would have been in a Christian context, but it is a ‘heroic’ poem, set in the pre-Christian warrior society of the Germanic heroic age, that imagined past in which, as in the Homeric age, heroes achieved fame in carrying out great deeds against formidable opponents, in accordance with the ideals of glory, honour and personal loyalty.
Seamus Heaney, author of the most popular translation of Beowulf currently in use, is struck by the remoteness of this poem from modern life,4 and he strives to relate it to the world of his own experience. In a parallel fashion, scholars struggle to understand what Beowulf, a poem itself about a remote past, might have meant to an Anglo-Saxon audience, and indeed what its Anglo-Saxon audience – or audiences – might have been.5 The poem is preserved uniquely in a manuscript from the early eleventh century but is likely to have had a considerable transmission history before that, having been composed perhaps two or three centuries earlier but also being subject to textual change in the course of that transmission; we have no external reference to the poem in the Old English period.6
Whatever the date of its composition, Beowulf comes from long after the period of its setting. Looking back, as it does, it is remarkable in the sustained reflectiveness of its treatment of its heroic themes; it is of the tradition that tells about the heroic age but apart from that tradition in outlook and understanding.7 This apartness gives it its tone; it is as much an elegiac meditation as a narrative poem. The subject matter of Beowulf has been seen to concern contrasting experience,8 but in its stance too Beowulf is a poem of apparent oppositions or contradictions – between the outlook of the poem itself and the heroic values of the tradition in which it participates, and between what we might refer to, if a little anachronistically, as ‘tradition’ and ‘the individual talent’: the poem uses a traditional verse form with exceptional artistry, showing verve, inventiveness and intelligence, and it deploys the traditional form to address profound issues in human experience, ‘about human nature and its ancestry’, as Michael Alexander eloquently expresses it.9
Beowulf is composed, of course, in the formal metre handed down by tradition that is ubiquitous in Old English poetry, in which each line is made up of two half-lines, and each half-line has two stressed and a variable number of unstressed syllables, according to a system of rules that allows for a range of different configurations of stressed and unstressed syllables in the half-line (usually classified as five ‘types’, as first identified by Eduard Sievers).10 The other essential feature of Old English metre is that the two half-lines are bound together by alliteration. This metrical scheme is supported by the ‘word-hoard’ of poetic diction, including a wealth of synonyms and near-synonyms that allow the same idea to be fitted into a range of alliterative contexts. As well as mann and wer, for example, Beowulf shares with Old English poetry in general the following ‘poetic’ words for ‘man’: beorn, eorl (used in a more restrictive sense in prose), guma (cf. also, in Beowulf, dryhtguma, ‘retainer, warrior’, seldguma, ‘hall-retainer’), hæleð, rinc (cf. also the compounds beadorinc, ‘battle-warrior’, guðrinc, ‘battle-warrior’, etc.) and secg; the ordinary word wiga, ‘warrior’, is also used, both as a simplex and as the second element of a compound word (æscwiga, ‘[ash-]spear-warrior’, byrnwiga, ‘mailed warrior’, etc.).
This metrical structure underlies the strongly aural quality of Old English poetry, giving it power and solidity. Lines have a strong caesura and discrete phrases stand out strongly in relation to each other, at the same time as being linked together through alliteration: ‘the iron / flash of consonants / cleaving the line’ (as referred to by Heaney in his poem ‘Bone Dreams’11). The structure encourages patterns of phrasal parallelism and phrasal contrast, including abrupt opposition and the use of parenthetic interjections – highlighted in modern editions of Old English poems by the frequent appearance of dashes (or brackets) – and narrative has a markedly exclamatory quality. In the hands of a gifted poet, the metrical structure can be used with subtlety and deftness, with half-lines of different patterns being brought together in varying combinations: one student of Old English metre refers to the Beowulf poet’s ‘careful avoidance of any regularity of rhythm’.12 And the formal structure can be embellished by other – non-structural – sound effects, such as rhyme, paronomasia, cross-alliteration (with two sets of alliteration in the same line), and alliterative play extending over more than one line.
