·3·

Reception, Perceptions, and a Survey of Earlier Verse Translations of Beowulf

Subsequent chapters will focus particularly on verse translations of Beowulf from Edwin Morgan’s on, covering the period from the 1950s down to the present. There were plenty of attempts at rendering Beowulf in English verse before Morgan, of course, and I wish to give an overview of these before coming to the more recent period. In the present chapter I will sketch in something of the earlier larger reception history of Beowulf in the modern era and trace some inherited and changing perceptions of it, with particular reference to the history of its translation into verse. I have already referred to some of the translations from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a previous chapter, focusing on ideas of translation theory and approach. At the risk of some duplication of material, I consider verse translations again in the present chapter but as well as taking account of the features of the translations just mentioned I will also emphasize the understandings of and attitudes to the poem that animate them. Invaluable groundwork has been done by Andreas Haarder, Tom Shippey and others on material covered in this chapter and, though their focus was not primarily on translation, my debt to these scholars will be clearly evident below and is gratefully acknowledged.¹

Beowulf in the Nineteenth Century, and up to 1914

The beginnings of significant knowledge of Beowulf date only from the turn of the eighteenth-to-nineteenth century, and the poem remained largely the preserve of scholars throughout most of the nineteenth century, achieving more widespread interest and popularity only towards the end of the century and particularly in the twentieth century. Translations of the poem have contributed importantly to the ongoing development of that interest and popularity, which have been increasingly evident in recent decades and are probably at their height today. But getting Beowulf better known was one aim of translations from the start.

The early recovery and translation of Beowulf

The single surviving manuscript containing Beowulf had been acquired by the sixteenth-century antiquarian Laurence Nowell and later became part of the collection of Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631), whence it made its way into the possession of the British Museum (founded in 1753) as manuscript Cotton Vitellius A. xv. Despite the vicissitudes of history (including damage to the edges of all the pages of the manuscript due to a fire in 1731), Beowulf had been preserved down the centuries. But it remained unread and to a significant degree unreadable: Old English prose was well understood in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, but verse was a different matter. And the eighteenth century in particular was not fertile ground anyway for the study of Old English literature, as Allen Frantzen, among others, has documented; Frantzen refers to the hostility to Anglo-Saxon antiquities in this period, reflecting the view, ‘common in the eighteenth century, that Anglo-Saxon England was a barbarous place with a barbarous civilization only lifted to respectability by the Norman Conquest’.² Joseph Ritson, antiquarian and editor of ballads and metrical romances, is typical of the age when he dismisses the Anglo-Saxons as ‘for the most part, an ignorant and illiterate people’ and declares that ‘it will be vain to hope for proofs, among them, of genius, or original composition, at least in their native tongue.’³ Ritson described Old English verse as ‘a rhymeless sort of poetry, a kind of bombast or insane prose, from which it is very difficult to be distinguished’.⁴

In 1786 Beowulf came to the attention of the Icelander Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín, archivist of the Danish court in Copenhagen. Among the few before Thorkelín who had noticed Beowulf was Humphrey Wanley, who includes reference to it in his great 1705 catalogue of early English manuscripts and who prints therein a mostly correct transcription of lines 1–19 and 53–73 of the poem. Wanley couldn’t make much sense of Beowulf but he worked out that it was written in verse and hazarded a description of it as being about a Danish hero who fought against kings of Sweden.⁵ Beowulf was next mentioned by Thomas Wharton in his History of English Poetry (1776), but only in passing in a footnote at the beginning of the work. Echoing Wanley, Wharton writes, ‘The curious reader is also referred to a Danish Saxon poem, celebrating the wars which Beowulf, a noble Dane, descended from the royal stem of Scildinge, waged against the kings of Swedeland.’⁶

It was the reference to the hero as Danish that particularly interested Thorkelín and stimulated him to have two transcriptions of the manuscript text made, the second carried out by himself.⁷ On the basis of these transcriptions, full of errors as they were, Thorkelín produced the first edition of the poem, finally publishing it in 1815. Thorkelín himself reports that he had had to start work on this project again when all his materials on it were destroyed in the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, by British forces.⁸ Wackerbarth, the first translator of all of Beowulf into English verse (1849), comments sympathetically – and patriotically – on this disaster: he laments that Thorkelín’s edition ‘was ready for Publication in 1807, when the inexplicable Policy of the Danish Government gave Rise to a War with England, and in the ever to be regretted Bombardment of Copenhagen that followed, the Antiquarian’s House, and the literary Property he had been for thirty Years diligently collecting perished in the Flames’.⁹ Recent scholarship suggests, however, that the delay in the publication of Thorkelín’s edition was due more to his own incompetence as a scholar. In the view of the most recent commentator, Magnús Fjalldal, given Thorkelín’s scholarly inadequacies, his edition was ‘a predictable disaster’.¹⁰

Thorkelín’s edition abounds in instances of mistaken morpheme division and wrong letters: according to the calculation of J. R. Hall, there is an average of one letter-error every 1.7 long lines.¹¹ And, undeterred by his lack of knowledge of Old English poetry, Thorkelín accompanies his edited text with a floundering parallel translation into Latin (set out in short lines which follow the Old English half-lines), the first translation of the whole poem. The translation aims at word-for-word literalism, though, as he admits in his preface, Thorkelín found the task of translating the poem taxing indeed:

I have tried to render our poet and his circumlocutions word for word, in which matter if anywhere I have not satisfied the reader, I hope that he will kindly pardon me, as I have inevitably been tormented by the very great confusion of the letters and by the rough variation in the meaning of words, which is ambiguous, erratic and often in turn self-contradictory.¹²

Opinions of Thorkelín’s translation have been almost unanimously condemnatory, from Kemble, who finds ‘some gross fault’ within every five lines, to Wackerbarth, who declares it to be ‘certainly worse than useless’, to Marijane Osborn, who comments that it is ‘often mistaken’.¹³ Thorkelín’s version is significant, however, as the first complete translation of Beowulf. His edition and translation instigated the concentrated study of the poem, but they were produced by an ill-equipped scholar in the days before Germanic philology and at a time when a basic understanding of Old English poetry and poetics was lacking – and this shows. Thorkelín’s translation was also not aided by his own faulty transcription of the manuscript text. Indeed it is the unsatisfactory nature of Thorkelín’s text that especially militates against his producing an adequate translation.

Thorkelín’s edited version and translation of the opening eleven lines of the poem are as follows:

Hwæt wegar Dena	Quomodo Danorum
In geardagum	In principio
Þeod cyninga	Populus regum
Þrym gefrunon	Gloriam auxerit,
Hu þa æþelingas	Quomodo principes
Ellen fremedon.	Virtute promoverit.
Oft Scyld Scefing	Sæpe Scyldus Scefides
Sceaþen þreatum	Hostes turmis,
Monegum mægþum	Multis nationibus
Meodo setla ofteah	Dignas sedes auferens
Egsode. Eorl	Terruit. Dux
Syþþan ærest wearþ	Postquam fiebat,
Feasceaft funden	Miseris obviis
He þæs freofre gebad.	Solatium mansit.
Weox under weolcnum	Crevit sub nubibus,
Weorþmyndum þeah	Honore viguit,
Oþ þæt him æghwylc	Donec ille quilibet
Þara ymbsittendra	Accolarum
Ofer hronrade	Ad cetorum vias
Hyran scolde	Suum cogeretur
Goban gyldan	Tributum solvere.
Þæt wæs god cyning.	Ille fuit bonus Rex.

By way of comparison, it may be helpful to quote (again) the corresponding lines from Klaeber’s Beowulf, and to supply as literal a translation as is feasible in Modern English:

Hwæt, we Gar-Dena       in geardagum,

þeodcyninga       þrym gefrunon,

hu ða æþelingas       ellen fremedon.

Oft Scyld Scefing       sceaþena þreatum,

monegum mægþum       meodosetla 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.

[Listen, we have heard of the glory in days of yore of the kings of the people (þeodcyninga) of the Spear-Danes (Gar-Dena), how the noblemen accomplished [deeds of] valour. Often Scyld Scefing deprived troops of enemies, many tribes, of their mead-benches (meodusetla), terrified/inspired awe in warriors; he experienced comfort for that: he prospered under the clouds, thrived in worldly honours (weorðmyndum), until each one of the tribes situated around, over the whale-road, had to obey him, give him tribute: that was a good king.]

An English version of Thorkelín’s Latin translation might read,

How in the beginning the people of the kings increased the glory of the Danes, how they [the people] advanced the princes in valour. Often Scyld son of Scef terrified enemies with his troops, taking away the worthy seats from many tribes. After he became ruler, he awaited consolation from the miseries that lay in his path. He grew great under the clouds, flourished in honour, until each and every one of those dwelling near was driven to the roads of the whales to pay tribute to him. He was a good king.

Thorkelín’s translation errors here are due partly to the deficiencies of his Old English text, in which some letters are misread (ð is also silently changed to þ) and morphemes are not correctly divided (instances of the latter being wegar, in which the first-person pronoun which in the Old English is the subject of the opening sentence is not identified; and þeod cyninga, which is not recognized to be a compound; Thorkelín mis-transcribes gomban as Goban but still manages to supply the right sense), and the errors are due partly to failure to understand the basic meaning and use of Old English words (examples are gefrunon, ‘heard’, translated ‘auxerit’, ‘increased’; meodo, ‘mead’, clearly taken to be a ‘meed’ word; and hwæt, translated as a variant of hu). In his preface Thorkelín had referred to the meaning of words being ambiguous in Beowulf, a quality that is very much reflected in his own translation here as well, in which, for example (as in the Old English), the genitives of the opening clause could be construed in several different ways.