A suggestive passage in Beowulf shows the oral poet of Germanic tradition at work, while itself illustrating some of the poetic features it refers to:
Hwilum cyninges þegn,
guma gilphlæden, gidda gemyndig,
se ðe eal fela ealdgesegena
worn gemunde, word oþer fand
soðe gebunden; secg eft ongan
sið Beowulfes snyttrum styrian
ond on sped wrecan spel gerade,
wordum wrixlan. (lines 867b–74a)
[At times a thegn of the king, a man laden with eloquence, mindful of songs, who remembered a multitude of stories from the whole range of ancient tradition, found new [other] words, properly bound together. The man began again artfully to treat of Beowulf’s exploit and skilfully to relate an apt tale, to vary his words.]
I will return to technical features of this passage a little later. For the moment, it is offered as an image of the poetic tradition in which Beowulf participates. In accordance with the rules of metre the words are ‘properly bound together’ (soðe gebunden), and they are ‘artfully’ (snyttrum) arranged, with attention to variation in expression (wordum wrixlan). It is notable that the passage appears to give a considerable amount of detail about poetic composition but is actually quite unspecific, using language that is qualitative rather than precise in the character of its description. In this respect it is typical of the generalizing tendencies of Beowulf and Old English poetry as a whole, absorbing the individual into the framework of tradition.
Beowulf portrays an oral culture, a culture in which knowledge and story live in memory and utterance rather than in writing, as in the passage just quoted. It also displays features in its form that have been identified as distinctive of oral literature.13
The Beowulf poet adopts the stance of the oral scop, ‘minstrel’, in his narrative voice, speaking in the first-person plural from the perspective of a shared tradition – ‘Hwæt, we Gar-Dena […] / […] þrym gefrunon’ (lines 1–2; ‘Listen, we have heard of the glory … of the Spear-Danes …’) – or, more usually, in a non-individualized first-person singular, as a speaker with special knowledge of that tradition – ‘Ne hyrde ic cymlicor ceol gegyrwan’ – (line 38; ‘I have not heard of a ship more fittingly prepared’). The poem’s narrative voice is exclamatory and communal, and the narration and speeches are rich in gnomic and proverbial-sounding lore, its sententious utterances assuming assent from the community for whom and to whom the narrator speaks: ‘Swa sceal geong guma gode gewyrcean’ (line 20; ‘So must a young man bring it about by generosity …’).
The Beowulf poet adopts the stance of the scop but in fact this narrator and this audience are a fiction. As Beowulf – the text – is read, or read out, the narrator is absent and the homogeneous audience that the poem constructs becomes part of the poem rather than being part of the real world of its reception. Beowulf gives the impression of being the oral utterance of a scop, using the traditional medium of heroic poetry to pass on things he has heard about, but its relationship to the tradition is more complex: Beowulf is a literate work, which offers a meditation on its heroic world rather than itself coming directly from such a world.14
I have suggested that the relationship between the Beowulf poet and the tradition to which his poem belongs is a complex one. The poetry of Beowulf is traditional but it is also highly distinctive, this distinctiveness being an important aspect of the interplay between individuality and tradition. Alliteration, for example, is integral to the structure of the metrics of Beowulf but is also insistently used by this poet with striking artfulness, as are other aspects of the play of sound in the poem.15 And the interplay between individuality and tradition is equally evident in Beowulf at the level of vocabulary, which is based on the traditional ‘word-hoard’ of poetic words but can be brilliantly creative in the use of that word-hoard. In particular, Beowulf is exceptionally rich in poetic compound words, a far higher proportion of which are unattested elsewhere than is the case with any other surviving Old English poem. The potent exploitation of poetic simplex words is also in evidence.16
Compound words contribute to one of the characteristic features of Old English poetic syntax, the elaborate use of variation and repetition. This is a syntax which in weaving patterns of apposition, parallelism, recapitulation and juxtaposition exploits grammatical characteristics of the Old English language. In Old English (unlike the Present-Day English of modern translators), word endings rather than, or as well as, word order indicate the relationship between words in a sentence and so, especially in poetry, there is greater flexibility in constructing interweaving patterns of grammatically related phrases. Indeed, just as there is a special poetic vocabulary in Old English verse – ‘almost […] a language within a language’, as Michael Alexander has referred to it17 – so too a distinctive poetic syntax has been identified. Having studied the ‘rules’ of word order in the poetry, one recent commentator on Old English poetic syntax goes as far as to declare, ‘For the Anglo-Saxons, the language of poetry may have been something analogous to a foreign language or a second native language, which they had to learn separately from their “first” language.’18 The syntax of poetry shows distinctive differences from that of prose and, we may assume, of ordinary speech.19
The grammatical characteristics of Old English poetry, often accompanied by the kinds of sound patterns mentioned above, are seen in a particularly developed form in Beowulf, facilitated by the poet’s remarkable inventiveness in compounding. The next section of this chapter aims to show some of these features in action: before turning to the modern versions and their approaches to translation, I now wish to examine a couple of passages from Beowulf which illustrate its poetry and poetics.