Thorkelín is not properly equipped to edit and translate the poem but tries his best anyway. He gets into deeper trouble as he proceeds after this opening passage, mistaking the blæd, ‘renown, glory’, of Beowulf spreading widely for his blood flowing profusely (Sanguine late scaturiente), turning the gnomic passage at lines 20–3 into an apostrophe (‘Thus you ought to bring it about by ready gifts of treasure, O king, offered to your fathers, so that in after times young men may become accustomed to follow their leaders, when wars come’: ‘Ita debes cimeliorum / O Rex efficere / Præsentibus donis / Patribus (oblatis) tuis, / Ut juvenes / Post assuefiant / sequi duces, / Ubi bella venerunt’),¹⁴ and, confused by the mention of Beowulf at line 18, taking the description of Scyld’s ship funeral to be an account of the voyage to Denmark of the hero and his virorum cohors, ‘troop of men’ (virorum cohors translating hringed stefna, ‘ringed-prow’), a troop which is ‘ready for action and eager for the journey’ (expedita et itineris avida).

It is the Danishness of Beowulf that particularly interests Thorkelín, as he makes clear in his patriotic preface to his edition and translation. The preface begins,

Among all the monuments of the ancient Danish world which time, the devourer of things, has bequeathed to us, the admirable epic concerning the Scyldings now properly published stands out. For we have here the well-watered sources from which can be drawn forth knowledge of religion and of poetry and the sequence of the achievements of our people in the third and fourth centuries.¹⁵

As well as initiating the scholarly study of Beowulf, Thorkelín thus also begins the enterprise of nationalistic appropriation of it which was to be a popular one among nineteenth-century scholars. I will refer to this appropriation in a later section; for the present we might note that Thorkelín values Beowulf not for its literary qualities but for what it tells us about the past. Concerning its literary qualities, his statement about the ‘rough variation in the meaning of words, which is ambiguous, erratic and often in turn self-contradictory’ is as much as he has to offer.

Thorkelín’s edition and translation was followed by a translation of the poem into Danish by N. F. S. Grundtvig, a free paraphrase in a rhyming ballad metre.¹⁶ Grundtvig, a wide-ranging scholar with strong nationalistic and religious convictions, was keenly interested in Danish history and antiquities and hoped that his translation would be of value as a ‘text-book in patriotism’.¹⁷

Ten years before the publication of Thorkelín’s edition, Sharon Turner, having independently discovered the poem, had initiated the history of Beowulf translation when he bravely included word-for-word renderings into English of selected passages from it (set out in short lines) in his summary of the poem in the fourth volume of his The History of the Anglo-Saxons (1805); in the same volume he also quotes some forty lines from Beowulf and other Old English poems in the original language and adds comments on Old English metre.¹⁸

Turner viewed Anglo-Saxon poetry as reflecting a ‘rude’ state of poetical genius and taste,¹⁹ but he came to recognize that Beowulf was an important literary monument, characterizing it as ‘a specimen of an Anglo-Saxon poetical romance’: he declares in the 1820 (third) edition of his History, ‘It is the most interesting relic of the Anglo-Saxon poetry which time has spared to us’, adding, ‘and, as a picture of the manners, and as an exhibition of the feelings and notions of those days, it is as valuable as it is ancient.’²⁰ In his second edition (1807) of the History he includes the beginning of the poem among the translated extracts (this passage is not in the first edition):

What have we not in the world,

in former days,

heard of the glory

of the Theod-kings?

How the ethelings

in strength excelled!

Oft the scyld of the race of Scefa,

from hosts of enemies,

from many tribes,

the mead of the seats withdrew.

Turner has difficulty with these lines (not understanding Gar-Dena, for example, and introducing a negative: the na of Dena?) but he makes a better stab than Thorkelín: he recognizes the first-person-plural pronoun, for example, and gets the meaning of gefrunon right. And his revised version of these lines in the 1820 edition of the History, written after he had consulted Thorkelín’s edition, is a further considerable improvement:

How have we of the Gar-Danes,

in former days,

of the Theod-kings,

the glory heard?

How the ethelings

Excelled in strength!

Oft the scyld-scefing

from hosts of enemies,

from many tribes,

the mead-seats withdrew.²¹

Here Turner is still unable to cope with the opening exclamatory Hwæt and has to improvise with Scyld Scefing but the overall meaning corresponds reasonably to that of the original. Soon, however, he goes badly wrong, like Thorkelín mistaking the ship funeral of Scyld for an account of the ‘embarkation of Beowulf and his partizans’, who are setting out to travel to Denmark. Even in 1805 when translating the half-line blæd wide sprang (line 18b) he avoids Thorkelín’s error of interpreting blæd as ‘blood’, translating the half-line instead ‘The fruit wide sprang’, though he wrongly (if understandably) assumes that the Beowulf to whom this phrase applies is the hero of the poem.

Short extracts from Beowulf were translated into English by Ebenezer Henderson in 1818, closely following Thorkelín’s Latin version.²² Then in 1826 came the first translation of selected portions of the poem into English verse, interspersed with plot summary, by John Josias Conybeare.²³ Conybeare adopts blank verse as his poetic form:

List! We have learnt a tale of other years,

Of kings and warrior Danes, a wondrous tale,

How æthelings bore them in the brunt of war.²⁴

Conybeare aims at literary fluency and elegance rather than word-for-word literalness. After his translation and summary he prints the Old English text of the translated passages accompanied by a literal rendering into Latin: for the opening three lines of the translation, as quoted above, he has

Hwæt we Gar-Dena	Aliquid nos de Bellicorum Danorum
In gear-dagum	In diebus antiquis
Ðeod cyninga	Popularium regum
Ðrym gefrunon,	Gloria accepimus,
Hu ða Æðelingas	Quomodo tunc principes
Ellen fremedon.	Virtute valuerint.25

In his verse translation rather than striving for literalness he seeks to convey the story of the poem and to bring extended passages from it to life in poetic Modern English. As Roy Liuzza has explained, his use of blank verse brings a classical feel to the translation and renders the original poem acceptable to an early-nineteenth-century audience, with Conybeare accommodating it to the taste of his readers by recasting it so as to release it from what he refers to as the ‘barbarisms and obscurity of the language’ and the ‘shackles of a metrical system at once of extreme difficulty, and, to our ears at least, totally destitute of harmony and expression’.²⁶ For Conybeare, Beowulf is worthy of being brought to the attention of his contemporaries, however: in it can be found ‘many of those which have in all ages been admitted as the genuine elements of poetic composition’.²⁷ The translation was praised by Isaac D’Israeli, father of Benjamin, in 1841 – ‘Conybeare’s poetical version remains unrivalled’ – though D’Israeli also draws attention to the extent of the recasting involved in Conybeare’s approach to this ‘primitive’ poetry: ‘But if a literal version of primitive poetry soon ceases to be poetry, so likewise, if the rude outlines are to be retouched, and a brilliant colouring is to be borrowed, we are receiving Anglo-Saxon poetry in the cadences of Milton and the “orient hues” of Gray.’²⁸

Also evident in the translation is Conybeare’s uncertain grasp of the sense of the Old English, reflective of the state of knowledge of the language of the poem at this time, though his understanding is an advance on that of Thorkelín and Turner: he even hits on the import of the opening Hwæt (though not translating it properly in his Latin literal version).²⁹

Conybeare’s treatment of narrative is illustrated in his rendering of the passage in which Beowulf first hears news of Grendel’s attacks:

Such tidings of the Grendel and his deeds

The Goths’ high chief, the thane of Higelac, learn’t;

He that was the strongest of the sons of men.

And soon that noble soldier bad array

A goodly ship of strength. The hero spoke

His brave intent, far o’er the sea-bird’s path

To seek the monarch at his hour of need.³⁰

Conybeare may be regarded as the first English popularizer of Beowulf (for an educated readership, of course), carefully tailoring it to suit his own taste and that of his readership. As Tom Shippey notes, his Illustrations was ‘the source from which British readers continued to draw their knowledge of the poem for some time’.³¹

Thorkelín’s edition of Beowulf was immediately perceived to be highly inadequate. Conybeare collated Thorkelín’s edited text with the manuscript in 1817 and corrected it extensively (he also corrected the translation), going on to use this collation, which was itself far from free of errors, for his Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. Error-tracking collations of Thorkelín’s edited text and the Beowulf manuscript were also made by Frederic Madden (1824), N. F. S. Gruntvig (1831) and Benjamin Thorpe (1830), the latter providing the basis for Thorpe’s own later edition of the poem (1855).³² Thorkelín’s edition was finally superseded by the much more scholarly edition of John Mitchell Kemble (1833), the pioneering exponent of Germanic philology in England.³³ Kemble’s edition is dedicated to ‘James Grimm’ and applies the principles of the new language science. Of the unfortunate editio princeps Kemble writes scathingly, ‘not five lines of Thorkelin’s edition can be found in succession, in which some gross fault, either in the transcript or the translation, does not betray the editor’s utter ignorance of the Anglo-Saxon language’.³⁴ He also takes a sideswipe at the translations of Turner and Conybeare on the way past: ‘Even the works of Mr. Turner and Professor Conybeare, although in some respects immeasurably superior to Thorkelin’s, are marked with mistranslations and false readings of no light kind.’³⁵ Kemble’s edition was based on his own transcription of the poem. J. R. Hall notes that whereas Thorkelín has nearly 300 letter-errors in the first 500 long lines of Beowulf, Kemble has only twenty-one, a mark of the advance in editing that his edition represents.³⁶

Kemble was a philologist and also a leading representative of the ‘Saxonism’ of the earlier nineteenth century, following Turner in embracing values and traditions associated with the Anglo-Saxon world.³⁷ For Kemble, as for Turner, the Anglo-Saxon period was an originary one: ‘the childhood of our own age, – the explanation of its manhood’.³⁸ Beowulf might be ‘rude’ but it presents ‘a very faithful picture’ of that originary period.³⁹

As philological study advanced, Kemble’s edition would itself soon be superseded by others, of which the most influential were produced in Germany, which was of course very much the centre of gravity of philology in the nineteenth century and the setting for a veritable industry of scholarship. In 1863 appeared Moritz Heyne’s authoritative edition, soon to become a standard and much reprinted and revised down the generations; Heyne’s edition circulated along with others from such heavyweights as Grein (1857–8, 1867), Ettmüller (1875), Holder (1881–4) and, after the turn of the century, Holthausen (1905–6).⁴⁰ Ettmüller and Grein were also the first translators of Beowulf into German (in 1840 and 1857, respectively), both adopting alliterating stress-based metre as their medium.⁴¹

Kemble’s revised edition of his Beowulf (1835–7) included a close translation of the poem into English prose, the first full translation into English; I provided a short quotation from this in Chapter 1.⁴² Kemble intended his translation as an aid in interpreting Beowulf and aimed at literalness. To refer again to a passage from him quoted earlier, ‘I was bound to give, word for word, the original in all its roughness’, he wrote; ‘I might have made it smoother, but I purposely avoided doing so.’⁴³ We saw earlier that, though literal in his approach, Kemble also strove to write literary prose, with a lightly archaizing style. The literary quality of the writing is already apparent in the opening lines of his translation, which hardly come across as rough (though the sentences are not well-formed classical ones):

Lo! We have learned by tradition the majesty of the Gar-Danes, of the mighty kings in days of yore, how the noble men perfected valour. Oft did Scyld the son of Scéf tear the mead-thrones away from the hosts of his foes, from many tribes; the earl terrified them, after he first was found an outcast. He therefore abode in comfort, he waxed under the welkin, he flourished with dignities, until each one of the surrounding peoples over the whale’s path, must obey him, must pay him tribute: That was a good king!

This reads well and in terms of sense it represents a striking advance on previous English translations. Apart from the troublesome eorl (line 6 of Beowulf), taken here to refer to Scyld, the translation is essentially a reliable one, based on a good text.

English verse translation in the nineteenth century

A number of other literal student-directed translations into English prose, intended as ancillary to the study of the original, but also archaizing in their style to some degree, appeared in the course of the nineteenth century, by Thorpe (1855), Arnold (1876) and Earle (1892);⁴⁴ Thorpe’s and Arnold’s translations accompanied their editions of the poem, while Earle’s was a free-standing scholarly translation informed by the substantial progress in the textual study of Beowulf achieved by German scholars in the later nineteenth century. Further prose translations would appear in the opening years of the twentieth century, by J. R. Clark Hall (1901), Tinker (1902) and Child (1904).⁴⁵ As scholarly work on Beowulf developed and the poem consolidated its place as a university teaching-text, there was a steady demand for serviceable translations, which continued to improve in their accuracy and understanding of the poem and its poetics as the scholarship that they reflected advanced. They were not going to do much, however, to bring Beowulf into wider public consciousness.

Targeting a wider audience, English verse translation of Beowulf (i.e., of the whole poem, as opposed to extracts) began in 1849 with A. Diedrich Wackerbarth’s version, in a ballad-like rhyming syllabic metre. In using a ballad-like metre Wackerbarth was taking a different tack from the classicizing Conybeare but, like Conybeare, he was appealing to the literary taste of the day. The result of his style of verse, however, is to give a completely false impression of the poetry of Beowulf, as he himself seems to have been uncomfortably conscious of: in his preface to the translation he writes,

Some may ask why I have not preserved the Anglo-Saxon alliterative Metre. My Reason is that I do not think the Taste of the English People would at present bear it. I wish to get my book read, that my Countrymen may become generally acquainted with the Epic of our Ancestors wherewith they have been generally unacquainted […]. Still, if the literary Bent of this Country should continue for some few Years longer the Course it has of late Years pursued, it will be time to give this Poem to the English People in English alliterative Metre, and I shall be thankful to see it done.⁴⁶

Wackerbarth, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the Catholic college St Mary’s, Oscott,⁴⁷ based his translation on the edition of Kemble – ‘this accurate and beautiful Edition cannot be too highly valued’⁴⁸ – which gave him a sounder text to work with than had been available previously. He began work soon after Kemble’s edition came out but he explains that he proceeded very slowly with the translation ‘on account of the Difficulty of the Work, and the utter Inadequacy of any then existing Dictionary’; he writes, ‘I still however wrought my Way onward, under the Notion that even if I should not think my Book, when finished, fit for Publication, yet that the MS. would form an amusing Tale for my little Nephews and Nieces.’⁴⁹ This last remark suggests Wackerbarth’s perception of the level of literature represented by Beowulf.

Wackerbarth sought an easy entertaining style, as did Lumsden in the next verse translation (1881), also in rhyming syllabic metre,⁵⁰ both of them turning Beowulf into metrical romance but neither, in doing so, having much impact in terms of raising the popular profile of the poem. Here is Wackerbarth in jaunty full swing, wreaking havoc on the sinister passage (lines 99–104) in which Grendel first comes to attack Heorot:

Thus gallantly the Comrades fared,

       Till one both stark and fell,

Dark Deeds to perpetrate prepared, –

       A ghastly Foe from Hell:

And Grendel hight that Demon gaunt;

The Marches were his lonely Haunt,

The Moor and Fen and Fastness’ height

He held subjected to his Might.

The critic and clergyman Stopford Brooke, who himself included translated extracts from Beowulf in his History of Early English Literature (1892),⁵¹ colourfully dismisses this kind of verse translation. Discussing his own approach (and also rejecting prose translation), he writes,

Translations of poetry are never much good, but at least they should always endeavour to have the musical movement of the poetry, and to obey the laws of the verse they translate. A translation made in any one of our existing rhyming metres seemed to me as much out of the question as a prose translation. None of these metres resemble those of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and, moreover, their associations would modernize old English thought. An Anglo-Saxon king in modern Court dress would not look more odd and miserable than an Anglo-Saxon poem in modern rhyming metre.⁵²

Here Brooke, writing for a general audience rather than for scholars, and addressing some of the issues of translation theory and practice highlighted above in Chapter 1, advocates a ‘foreignizing’ approach, an approach that seeks to bring the reader to the poetry of the original rather than, like Wackerbarth and Lumsden, and indeed Conybeare with his blank verse,⁵³ the other way around. For Brooke, bringing the reader to the poetry means eschewing prose – ‘A prose translation even when it reaches excellence, gives no idea whatever of that to which the ancient English listened’⁵⁴ – and using a kind of verse that ‘resembles’ that of the Old English. He still strives to make his translation readable, however.

Among the passages translated by Brooke is that describing the funeral of Scyld (lines 32–40a, 50b–2):

There at haven stood, hung with rings, the ship,

Ice-bright, for the outpath eager, craft of Æthelings!

So their lord, the well-beloved, all at length they laid

In the bosom of the bark, him the bracelet-giver, –

By the mast the mighty king. Many gifts were there,

Fretted things of fairness brought from far-off ways! –

Never heard I of a keel hung more comelily about

With the weeds of war, with the weapons of the battle,

With the bills and byrnies […]

None of men can say,

None of heroes under heaven, nor in the hall the rulers,

For a truthful truth, who took up that lading.⁵⁵

This contrasts radically with the rhyming of Wackerbarth and successfully takes over some of the features of Old English poetry – the compounding, the appositive syntax, a diction that is both stylized and inventive, a strong rhythmical-alliterative structure – but the verse comes across as pedestrian and limited in its expressive capacity. Here comelily and for a truthful truth are particularly feeble. Brooke writes, ‘I felt myself then driven to invent a rhythmical movement which would enable me, while translating literally, to follow the changes, and to express, with some little approach to truth, the proper ebb and flow of Anglo-Saxon verse.’⁵⁶ This was a worthy aim but, eloquent preacher though he reputedly was,⁵⁷ Brooke was not equipped to bring it to fruition. It is interesting, however, to see him and other late-nineteenth-century translators struggling to find a suitable verse medium for their versions of Beowulf, beginning to recognize the need to adopt a stress metre in an age in which syllabic metre dominated.

The first full Modern English translation of Beowulf to make use of a stress-based metre was that of James M. Garnett (1882), a few years before Brooke’s translated extracts. Garnett’s was also the first translation to be published in the United States and it was much reprinted in the decades after its first publication.⁵⁸ The verse lines of the translation are made up of two half-lines, each having two accented syllables. Garnett instigates the tradition in English of using imitative metre for the translation of Beowulf, a tradition that would become the dominant one in future years. He does not imitate the alliterative component of Old English metre, however, employing alliteration only occasionally – as an effect rather than for structural purposes.