The much-analysed opening lines of the poem provide one such convenient example:
Hwæt, we Gar-Dena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum meodusetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas, syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden. He þæs frofre gebad:
weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
oð þæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan. Þæt wæs god cyning.
These powerful and resonant lines present a carefully wrought introduction to the first half of the poem and begin to touch on major preoccupations that will be explored in the later narrative. Lines 1–52 of Beowulf, usually referred to as the ‘Prologue’, and the first numbered section or ‘fitt’ (lines 53–114), may be seen as a meditation on the steady passage of great events remembered from long ago, focusing on þrym, ‘acts of glory’, and ellen, ‘deeds of valour’, but also on the passing of time, mutability. It is a meditation that is begun in this opening sequence, which introduces the ancient past of the poem and covers the achievements of a great Danish king, Scyld Shefing. The rest of the Prologue completes the account of Scyld’s life and describes his impressive ship funeral, itself an emblem of the themes of þrym and ellen on the one hand and mutability on the other. The first fitt will trace the story of Scyld’s successors down the generations to the time of King Hrothgar and the immediate events of the poem’s story.
In line with the traditionality of the poet’s approach, Beowulf begins with a conventional formal call to attention of an imagined physical audience, Hwæt, literally meaning ‘What’ but usually rendered as ‘Listen’ or ‘Indeed’; older translators have ‘Behold’ or ‘Lo’, which sound unidiomatic today but could be said to reflect the archaic aspect of the diction of Beowulf. We might grammatically translate the rest of the opening sentence as ‘We have heard of the glory [with the direct object þrym, ‘glory’, and verb gefrunon, ‘heard’, delayed to the end of the second line] in days of yore of the kings of the people (þeodcyninga) of the Spear-Danes (Gar-Dena), how the noblemen accomplished [deeds of] valour (ellen).’ There is notable grammatical parallelism between Gar-Dena and þeodcyninga and it would also be possible indeed to take þeodcyninga as being in apposition to rather than dependent on Gar-Dena: ‘we have heard of the glory of the Spear-Danes, the kings of the people’, the ‘Spear-Danes’ thus being identified with the kings of the people. The extremely light punctuation of Old English poetry manuscripts means that syntactical ambiguity is often a possibility. Such ambiguity has to be resolved in oral performance – and in translation – but can remain unresolved ‘on the page’.20
Line 3 constitutes an expansion on the opening exclamatory statement while at the same time in ellen fremedon, ‘accomplished [deeds of] valour’, it provides grammatical parallelism (reinforced by the -on rhyme) to þrym gefrunon. It might also be possible to translate ða æþelingas as ‘then noblemen’ rather than ‘the noblemen’, thus recapitulating or varying on geardagum, ‘in former days’.21 This first sentence provides a grand Arma virumque cano-type statement (to refer to the opening words of Virgil’s Aeneid) of concerns covered by the poem, stressing the themes of the glory and courage of the Danish kings and people, all set in a remembered past. The voice of the narrator, speaking to and for an implied community, is characterized by certainty and directness of expression, the sense arranging itself around key simplex nouns (þrym, ellen) supported by verbs in the indicative mood. The key nouns are abstract but used in a concrete sense, as action words: þrym suggests glorious actions, ellen valorous deeds. The language is restrained and dignity is conveyed in this opening sentence by the parallelism, poetic word order – with inversion and suspended resolution –, poetic vocabulary (geardagum, ‘days of yore’, þeodcyninga, ‘people-kings’) and compound words (Gar-Dena, geardagum, þeodcyninga).
The sense of dignity and restraint is maintained in the rest of the passage. We might render the second sentence as follows: ‘Often Scyld Scefing, in troops of enemies, deprived [with again the resolution provided by the verb (ofteah) delayed] many tribes of their mead-benches (meodusetla), terrified/inspired awe in warriors,’ in which the ‘mead-benches’, synecdochically representative of the hall, the focus and symbol of social life in the heroic world, epitomize the (lost) autonomy and self-esteem of the enemy tribes conquered by Scyld, and egsode eorlas, ‘terrified warriors’ or ‘inspired awe in warriors’, is an appositive phrase presenting a kind of variant on or development of the preceding line. The sentence now modulates into a subordinate clause, ‘since the time when he was first found destitute’. The adjective feasceaft, which I have translated ‘destitute’ but more literally means ‘having few things’, is an instance of the figure of litotes or understatement, common in Old English, alluding contrastingly to Scyld’s mysterious arrival among the Danes as an unknown orphan.
The third and final sentence of our passage elaborates the contrast between the destitute boy and the great king he is to become. Beginning with further understatement, the account of Scyld continues, ‘He experienced comfort (frofre) for that: he prospered (weox, literally ‘waxed’) under the clouds [i.e., in the world], thrived in worldly honours (weorðmyndum), until each one of the neighbouring tribes [the Old English is actually less abstract here than my translation, having ymbsittendra, ‘those situated, or sitting, around’], over the whale’s road, had to obey him, give him tribute; that was a good king.’ The closing exclamation is offered as a truth, which everyone will agree with. It is understood to be justified by the preceding sequence, which exploits verbal variation and cumulation in its account of Scyld’s achievements: the sequence consists of three principal verbs (gebad, ‘experienced’; weox, ‘prospered’; þah, ‘thrived’), of which the latter two (near synonyms) present manifestations of Scyld’s success, explaining how he ‘experienced comfort for that’. These principal verbs lead to the climactic oð þæt, ‘until’, clause, in which hyran, ‘obey, listen to’, and gomban gyldan, ‘pay, or yield, tribute’, are again examples of variation.
The passage is conceived as a single unit, the essential mode of which is exclamatory. It is made up of three sentences that are broadly symmetrical in structure, each beginning with a measured declarative statement or sequence of statements, including therein an element of variation; this larger part of the sentence is then modified in each instance by a brief subordinate clause, the latter balancing or completing the sentence’s theme. In the first sentence the subordinate clause is an adverbial ‘how’ clause; in the other two the subordinate clauses are temporal (‘since’ and ‘until’), these three conjunctions, hu, syððan and oðþæt, being significantly among those used most frequently in the poem, in keeping with its generally contrastive and additive syntactic mode.