Garnett presents a version of Beowulf in verse but, unusually, combines this form with an emphatically literalist approach to the translation, following the Old English indeed in a word-for-word manner.  His use of accentuation is unobtrusive, and the translation recalls Kemble’s literal prose version of the poem. Again, as a sample, I quote the beginning of the Unferth episode (lines 499–505):

Hunferth then spoke, the son of Ecglaf,

Who at the feet sat of the lord of the Scyldings,

Unloosed his war-secret (was the coming of Beowulf,

The proud sea-farer, to him mickle grief,

For that he granted not that any man else

Ever more honor of this middle-earth

Should gain under heaven than he himself).

Garnett aims to get the best of both worlds, thereby hoping to aid the student working with the Old English text but also to interest the general reader. The result is a curious kind of overwrought prose-poetry in a curious kind of English, with much disruption of normal modern English word order, frequent lack of clarity in expression and – as with other translators – an evident fondness for archaizing diction. Tinker complains that ‘it is hard to read the lines as anything but prose’,⁵⁹ a comment that has considerable justification, though there is a distinctive underlying rhythmic structure to the lines which may be seen as qualifying the writing as verse, of a cumbersome kind. Garnett accepts that his translation ‘lacks smoothness’ but he perceives the original as lacking smoothness as well and thinks that his verse gives ‘a better idea of the poem than a mere prose version would do’.⁶⁰ He adds, ‘While it would have been easy, by means of periphrasis and freer translation, to mend some of the defects chargeable to the line-for-line form, the translation would have lacked literalness, which I regarded as the most important object.’⁶¹ In terms of our discussion in the opening chapter, Garnett offers a translation which in its literalness is also foreignizing.

A decade later J. L. Hall published another verse version, the second to be published in America.⁶² Like Garnett’s version (which Hall praises⁶³), Hall’s adopts a stress metre but softens the strangeness of this for his readers by accompanying it with a syllabic metrical effect. He writes in his preface, ‘In order to please the larger class of readers, a regular cadence has been used, a measure which, while retaining the essential characteristics of the original, permits the reader to see ahead of him in reading’;⁶⁴ he goes on to observe that his cadences ‘closely resemble those used by Browning in some of his most striking poems’.⁶⁵ Hall is generally freer than Garnett in his approach to translation, not attempting the kind of literalism that we have seen in the latter translator. Hall’s verse is also insistently alliterative, the first of its kind among (complete) Beowulf translations in English: Wackerbarth would perhaps have been ‘thankful to see it done’.

Hall’s translation (submitted at Johns Hopkins for the degree of PhD) was addressed to the scholar but also to the member of that ‘larger class of readers’, the student of English literature, ‘giving him, in modern garb, the most ancient epic of our race’.⁶⁶ Hall’s approach is illustrated in a vivid passage from the fight with Grendel (lines 813–19a; here, lines 21–7 in Hall’s lineation):

But Higelac’s hardy henchman and kinsman

Held him by the hand; hateful to other

Was each one if living. A body-wound suffered

The direful demon, damage incurable

Was seen on his shoulder, his sinews were shivered,

His body did burst. To Beowulf was given

Glory in battle.

The translation, comparable in technique to that of Brooke, adopts a somewhat foreignizing approach, achieved through the use of alliteration, inversion of word order and heightened diction, but Hall manages to combine this approach with a reasonable degree of readability, though the expression is often strained and curious, as in the translation of lines 196–9a (Hall, here, lines 6–10):

                            So Higelac’s liegeman,

Good amid Geatmen, of Grendel’s achievements

Heard in his home: of heroes then living

He was stoutest and strongest, sturdy and noble.

He bade them prepare him a bark that was trusty.

This passage also nicely illustrates Hall’s use of ‘cadence’.

The last translation of Beowulf into English verse in the nineteenth century was that of William Morris. In his self-consciously medievalizing translation of 1895 Morris too employs both a stress-based metre and structural alliteration, but he carries the foreignizing approach much further than any previous translator.⁶⁷ Morris’s version is unlike any other, hitting the reader between the eyes in suggesting the otherness of Beowulf. It does so, it has to be admitted, at the expense of making Beowulf into something of a lumbering oddity, awkward and unwieldy. The opening lines (quoted at greater length above) give a flavour of Morris’s style:

What! We of the Spear-Danes of yore, so was it

That we learn’d of the fair fame of the kings of the folks

And the Athelings a-faring in framing of valour.

Morris’s translation was praised in some quarters when it first came out. For Theodore Watts, writing in the Athenaeum, Morris’s ‘sympathy with the Old English temper is nothing less than marvellous’.⁶⁸ Watts takes up a familiar theme when he declares that the translation ‘will seem uncouth to the general reader whose ear is familiar only with the quantitative scansion of classic movements and the accentual prosody of modern rhyme and blank verse’, but for Watts such criticism is misplaced: ‘But if the business of the translator is to pour the old wine into the new bottles with as little loss as possible of its original aroma, Mr Morris’s efforts will have been crowned with entire success.’⁶⁹

Few critics since, however, have found much to say in favour of Morris’s Beowulf. Edwin Morgan’s verdict is perhaps the harshest, describing it as ‘disastrously bad, uncouth to the point of weirdness, unfairly inaccurate, and often more obscure than the original (hardly in fact a translation at all, since Morris “worked up” a prose paraphrase passed to him with increasing misgiving by the scholarly A. J. Wyatt)’.⁷⁰ Morgan presents a jaundiced survey of existing translations down to his own day, not having a good word to say about any of them, but his severest words are for Morris. Marijane Osborn is more understated but hardly less sympathetic in her criticism when she comments on the lines ‘Ye twain in the waves’ might / For seven nights swink’d. He outdid thee in swimming’: ‘This passage is relatively successful compared to many others in this version, the poet merely being led into “swink’d” by the alliterative “swimming”’.⁷¹ Morris scholars have largely ignored the translation, though Jack Lindsay pauses to refer to it as ‘one of his least successful productions’; Fiona MacCarthy declares, ‘Few people have had a good word to say for Morris’s Beowulf (least of all in Oxford). I will not attempt one. It is Morris at his most garrulous and loose.’⁷²

A number of recent articles, by Robert Boenig, Roy Liuzza and Chris Jones,⁷³ and an earlier one, by P. M. Tilling,⁷⁴ adopt more sympathetic attitudes to Morris’s version. Boenig argues for its importance for Morris’s development as a writer of prose romance (though it was one of the very last things Morris wrote) and insists on the appropriateness of archaizing effects in its vocabulary and syntax – ‘for the original poem attempts in its own way to archaize’⁷⁵ – and he praises the translation’s balance of accuracy and poetic excitement. Liuzza and Jones consider Morris’s Beowulf in the context of its cultural setting and of Morris’s perception of the original poem. Jones brings out aspects of the language ideology of the time, referring to ‘nativist’ pro-Anglo-Saxon views in the nineteenth century, while Liuzza, noting that Morris had shown himself perfectly capable of translating Icelandic sagas in a direct and straightforward way, sees Morris in his Beowulf translation as ‘apparently trying to recreate the experience of reading Beowulf in the depth of its history, across the centuries that separate it from us’. He observes, ‘In effect he was trying to make distance itself into an aesthetic category, to respect and recreate the strangeness of the reading encounter with an ancient poem.’⁷⁶ Liuzza acknowledges the bizarreness of the translation, however, and finds it ‘almost unintelligible in places’, and even Boenig admits that there are ‘problems’ with it.⁷⁷

Both Boenig and Liuzza were anticipated in some of their conclusions by Tilling, though the latter takes a different line from Liuzza in his consideration of Morris’s saga translations (‘using consciously archaic words […] reasonably accurate, but often difficult to read’).⁷⁸ Tilling analyses the principles and methods of the Beowulf translation, with particular reference to vocabulary, and shows that Morris was trying to recreate the text as closely as possible for his modern readers: the translation ‘cannot be judged a complete success’, admits Tilling, but it ‘repays study because it is a serious attempt, by a literary figure of some consequence, to convey to his readers something of the nature of the text, as well as the meaning, of a great poem from their culture’.⁷⁹

With regard to the point about Morris’s saga translations, it is useful to quote a short extract from his version of Volsunga Saga, on which he collaborated with Eiríkr Magnússon. The passage is from the climax of the Sigmund–Signy story, where Sigmund and his son Sinfjotli arrive at the stronghold of King Siggeir, husband of their sister Signy, intending to kill the king in an act of vengeance. The avengers are accidentally discovered in their hiding place by one of the two young sons of Siggeir and Signy, who

beholds withal where two men are sitting, big and grimly to look on, with overhanging helms and bright white byrnies; so he runs up the hall to his father, and tells him of the sight he has seen, and thereat the king misdoubts of some guile abiding him; but Signy heard their speech, and arose and took both the children, and went out into the porch to them and said:

‘Lo ye! These younglings have bewrayed you; come now therefore and slay them!’

Sigmund says, ‘Never will I slay thy children for telling of where I lay hid’.

But Sinfjotli made little enow of it, but drew his sword and slew them both, and cast them into the hall at King Siggeir’s feet.⁸⁰

In this vigorous and graphic passage the translation is literal, to the extent indeed of unidiomatically preserving the shifting tenses of the original, and the diction is archaic and stilted. The passage is hardly ‘straightforward’ but neither is it difficult to read. Similar stylistic features are apparent in the Morris/Magnússon translation of Grettis Saga, as illustrated, for example, by a short extract from the account of Grettir’s fight with Glam, another vigorously descriptive passage, and of course a famous analogue to the Beowulf-and-Grendel episode in Beowulf:

Now Glam gathered up his strength and knit Grettir towards him when they came to the outer door; but when Grettir saw that he might not set his feet against that, all of a sudden in one rush he drave his hardest against the thrall’s breast, and spurned both feet against the half-sunken stone that stood in the threshold of the door, so that his shoulders caught the upper door-case, and the roof burst asunder, both rafters and frozen thatch, and therewith he fell open-armed aback out of the house, and Grettir over him.