The language of these opening sentences is carefully wrought, but it is also formulaic. Alliterating phrases used here occur elsewhere in Beowulf and in other Old English poems in comparable metrical environments.22 To give just two examples from our passage, in geardagum, ‘in days of yore’ (line 1b) appears again in Beowulf at lines 1354 and 2233 (as on geardagum); the phrase in/on geardagum also occurs in Christ and Satan (ASPR I, 135–58), line 367, Christ I (ASPR III, 3–15), line 251, The Wanderer (ASPR III, 134–7), line 44, and the related formulation æfter geardagum, ‘after days of yore’, also appears (The Phoenix [ASPR III, 94–113], line 384). And the yoking of þeodcyninga, ‘people-kings’, and gefrunon, ‘heard’ (line 2), is reflected later in Beowulf at line 2694, Ða ic æt þearfe gefrægn þeodcyninges, ‘Then I heard that at the need of the king of the people’;23 elsewhere þeodcyning not only collocates with gefrignan (Riddle 67 [ASPR III, 231], line 1) but it also does so with þrym (Genesis A [ASPR I, 3–87], line 1965) (cf. Beowulf, line 2) and with þearfan (Judgement Day II [ASPR VI, 58–67], line 162) (cf. Beowulf, line 2694).
In such instances the Beowulf poet is tapping into the rich ready-made resources provided by the poetic tradition. It is also notable, however, that some of the phrases that recur in the poem are not found in other surviving poems. The formula monegum mægþum is an example of one that does not turn up elsewhere. This might be due simply to the smallness of the surviving corpus of Old English poetry – if we had more poetry we might find examples of monegum mægþum and its variants. It is also possible, however, that the Beowulf poet has formulations that are his own, just as key elements in his vocabulary are his own (see below): he is using formulaic language in a ‘generative’ way. Thus, ærest is linked with syððan in other poems (Genesis A, line 2776; Elene [ASPR II, 66–102], line 116) and with wearð (Riddle 83 [ASPR III, 236], line 5) but the Beowulfian phrase syððan ærest wearð (lines 6b, 1947b) is unparalleled. The word cyning occurs over two hundred times in surviving Old English poetry but the expression þæt wæs god cyning is unique to Beowulf, where it is used three times (lines 11b, 863b, 2390b); phrases belonging to the system represented in the Beowulf formula do, however, appear in other poems: Þæt is æðele cyning, ‘that is a noble king’ (Andreas [ASPR II, 3–51], line 1722b), þær is riht cyning, ‘where there is a true king’ (Guthlac A [ASPR III, 49–72], line 682b).
In his use of formulaic language in these opening lines therefore the Beowulf poet may be seen using tradition but varying it and extending it. Gar-Dena, ‘Spear-Danes’ (line 1), is an instance from a system of ways of referring to the Danes that the poet makes use of, with no parallels elsewhere in the poetry, though the formulaicity of this phrase is obvious. Words like Gar-Dena are on one level little more than poetic tags and the choice of whether to call the Danes Spear-Danes (lines 1, 601, etc.) or Bright-Danes (lines 427, 609) or Ring-Danes (lines 116, 1279, 1769) or North-Danes (line 783) or East-Danes (lines 392, 616, 828) or South-Danes (lines 463, 1996) or West-Danes (lines 383, 1578) seems to be purely down to the requirements of alliteration. At the same time, however, such diction, even if it must appear uninspired, serves to confirm the poet’s participation in tradition.
Throughout the whole passage, then, the traditional nature of the language is strongly in evidence. The vocabulary in this discursive passage is mostly not distinctive, though it will become more so later, just as the certainties of the communal outlook will become more problematical. The opening Hwæt locates the poem in traditional narrative; the poetic compound nouns, apart from Gar-Dena and the conventional-looking meodosetla, are familiar from elsewhere in Old English poetry (in meodosetla ofteah it is the juxtaposition rather than the words themselves that is remarkable: the hall is supposed to be a place of social joy, not violence);24 in adopting the kenning (a kenning being an allusive metaphorical phrase) ofer hronrade, ‘over the whale’s road’ (for the sea), also found in two other poems, the poet draws on a standard technique of Old English poetry.25 At this beginning stage of Beowulf the poet is situating his narrative in the heroic world and emphasizing the relationship of the poem to a larger tradition.
The passage is composed, of course, in the formal metre of Old English poetry, as described above (p. 29). It is made up predominantly of ‘type A’ half-lines, according to the Sievers system, giving a sense of steady development in the narrative.26 The regularity of lines 5–11 is particularly apparent: here we see a sequence of lines beginning with type A, this pattern being interrupted only by the light verses at lines 9 and 10; within the sequence there are two consecutive lines of AB structure (lines 6 and 7) enveloped by two of AE structure (lines 5 and 8).