Bright moonlight was there without, and the drift was broken, now drawn over the moon, now driven from off her; and, even as Glam fell, a cloud was driven from the moon, and Glam glared up against her. And Grettir himself says that by that sight only was he dismayed amidst all that he ever saw.⁸¹

Notably here, in a move that eschews strict literalness, Morris ‘feminizes’ the word moon, which in Old Norse is a neuter noun.

And Morris’s (and Magnússon’s) translations of Old Norse heroic poetry reflect the same kind of approach as the prose translations, as in the opening two stanzas of The Song of Atli:

In days long gone

Sent Atli to Gunnar

A crafty one riding,

Knefrud men called him;

To Giuki’s garth came he,

To the hall of Gunnar,

To the benches gay-dight,

And the gladsome drinking.

There drank the great folk

’Mid the guileful one’s silence,

Drank wine in their fair hall:

The Huns’ wrath they feared,

When Knefrud cried

In his cold voice,

As he sat on the high seat,

That man of the southland.⁸²

Morris medievalizes his language and preserves the laconicism of the original, though he does not imitate closely its metrical form with its structural alliteration and insistent stress pattern. In his verse and prose translations from the Old Norse, done about twenty-five years before the Beowulf, Morris like other romantically influenced nineteenth-century translators, combines medievalizing with fluency.

In the Beowulf he carries the medievalizing further and boldly sacrifices fluency in pursuit of otherness. One other passage for comparison may serve to suggest the distinctiveness of the Beowulf translation. Morris also produced a verse translation of the Aeneid, the first edition of which appeared in 1875. Virgil’s famous opening lines are Englished as follows:

I sing of arms, I sing of him, who from the Trojan land

Thrust forth by Fate, to Italy and that Lavinian strand

First came: all tost about was he on earth and on the deep

By heavenly night for Juno’s wrath, that had no mind to sleep:

And plenteous war he underwent ere he his town might frame

And set his Gods in Latian earth, whence is the Latin name,

And father-folk of Alba-town, and walls of mighty Rome.

Say, Muse, what wound of godhead was whereby all must come,

How grieving, she, the Queen of Gods, a man so pious drave

To win such toil, to welter on through such a troublous wave:

– Can anger in immortal minds abide so fierce and fell?⁸³

Morris is experimenting here too, notably in the length of his iambic line, which is heptameter, but he is experimenting in a manner far removed from what we find in his Beowulf of twenty years later. There is a poetic archaizing going on in the diction of his ‘Aeneids’ (illustrated here particularly in drave and fell) and much poetic inversion of normal word order is apparent, but the register is insistently classical, the style is sweeping, with a notable cultivation of run-on lines, and the sentences are extended and hypotactic in structure.

Here, by contrast, is Morris’s version of the hero’s altercation with Unferth in Beowulf:

Spake out then Unferth that bairn was of Ecglaf,

And he sat at the feet of the lord of the Scyldings,

He unbound the battle-rune; was Beowulf’s faring,

Of him the proud mere-farer, mickle unliking,

Whereas he begrudg’d it of any man other

That he glories more mighty the middle-garth over

Should hold under heaven than he himself held:

‘Art thou that Beowulf who won strife with Breca

On the wide sea contending in swimming,

When ye two for pride’s sake search’d out the floods

And for a dolt’s cry into deep water

Thrust both your life-days? No man the twain of you,

Lief or loth were he, might lay wyte to stay you

Your sorrowful journey, when on the sea row’d ye.’⁸⁴

The archaizing is even more pronounced here, as is the manipulation of word order, and integral to the verse form is the insistent percussive rhythm with structural alliteration that, combined with these other features, gives the writing its strange uniqueness.

William Morris’s translation of Beowulf was too uncompromising to contribute significantly to increasing interest in or understanding of Beowulf in the larger culture of the time, but it represents a striking experiment in literary medievalism even by the standards of the arch-medievalizer Morris, and it must be seen as a major artistic engagement with the Old English poem. Boenig ends his article finding himself wishing that Morris’s Beowulf were available in paperback for contemporary readers so that he could use it with his students reading Beowulf in translation at the end of the twentieth century: ‘They would thus come closer to encountering the original poem.’⁸⁵ One senses that using this translation to teach Beowulf today might not quite have the effect that Boenig desires. The translation teaches us a lot, though, about Morris’s developing medievalism and about the literary context in which it was produced.

Perceptions of Beowulf

Wackerbarth referred to giving Beowulf to the English people. As mentioned above, however, the poem remained largely the preserve of scholars throughout most of the nineteenth century, as was the case with Old English literature in general. For example, in the popular anthology Choice Specimens of English Literature, published in 1864, Beowulf does not appear and indeed, in what is a volume of 526 pages, there are only three pages of Old English texts – twenty-three lines from the poem Genesis (A) and two short prose extracts.⁸⁶

Among literary figures in the first half of the nineteenth century, Beowulf was discussed by Isaac D’Israeli, and a few lines of it had been translated by Tennyson (friend of J. M. Kemble) as early as 1830, who later would produce a translation of The Battle of Brunanburh.⁸⁷ Tennyson’s translation of lines from Beowulf survives in a notebook held by the Houghton Library of Harvard University, reproduced here:

               Him the eldest

               Answered.

               The army’s leader

               His wordhoard unlocked

               We are by race

               Gothic people

               And Higelac’s

               Hearth ministers

               My father was

               To folk known⁸⁸

Clearly using Conybeare’s Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Tennyson has produced a literal word-for-word translation of the Old English passage (corresponding to lines 258–62 of Beowulf). In Conybeare he read,

Him se yldesta	Ille senior
Answarode,	Respondebat,
Werodes wisa	Exercitus dux
Word hord onleac.	Orationis thesaurus reserabat.
‘We synt gumcynnes	‘Nos sumus ortu
Geata leode,	Gothica gens,
And Higelaces	Et Higelaci
Heorð geneatas.	Familiares ministri.
Wæs min fæder	Erat pater meus
Folcum gecyðed.’	Viris cognitus.’89

Tennyson is guided by Conybeare’s Latin in some of his translation choices – army’s leader, ministers – but he is certainly engaging with the Old English text itself and indeed reflects the original more directly than does Conybeare in using such words as eldest, wordhoard, hearth and folk. The translation is no more than a brief exercise but is worth considering here as the first Englishing of lines from Beowulf by a major literary figure. It would be fifty years before Tennyson returned to translating Old English poetry in his ‘Battle of Brunanburh’, a translation of great verve and imagination – in the view of Christopher Ricks, ‘probably the best verse-translation of any Anglo-Saxon poetry’⁹⁰ – and a likely influence on William Morris.

Isaac D’Israeli, much influenced by Turner, has a dozen pages on Beowulf in the first volume of his three-volume Amenities of Literature (1841), in which he views it as a metrical romance coming from a primitive period of ‘semi-civilisation’, compares it to the works of Homer and presents a leisurely summary of its content down to the scene of Beowulf’s dispute with Unferth. Beowulf may be primitive but for D’Israeli its hero ‘appeals to nature and excites our imagination’.⁹¹ D’Israeli lost his eyesight as he worked on the Amenities and was assisted in writing it by his son Benjamin, who also brought out a new edition of the book in 1859, after the death of Isaac.⁹²

Sixteen years after the publication of D’Israeli’s Amenities, under the title ‘A Primitive Old Epic’, a prose summary of Beowulf appeared in the pages of Household Words, a popular weekly magazine edited (‘conducted’) by Charles Dickens.⁹³ There was no by-line to the piece but, as suggested by Nicholas Howe, the writer must have been Henry Morley, who was a staff-writer at the magazine at the time (and the most prolific contributor to its pages) and also an enthusiastic student of literary history.⁹⁴ Howe’s suggestion is borne out by the fact that the Household Words summary is used verbatim by Morley in Volume I of his later English Writers, and he draws upon some of its wording again in his more reflective account of Beowulf in his Sketches of Longer Works in English Verse and Prose in the Cassell’s Library of English Literature series.⁹⁵

For Morley Beowulf might be an epic but it is also primitive. He introduces the summary of it as follows:

The Celtic bards withdrew to the fastnesses of Britain, and with the conquering Saxons came the Gleemen, whose first songs related to the Sagas of the North. One primitive epic they brought with them, the tale of Beowulf, is the oldest story of which there is any trace in our literature, or in that of any kindred tongue. A lively picture of past customs, and a record of past manners of thought, it has been preserved for us in a single manuscript, now much defaced by fire, which seems to have been written in this country about eight hundred years ago.⁹⁶

Morley goes on to acknowledge his indebtedness to Thorpe’s edition and translation: ‘Our version is much indebted for its faithfulness, always indirectly, often most directly, to Mr Thorpe’s excellent edition of the Anglo-Saxon poem, to which a translation is attached, having the one fault, that it is into English of a Latin form.’⁹⁷ In the ensuing summary, though the prologue is omitted, the Danish part of the poem is covered in considerable detail (covering ten columns of print), to the extent of often reading like a paraphrase; the Geatish part is treated only perfunctorily (one column).