The basic metrical framework is enriched by some non-structural alliteration, although, in line with the restraint we have been observing in other aspects of the passage, this kind of embellishment is less insistent than in many other parts of the poem. Still, at the level of non-structural alliteration we see here an example of cross-alliteration (line 1: g and d)27 and we also see considerable use of double alliteration (lines 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11) and instances of alliterative play across lines (lines 1–2, gefrunon, fremedon; lines 5–6, -setla, syððan; lines 11–12, cyning, cenned, the last pair serving to link our passage with the next narrative unit of the poem). Rhyme effects are evident in the -on of gefrunon and fremedon at the end of lines 2 and 3 (these two lines sandwiched between ones ending in -um: geardagum, þreatum), the -de of hronrade and scolde in line 10, and the -an of hyran, gomban and gyldan in lines 10 and 11.
As a second, contrasting, passage illustrative of the art of the Beowulf poet, I wish to return to the extract quoted earlier, describing the traditional poet at work. In this passage, which is about the skill of the poet, the Beowulf poet takes the opportunity to pull out a few stops, exhibiting in it some of the technical features mentioned in his depiction of poetic composition.28
Here is the passage again:
Hwilum cyninges þegn,
guma gilphlæden, gidda gemyndig,
se ðe eal fela ealdgesegena
worn gemunde, word oþer fand
soðe gebunden; secg eft ongan
sið Beowulfes snyttrum styrian
ond on sped wrecan spel gerade,
wordum wrixlan; welhwylc gecwæð
Here we notice double alliteration in lines 868, 872 and 874 and alliterative play across lines at lines 869–70 (-fela, fand), 871–3 (three consecutive lines of s alliteration, with additional play on b [gebunden, Beowulfes] and on w [-wulfes, wrecan]) and 873–4 (in which the initial sound of wrecan, as well as connecting with Beowulfes, anticipates the w alliteration of line 874). Paronomasiac and rhyme-like effects are also in evidence. Thus, there is play on eal and eald at line 869, worn and word at line 870, and sped and spel at line 973. At line 870 gemunde echoes the earlier gemyndig (line 868) and is also linked by rhyme-effect to gebunden (line 871); and towards the end of the passage (lines 871–4) four out of six half-lines end in -an (ongan, styrian, wrecan, wrixlan).
It is notable that this aural play of sound and word highlights key ideas in the passage, to do with memory, tradition, words and the skill of the poet. Such ideas are also highlighted through the use of words unique to this passage. The vocabulary of the passage is grounded in traditional poetic diction (guma, worn, secg, sið) but also contains terms found only here – gilphlæden, ealdgesegena – and words found in phrasal combination only here – soðe gebunden, snyttrum styrian, spel gerade. The key ideas are also brought out through sentence structure, in which cumulation of epithets and variation are prominent. The passage is made up of two sense units, the first of which tells that a thegn composed words, stressing at length this man’s eloquence and mastery of tradition, while the second goes on to highlight the artistry of his new spel, ‘tale’, about Beowulf’s exploit. As is brought out by this grammatical structure, in the depiction of the oral poet at work no distinction is made between composition and performance: it is only in performance that the oral poem is realized.
Metrically the passage is made up predominantly of type A half-lines (gidda gemyndig, worn gemunde, etc.), as was the case with our previous passage, but, supplying rhythmical variety, there is more use here of types D and E, with their patterns of secondary stress, especially in the second sense unit: guma gilphlæden (D), word oþer fand (E), secg eft ongan (E), sið Biowulfes (D), welhwylc gecwæð (E).