Morley was bringing the poem to the attention of a wide audience, as Wackerbarth and his verse-translating successors also sought to do, but it hardly entered into public consciousness to a significant degree. Morley, a leading figure in the rise of English studies, who later became Professor of English Language and Literature at King’s College London and then at University College London,⁹⁸ also published a more detailed summary of the poem (as mentioned above) in his Sketches of Longer Works in English Verse and Prose, and he paid significant attention to Beowulf and other early literature in his historical survey English Writers. In the former of these popularizing works he intersperses his prose summary with passages in imitative verse (though without structural alliteration); in the latter he includes a survey of the history of the study and translation of Beowulf down to his own time of writing.⁹⁹

But it was not until the criticism of writers like Bernhard ten Brink (translated from the German) and Stopford Brooke at the very end of the century and after, that we see the beginnings of the wider appreciation that Beowulf was later to achieve. Brooke, while regretting that ‘the poem is lamentably destitute of form’ (a common critical perception until much later) and that its dialogue is ‘without much imagination’, included detailed treatment of Beowulf in his History of Early English Literature and provided extensive selections from the poem in translation (in an archaizing alliterative metre, as we have seen).¹⁰⁰ Ten Brink declares that Beowulf is not a national poem or an epos, since ‘[s]uch poems arise only among nations that victoriously maintain ideals of higher culture against inimical forces’, but he goes on to insist, ‘If Beowulf is no national poem and no epos in the strict sense, taking matter and composition into account, yet, as regards style and tone, character and customs, it is both in a high degree. […] A great wealth of poetic feeling is revealed in this poem.’¹⁰¹ Beowulf gets an entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica for the first time in 1910 (by Henry Bradley).¹⁰²

In this context of growing appreciation of Beowulf John R. Clark Hall produced his two translations, a prose one in 1901 and a verse one in 1914.¹⁰³ In the introduction to the prose translation, he declares Beowulf to be a poem ‘of no mean order’ but it is also ‘the poem of a nation’s childhood’,¹⁰⁴ in which the poet shows ‘crudity and clumsiness and want of resource in handling the material’ and tells his story ‘very much as a child would tell it’.¹⁰⁵ Hall is equally half-hearted about the literary qualities of Beowulf in the introduction to his verse translation:

The poem of Beowulf is of the highest interest to English people […]. Apart from this, and from its value as a unique source of information as to the social conditions of our ancestors in their continental home before they migrated hither, it has sufficient literary merit to be well worth reading for its own sake. It is very uneven, to be sure – it sinks every now and then to the level of the dullest prose, and has the prolixity which is characteristic of a primitive and leisurely age – but for the most part it is thoroughly good stuff.¹⁰⁶

Ameliorating the perceived crudity and clumsiness of the original, Hall’s verse translation aims at ‘the smoothness necessary to make the poem attractive to modern ears’,¹⁰⁷ and so though adopting a four-stress line he largely dispenses with alliteration:

Lo! We have heard tell how mighty the kings

of the Spear-bearing Danes were in days that are past,

how these men of high birth did valorous deeds.

He also criticizes previous translations for being too archaic in diction, but he himself, among numerous other examples of archaism, refers to Scyld, who ‘took mead-benches oft / from parties of foemen’ (lines 4–5) and who ‘waxed under the welkin’ (line 8). Overall, the translation reads as laboured and uninspired, which is hardly untypical of the bigger picture of early translations of Beowulf.

Before this period of wider appreciation when Beowulf was getting (albeit highly qualified) praise from literary critics, it was essentially scholars and their students who had knowledge of the poem. As we have seen, they were painfully conscious of the roughness of its poetry but they were interested in it as presenting, in Sharon Turner’s words, ‘a picture of the manners’ and ‘an exhibition of the feelings and notions’ of the ancient past. One of the early reviewers of Thorkelín, the Germanist William Taylor, writing in 1816, reflects this perception when he describes Beowulf as a ‘curious production’ throwing light on ‘the manners and spirit of the Gothic north’, a poem which ‘may no doubt be applied to the discovery of historical truth’. Taylor waxes lyrical at the end of his piece when he extols Beowulf, in words that it is hard to resist quoting, as ‘the most brilliant coruscation of the boreal dawn of literature’.¹⁰⁸

And in the period of romantic ‘nation forging’ of the nineteenth century (to appropriate Linda Colley’s suggestive phrase¹⁰⁹), scholars saw Beowulf as a foundational monument. As Allen Frantzen says of its early reception, ‘Early scholars saw Beowulf as a record of English Germanic origins and mined it for evidence of the heroic civilization that distinguished the Anglo-Saxon past.’¹¹⁰ The cultural appropriation of Beowulf was by no means confined to English writers. Thorkelín had entitled his edition of Beowulf, Poema Danicum dialecto Anglosaxonica, ‘A Danish Poem in Anglo-Saxon Dialect’, thereby seeking to claim the poem for his adopted homeland.¹¹¹ He regarded Beowulf as a Danish poem translated into Anglo-Saxon, perhaps by King Alfred, with Christian references creeping in as part of the process of translation.¹¹²

German scholars and translators assumed that Beowulf belonged to the national heritage of Germany and embraced it with increasing fervour. Thus, for Heinrich Leo, Anglo-Saxon was ‘a German dialect in the strictest sense of the word’.¹¹³ Leo’s 1839 study of Beowulf was entitled Beowulf, das älteste deutsche, in angelsächsischer Mundart erhaltene, Heldengedicht, ‘Beowulf, the oldest German heroic poem, preserved in Anglo-Saxon dialect’,¹¹⁴ and the view that Beowulf is the oldest German epic is also reflected in the titles of the translations of Simrock (1859) and von Wolzogen (1872), Das älteste deutsche Epos and Das älteste deutsche Heldengedicht, respectively.¹¹⁵ Tom Shippey writes of the project of German philologists to construct ‘a national ancestral culture’ and comments that in nineteenth-century German treatments of Beowulf ‘one can see patriotism turning increasingly to aggressive nationalism; and racism is not far away’.¹¹⁶

Beowulf also struck a nationalistic chord in England, at least for the select constituency that knew about it. Shippey notes that among English commentators there is little of the fervour of German pronouncements and he suggests that ‘the comparative lack of nationalist feeling shown by English scholars can be attributed to the nineteenth-century suppression of specifically English sentiment in the interest of an ideology of British unity’.¹¹⁷ There was plenty of English sentiment around, however, and, in this context, English scholars were proud of their Beowulf, introducing a distinctly nationalistic note into some of their discussions of it. In 1820 Turner expressed his chagrin that Beowulf had not been first printed in England: ‘our antiquarian patriotism may be blamed that, when so much labour and money have been applied to print, at the public expence, so many ancient remains, and some of such little utility, we should have left this curious relic of our ancestors to have been first printed by a foreigner, in a foreign country.’¹¹⁸ As J. R. Hall notes, in 1824 Frederic Madden too lamented the fact that the only edition of Beowulf that had by then been published was ‘by a foreigner’.¹¹⁹ Isaac D’Israeli, noting that the Danes, among whom ‘the patriotism of literature is ardent’, had claimed Beowulf as their own, expressed gratitude to Kemble for producing an English edition of the poem: ‘Mr Kemble has redeemed our honour by publishing a collated edition, afterwards corrected in a second with a literal version.’¹²⁰

Wackerbarth described Beowulf as ‘the Epic of our Ancestors’ (as quoted above) and later John R. Clark Hall (also quoted above) spoke in similar terms. For Henry Morley, Beowulf, along with Cædmon’s ‘Paraphrase’ (the biblical poems of the Junius Manuscript), represents worthily the beginning of English literature: ‘[These] two noblest pieces of First-English are also the most ancient, and stand worthily at the beginning of a literature that represents, without a break, the life and labour of the people of this country for twelve hundred years.’¹²¹ Stopford Brooke declares, ‘The poem is great in its own way, and the way is an English way. The men, the women, at home and in war, are one in character with us. It is our Genesis, the book of our origins.’¹²² The fact that Brooke was born near Letterkenny in County Donegal is no impediment to his embracing an English identity in which he perceives Beowulf to be intimately implicated. For Brooke, Beowulf himself epitomizes the ideal of manhood that has been found throughout English history. Beowulf might have been a Geat but his poem is English – ‘we may fairly claim the poem as English’¹²³ – and Beowulf’s qualities ‘represent the ancient English ideal, the manhood which pleased the English folk even before they came to Britain; and because, in all our history since Beowulf’s time, for 1200 years or so, they have been repeated in the lives of English warriors by land and sea whom we chiefly honour.’¹²⁴ Brooke particularly compares Beowulf to Lord Nelson: ‘Gentle like Nelson, he had Nelson’s iron resolution.’¹²⁵

Referring to Old English poetry more widely, Brooke discerns in it ‘that steady consistency of national character, that clinging through all difficulty to the aim in view, that unrelenting curiosity, that desire to do better what has been done’.¹²⁶ Brooke’s pronouncements represent classic expressions of the racial myth of Englishness which flourished in the nineteenth century.¹²⁷ As noted above, he himself was born in Ireland, a biographical detail that illustrates the aspect of inclusiveness that has been seen to characterize constructions of Englishness in the last third of the century. As Robert Young puts it, ‘Englishness became something inclusive, defined not in terms of autochthonous origins attached to a particular place, and only very generally in terms of origin.’¹²⁸ Brooke can invoke ‘a common racial and cultural origin in the Anglo-Saxons’,¹²⁹ with which he can identify culturally, defining himself as English and celebrating Beowulf as a foundational expression of essential English qualities.