In this virtuoso passage sound, sense and grammar combine in a self-conscious display of the craft of the Beowulf poet in what is itself an evocation of the craft of ‘the poet’. This observation brings us back to the question of the relationship of Beowulf itself to the originally oral poetic tradition in which it participates, which I discussed earlier. I hope that consideration of these lines, along with that of the other passage we have looked at, may serve to give a sense of the richness and art of the poetry of Beowulf, which modern poets must somehow come to terms with in their translations. Needless to say, if we had examined other passages in Beowulf, this would have brought out other aspects of the poetry of this many-faceted work.
As mentioned above, we will be returning to these two passages in subsequent chapters, to consider how they are treated by some modern poets in their translation of the Old English. An essential point about the poetry of Beowulf that I have concentrated on in this chapter is that it is at once traditional and strikingly original. In its originality Beowulf exploits the possibilities of tradition but it also transcends tradition, standing outside the pre-Christian heroic world it describes and complicating – while respecting – the value-system of its people.
In looking back at Beowulf from their modern perspective, translators are addressing a poem therefore that comes from a distant phase of language and culture and that even within that phase represents a special register which is handled with particular craft and sophistication by the Beowulf poet. The most successful (in my view) poetic translations discussed in the following chapters are conscious of these considerations but they, and others, disagree about how to respond to the challenge of creating an appropriate register in representing the Old English poem in Modern English. What most verse translators strongly agree upon is what they see as their primary aim, which is to produce poetry that lives. The balancing act will be to do so while at the same time doing appropriate justice to the poetry of Beowulf.
1 Heaney, Beowulf, ‘Introduction’, p. xii (references to Heaney’s ‘Introduction’ follow the pagination of the Faber edition, ‘Introduction’, pp. ix–xxx).
2 Among a wealth of critical writings on the poetry of Beowulf, key and influential items that stand out include Bonjour, The Digressions in Beowulf; Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf; Irving, A Reading of Beowulf; Niles, Beowulf: The Poem and its Tradition; Fred C. Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style; Irving, Rereading Beowulf; Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf; Tyler, Old English Poetics: The Aesthetics of the Familiar in Anglo-Saxon England; see also Fulk, ed., Interpretations of Beowulf.
3 The phrase comes from the title of Elizabeth Tyler’s monograph, referred to in the previous note.
4 See Heaney, Beowulf, p. xii.
5 Among important recent discussions relevant to these issues are Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England; Clemoes, Interactions of Thought and Language in Old English Poetry; Niles, ‘Reconceiving Beowulf: Poetry as Social Praxis’ and Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts, pp. 13–71 (‘Locating Beowulf in Literary History’).
6 Beowulf is preserved in London, British Library, Manuscript Cotton Vitellius A. xv: see Kiernan, Electronic Beowulf, containing digital facsimiles, transcription, edition, etc. On the dating of Beowulf, see Chase, ed., The Dating of Beowulf; Bjork and Obermeier, ‘Date, Provenance, Author, Audiences’; Frank, ‘A Scandal in Toronto: The Dating of Beowulf a Quarter Century On’.
On the issue of textual change in the course of transmission, see Lapidge, ‘The Archetype of Beowulf’; drawing upon Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe’s seminal study Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse, Lapidge notes, ‘Anglo-Saxon scribes, in the process of copying Old English verse, very frequently interfered with what they were copying by substituting metrically (and often lexically) acceptable words and phrases into the copy-text which lay before them’ (pp. 36–7). Similarly, Tyler emphasizes the degree to which intervening scribes or reciters are ‘participating in the ongoing composition of the poem’ (Old English Poetics, p. 6); see also Pasternack, The Textuality of Old English Poetry, esp. pp. 1–32.
7 On the Old English heroic tradition, see my chapter, ‘Germanic Legend and Old English Heroic Poetry’.
8 See especially Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’; also Bonjour, The Digressions in Beowulf; Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf; Shippey, ‘Structure and Unity’; Orchard, A Critical Companion, ‘Style and Structure’, pp. 57–97.
9 Beowulf: A Verse Translation, revised ed., p. xii.
10 Sievers, ‘Zur Rhythmik des germanischen Alliterationverses’ (1885), introducing the concept of the Sievers ‘five types’ of half-line metrical structure. The five types identified by Sievers are A (/ x / x), B (x / x /), C (x / / x), D (/ / \ x), E (/ \ x /) (where / indicates a stressed syllable, \ a lightly stressed syllable, and x one or more than one unstressed syllable), with minor variations allowable particularly within types D and E; later theorists refined Sievers’s scheme, developing the idea of ‘light’ verses (with only one stressed element) and ‘heavy’ verses (with three stressed elements).
11 Heaney, ‘Bone Dreams’, in his collection North, pp. 27–30, at p. 28.
12 Lehmann, ‘Broken Cadences in Beowulf’, p. 1.
13 See my article, ‘Audience(s), Reception, Literacy’, drawing upon the classic study of Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word; see also Orchard, ‘Oral Tradition’.
14 On the ‘absent author’, see Bäuml, ‘Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy’.
15 See especially Orchard, A Critical Companion: ‘Style and Structure’, pp. 57–97, ‘Words and Deeds’, pp. 169–202.
16 See Frank, ‘Sharing Words with Beowulf’.
17 Alexander, The Earliest English Poems, ‘Introduction’, p. 11.
18 Momma, The Composition of Old English Poetry, p. 193.
19 For key recent contributions, see Momma, The Composition of Old English Poetry; Donoghue, ‘Word Order and Poetic Style: Auxiliary and Verbal in The Metres of Boethius’; Blockley, Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax; many relevant issues are also discussed in Mitchell, Old English Syntax.
20 Punctuation, paragraphing and other key layout elements in editions of Old English poems are usually (silently) the contribution of the editor(s), a circumstance that is receiving critical attention in current research: see esp. Fred C. Robinson, ‘Mise en page in Old English Manuscripts and Printed Texts’; Liuzza, ‘Scribes of the Mind: Editing Old English in Theory and in Practice’. The punctuation of Old English texts was a particular concern in the work of Bruce Mitchell in recent decades, beginning with his 1980 article ‘The Dangers of Disguise: Old English Texts in Modern Punctuation’.
21 As argued by Howlett, British Books in Biblical Style, p. 506; Orchard, A Critical Companion (p. 59), finds this idea plausible.
22 For a listing of all repeated formulas in Beowulf, see Orchard, A Critical Companion, pp. 274–314.
23 At line 2694 gefrægn is lacking in the manuscript but it is universally inserted by editors.
24 For geardagum and þeodcyninga, see here; occurrences of weorðmynd in the plural can be found in Christ I (ASPR III, 3–15), line 378, Alms-Giving (ASPR III, 223), line 3), Judith (ASPR IV, 99–109), line 342), Guthlac A (line 463), as well as elsewhere in Beowulf (line 1752).
25 Andreas (line 821, on hronrade) and Genesis A (line 205, geond hronrade). On the possible close relation of these poems to Beowulf, see Orchard, A Critical Companion, p. 167. The use of kennings is characteristic of Old English (and Old Norse) poetry generally; cf. hwæles eðel, ‘whale’s homeland’ (Andreas, line 274, The Seafarer [ASPR III, 143–7], line 60, The Death of Edgar [ASPR VI, 22–4], line 28), also for the sea.
26 On the effect of the different half-line types on narrative pace, see Raw, The Art and Background of Old English Poetry, pp. 87–122; Scragg, ‘The Nature of Old English Verse’, pp. 60–3.
27 On the alliteration of gutteral g (Gar-) and palatal g (gear-) in line 1, see Orchard, A Critical Companion, p. 60; cf. also gomban gyldan (line 11). Orchard is surely correct in seeing this ‘archaic’ alliteration as ‘utterly traditional’ rather than as evidence for an early date for the poem (as he points out [ibid.], the distinction between the two pronunciations of g apparently arose in the eighth century).
28 On this passage, see further Eliason, ‘The “Improvised Lay” in Beowulf’; Creed, ‘“… Wél-hwelċ Gecwæþ …”: The Singer as Architect’; Nolan and Bloomfield, ‘Beotword, gilpcwidas, and the gilphlædan Scop of Beowulf’.