American investment in things Anglo-Saxon began with Thomas Jefferson and continued with the teaching of Old English in a few universities from the 1820s. Jefferson didn’t know Beowulf but he idealized the pre-Norman age and he considered that the American colonists were the ‘true heirs of the Anglo-Saxon heritage of constitutional liberty’.¹³⁰ He even proposed having images of Hengist and Horsa, mythic founders of Anglo-Saxon England, on the Great Seal of the United States.¹³¹ The ‘father of the University of Virginia’, as his epitaph has it, Jefferson wrote a grammar of Old English and included ‘Anglo-Saxon’ on the curriculum that he designed for the new university, thus initiating the history of Old English as an academic subject in America.¹³²

Influenced by German philological scholarship but looking to early England for America’s racial heritage, American scholars increasingly embraced the study of Old English as the nineteenth century went on, so that ‘by the end of the century America had developed a strong tradition of Anglo-Saxon scholarship’.¹³³ Unlike most of their British contemporaries, American literary figures also took an interest: as J. R. Hall summarizes, ‘Henry Wadsworth Longfellow composed a long essay on Anglo-Saxon literature, David Thoreau ventured to capture its spirit in verse, James Russell Lowell praised its “homespun” diction, and Walt Whitman celebrated it – along with himself.’¹³⁴

It is worth pausing particularly on Longfellow, who in that ‘long essay on Anglo-Saxon literature’ (published in 1838) wrote on Beowulf at some length and translated almost seventy lines of it (all of Fitt 3) into verse.¹³⁵ For Longfellow, Beowulf

is like a piece of armor; rusty and battered, and yet strong. From within comes a voice sepulchral, as if the ancient armor spoke, telling a simple, straight-forward narrative. […] The style, likewise, is simple, – perhaps we should say, austere.¹³⁶

Longfellow describes the passage he translates, in which Beowulf hears the news of Grendel’s attacks and travels to Denmark, as having ‘a high epic character’.¹³⁷ Warming to his subject, he exclaims, ‘We can almost smell the brine, and hear the sea-breeze blow, and see the mainland stretch out its jutting promontories, those sea-noses (sæ-næssas), as the poet calls them, into the blue waters of the solemn main.’¹³⁸

The translation begins,

Thus then much care-worn

the son of Healfden

sorrowed evermore,

nor might the prudent hero

his woes avert.

The war was too hard,

too loath and longsome,

that on the people came,

dire wrath and grim,

of night-woes the worst.

This from home heard

Higelac’s Thane,

good among the Goths,

Grendel’s deeds. (corresponding to lines 189–95)

Longfellow keeps close to the literal meaning of the Old English as he understands it (which is reasonably well), half-line by half-line. In doing so, he fears that his readers ‘will see very little poetry in all this’ but he urges them to follow the exhortation of Kemble, whose edition is among the publications he is reviewing, to judge Beowulf not by modern standards but those of the times it describes, viewing it as a ‘rude but very faithful picture of an age […] brave, generous and right-principled’.¹³⁹

As mentioned above, the first full verse translations of Beowulf published in America were those of Garnett (1882) and J. L. Hall (1892). Garnett’s version was aimed at ‘the general reader’ and for the ‘aid of students of the poem’; Hall’s, as noted earlier, was addressed to scholarly readers but also sought to interest the student of English literature, ‘giving him, in modern garb, the most ancient epic of our race’.¹⁴⁰ These translations cater for a readership of students studying Beowulf and at the same time reflect a construction of American literary history and American identity that places Beowulf at its beginning. Beowulf is the most ancient epic of ‘our race’.

An American translation of Beowulf in literary prose was published by Tinker in 1902, ‘as an attempt to make as simple and readable a version of the poem as is consistent with the character of the original’,¹⁴¹ followed by another by C. G. Child in 1904, and in 1909 Francis Gummere brought out his popular verse translation, based on a version of Old English metre, with alliteration, and abounding in archaism and poetic diction, a translation which is still available in print today and on the internet.¹⁴² The opening lines give a flavour of his register and diction:

LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings

of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,

we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!

Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,

from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore,

awing the earls. Since erst he lay

friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him:

for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve,

till before him the folk, both far and near,

who house by the whale-path, heard his mandate,

gave him gifts: a good king he!

Gummere in his stiff and mannered version is among those who have Scyld waxing under welkin (line 8), and later, as Scyld’s funeral approaches, we read that ‘In the roadstead rocked a ring-dight vessel’ (line 32).

The Harvard Classics (1910) edition of Gummere’s translation has an introductory note which refers to the Anglo-Saxons as ‘our Teutonic ancestors’, reflecting the perception about identity and origin widely evident in other American writers: ‘When our Teutonic ancestors migrated to Britain from the Continent of Europe’, states Gummere, ‘they brought with them the heroic songs in which their minstrels were accustomed to celebrate the deeds of their kings and warriors.’¹⁴³ Some seventy years earlier Longfellow had written of ‘our Saxon forefathers in England’,¹⁴⁴ and throughout the nineteenth century ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ is a significant theme in American culture.¹⁴⁵

Twentieth-Century Perspectives

The twentieth century saw a marked and progressive increase in the amount of attention devoted to Beowulf by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and saw too the widespread adoption of the poem on university teaching programmes, where it was taught both as ‘language’ and, increasingly, as ‘literature’. The sheer number of translations produced over the century is one indicator of the prominence of the poem on degree courses.¹⁴⁶ Beowulf and its offshoots have also become increasingly, especially approaching the present day, the object of interest in wider popular culture. For what it is worth, a 2007 googling of ‘Beowulf’ turned up some 4,920,000 hits (ranging from the good to the bad and the ugly), rocketing to 16,700,000 in 2008, after the release of the Robert Zemeckis film Beowulf. By way of comparison there were 4,590,000 hits for ‘Chaucer’, 1,490,000 for ‘Gawain’, 1,130,000 for ‘Aeneid’ and 5,010,000 for ‘Iliad’.¹⁴⁷ As noted recently by Eileen Joy and Mary Ramsey, ‘For all the talk of the supposed marginalization of Old English studies within the American and British academies, Beowulf continues to fascinate students, scholars and artists alike.’¹⁴⁸

Joy and Ramsey go on to refer to Terry Eagleton’s recent insistence that Beowulf ‘ultimately retains its pride of place in English studies mainly due to its function, from the Victorian period forward, as the cultural tool of a troubling nationalist romance with an archetypal and mythological past’.¹⁴⁹ We have seen in the previous section evidence of the validity of Eagleton’s perception of the political role of Beowulf throughout its modern history, a political role that Tom Shippey too highlights when he writes, surveying the ‘critical heritage’ of Beowulf, ‘one has to say that the poem itself at all times appeared as a source of potential authority and power’.¹⁵⁰ But it is an oversimplification to assume that, because the poem has been appropriated in the cause of national and literary grand narratives, it is therefore inextricable from such narratives. Heaney’s treatment of it, for one, problematizes this interpretation, as I hope to show below, and other translators appropriate Beowulf in interesting and different ways. Recent artistic and popular adaptations are not interested in Beowulf as a monument of English literature; and within academia the poem has been put to new uses. In Joy and Ramsey’s striking phrase, Beowulf has become ‘liquid’, and it was also perhaps more liquid in some ways in the past than critics like Eagleton have been willing to credit. To quote Joy and Ramsey again, referring to significant strands in contemporary Beowulf scholarship, Old English scholars ‘have argued for situating Old English studies within contemporary theoretical paradigms that would help us to investigate how, in [John D.] Niles’s words, literary works such as Beowulf “shape the present-day culture that calls them to mind as past artefacts”’.¹⁵¹

Liquid or not, Beowulf was a source of great industry for scholars in the twentieth century and continues to be so in the twenty-first. With reference to the progressive increase in the scholarship of the poem referred to above, in a recent survey Allen Frantzen counted 223 publications on Beowulf in the 1800s but 1303 in the 1900s down to 1972 (using the Greenfield–Robinson Bibliography,¹⁵² the cut-off date of which is 1972) and he charts a further 110% increase between 1972 and 1997 (using the Anglo-Saxon England annual bibliographies).¹⁵³ Things haven’t been slowing down since 1997 either.

A turning point in the criticism and appreciation of the poem came with the publication of J. R. R. Tolkien’s lecture ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ in 1936, in which Tolkien focused on the poem as literature rather than, as most scholars had up until then, as an interesting historical document but one with embarrassing childishness in its story, structure and poetic execution.¹⁵⁴ This view, which we have seen expressed by late-nineteenth-century commentators, was still the accepted one when Tolkien wrote. It is expressed famously by one of the major authorities of the early twentieth century, W. P. Ker, in a passage which Tolkien quotes in his essay. Ker pronounced,

In construction [Beowulf] is curiously weak, in a sense preposterous; for while the main story is simplicity itself, the merest commonplace of heroic legend, all about it in the historical allusions, there are revelations of a whole world of tragedy, plots different from that of Beowulf, more like the tragic themes of Iceland.¹⁵⁵

For Ker, ‘The fault of Beowulf is that there is nothing much in the story’, and ‘It is too simple’.¹⁵⁶

The literary critic Frank Kermode recalls his time studying Beowulf in the period before the Tolkienian literary turn took effect:

The interests of the teachers were exclusively philological and antiquarian. Beowulf provided them with a great variety of complicated scholarly problems, and it was in these that they wanted to involve their students. They rarely found it necessary or desirable to speak of Beowulf as a poem, and when they did so they were quite likely to say it was not a particularly good one.¹⁵⁷

It is a mark of this turning point and of the changing agenda in approaches to Beowulf that the biggest increase in studies of the poem in the twentieth century (down to 1972) as compared to the nineteenth was in the area of ‘literary interpretations’ – 306 as compared to sixteen¹⁵⁸ – of which three-quarters (244) were published after 1940. Tolkien’s publication also contributed to the consolidation of Beowulf’s canonical reputation, persuasively identifying it as literature worth studying. Kermode exclaims, ‘It would not be easy to think of a parallel to this occasion, a professorial lecture that changed a generation’s attitude to a document of national and historical importance.’¹⁵⁹

A key earlier publication had been Friedrich Klaeber’s article ‘Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf’ (1911–12), which argued influentially that the Christian elements of Beowulf were not interpolated or superimposed onto a pure pagan original¹⁶⁰ but were an integral part of the very fabric of the poem.¹⁶¹ Klaeber also produced what has perhaps been the most influential twentieth-century edition of the poem, the third edition of which was the standard edition in the United States from its publication in 1936 until very recently; ‘Klaeber’ has now been re-edited and updated in a revised version.¹⁶²

Klaeber (1863–1954) migrated to the United States and spent much of his career there (though retiring to Germany in 1931). After the heyday of Germanic philology, the twentieth century also witnessed another kind of migration, as the centre of gravity of Beowulf studies, and of Old English studies more generally, shifted away from Germany, first to Britain but increasingly to North America, where many more Anglo-Saxonists now live and work than anywhere else: the membership directory of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists for 2006–7 listed, out of a world-wide total of 566 members, 249 members based in the United States and Canada, 135 in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and 41 in Germany, with another five in German-speaking parts of Switzerland and one in Austria (leaving 135 in other countries). And it is in America that translations of Beowulf have particularly proliferated.

‘Almost everyone has heard of Beowulf’, wrote the prose translator David Wright in 1957.¹⁶³ Wright’s claim obviously overstates things but was true enough when applied to educated readers in the English-speaking world. And with Beowulf firmly established as a canonical teaching text on both sides of the Atlantic, being studied both in the original language and, particularly in America, also in translation, we get a stream of modern English versions of every type in the twentieth century, bringing us down to the translations of Morgan and his successors discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.

Differing readerships, and two 1940s verse translations

In a survey published in 1970–1, J. K. Crane distinguishes translations of Beowulf as aimed at four quite different audiences: the first group of translations he identifies are ‘those intended for the general reader interested in “reading”, not “studying”, the poem’. Crane continues,

The second category of reader is the non-specialist student who could be expected to both read [Beowulf] and examine its artistry, yet who would have no knowledge of Anglo-Saxon to assist him in the latter regard. […] The third group is the specialist, the reader with an Anglo-Saxon background who is attempting to rectify for himself the disparities between the original and any translation. […] And finally, in the fourth division are the Morgan and Raffel translations in which the attempt is rather to create a new work of art than preserve and make available an old one.¹⁶⁴

Crane pragmatically identifies broad categories of readership that translators write for (and, we might add, that publishers seek to market to). These categories are useful to use in a shorthand way, though there are problematic assumptions underlying them, with surely considerable overlap between them. Crane is right in seeing the fourth type as potentially ‘more self-sustaining’ (as he puts it) than the others,¹⁶⁵ the others being limited by their utilitarian aims. On the other hand, the examples of the fourth type that Crane cites could also be viewed as ideal representations of the first type. Certainly their authors regard themselves as making available the old poem as well as creating a new one, and their readers seek a ‘version’ of the original, reflecting something of the qualities of that original.

The two translations I wish to refer to before bringing this chapter to a close are from the 1940s, the period just before Morgan’s translation. They may be viewed as setting the scene for his translation and as representing versions of the status quo to which he reacted. The first of them, by Charles W. Kennedy (1940),¹⁶⁶ belongs fairly securely to Crane’s second category, being aimed at the student studying Beowulf in translation, and indeed Crane praises it as the best in this category ‘for bringing home the peculiar qualities of Anglo-Saxon poetry’.¹⁶⁷ Kennedy’s translation is accompanied by an extensive introduction containing much literary-critical discussion designed to bring out the student’s appreciation of the poem. The translation was published in America and achieved considerable popularity, being reprinted down to 1978.

Kennedy aims his version of Beowulf at students. He also has the objective, however, of writing ‘authentic modern verse’:

It has been my endeavor to translate the poem faithfully into authentic modern verse, and to avoid if possible that lack of spontaneity of spirit and flow of narrative that is a besetting snare of the translator. I have employed the four-beat alliterative measure, but without any attempt at strict adherence to the conventional types of Old English half-line.¹⁶⁸

The metrical form leads to a heavily alliterating style with insistent half-line structure and to an iambically/anapestically tending rhythm that is often very obvious – Crane remarks that ‘occasionally it degenerates into “Night Before Christmas” banter’:¹⁶⁹

He throve under heaven in power and pride,

                              (no lineation, corresponding to Beowulf, line 8)

or

A ring-prowed ship

Straining at anchor and sleeted with ice,

Rode in the harbor, a prince’s pride.

                              (corresponding to Beowulf, lines 32–3)

This is surely too rhythmically pronounced to work as modern poetry. And though Kennedy achieves a sense of seriousness and drama in many passages, the expressiveness of his phrasing is interspersed with quaintness and, as with ‘endured it ill’ in the following quotation, with stiffness:

Then an evil spirit who dwelt in the darkness

Endured it ill that he heard each day

The din of revelry ring through the hall,

The sound of the harp, and the scop’s sweet song.

                              (corresponding to Beowulf, lines 86–90)

Edwin Morgan particularly takes Kennedy to task for describing his translation as being in ‘authentic modern verse’ while employing a considerable amount of archaic diction:

Would that phrase [i.e., ‘authentic modern verse’] at that date [1940], if it meant anything at all, cover such words and expressions as: Lo!, I ween, smote him sore, what time …, blithesome band, ’twas a weary while, wretched wight, wove his words in a winsome pattern, ’neath, o’er, guerdon, oft, sire, no whit, bills and byrnies, when his soul must forth …? Such diction is certainly alien to ‘modern’ verse practice, and what authenticity can there be in the use of terms which were trite and passé by 1600?¹⁷⁰

The translation is far from convincing in ‘bringing home the peculiar qualities of Anglo-Saxon poetry’, but Kennedy’s version was as good as it got before Morgan’s own translation. And it played a part in making Beowulf interesting enough to read in the original, as one of today’s highly respected scholar/translators has personally testified: Marijane Osborn writes that Kennedy’s version ‘was the form in which I first read Beowulf, and I remember being swept along through the narrative’.¹⁷¹

The other translation that I wish to mention, finally, belongs to Crane’s first category, being ‘intended for the general reader interested in “reading”, not “studying”, the poem’. This is the translation by Mary Waterhouse, published in England in 1949, in blank verse. This translation did not make much of an impression in poetic circles or among Anglo-Saxonists, but it is relevant to refer to it here, as it was the most recent one when Morgan brought out his version.¹⁷²

Waterhouse justifies her bold choice of blank verse as her poetic medium largely in negative terms: the various imitative approaches adopted by previous translators haven’t worked. In translating ‘for the modern ear’, she seeks in her version to escape ‘that air of flippancy or frivolity which imitative versions in modern English give’; these imitative versions are also, unlike the original, frequently ‘overburdened with alliteration’.¹⁷³ Waterhouse’s valid criticisms of existing translations cause her to look elsewhere for a model to follow: ‘These considerations led to the choice of blank verse as the medium, taking it as the modern heroic line and therefore the equivalent of the older one’.¹⁷⁴ In using blank verse, she intends to provide ‘a clear and straightforward version of the poem, free from archaisms, real or spurious, alike of word, phrase, or verse form’.¹⁷⁵

Waterhouse has a certain logic on her side when she identifies blank verse as a kind of ‘modern’ (understood in its broadest sense) equivalent of Old English metre. But of course the adoption of blank verse brings a whole series of historical associations and connotations that profoundly alter the register and feel of the poem. Blank verse may be, or (more correctly) may have been, a kind of default mode of English verse but it is far from being a neutral medium. In Waterhouse’s version we get a polished, classicized Beowulf. In the view of one reviewer it presents a ‘pleasant and reliable’ image of the original poem,¹⁷⁶ but in being pleasant and reliable it also distorts:

Lo, of the Spear Danes’ might in days of old

And of the kings of men we have heard tell.

How princes then their deeds of glory wrought.

This has dignity and formality but it turns Beowulf into a ‘poetic’ poem from the golden treasury of (post-medieval) English verse. And, as Edwin Morgan insists, ‘blank verse is no longer a living medium for extended writing’.¹⁷⁷

Morgan was also quick to point out that the language of Waterhouse’s version is far from modern. He is just as scathing in attacking her translation as he had been with Kennedy’s. Noting her claim that she is providing a clear and straightforward translation that is free from archaisms, he exclaims,

The amount of self-deception underlying this assertion may be judged from the following select list: Lo!, thou/thee/ye, ’neath, o’er, ’twixt, ’tis/’twas/’twill, no wise, full oft, whoso, hath/doth, venture grim, the twain […]

And he goes on for another five lines giving further examples.¹⁷⁸

Waterhouse’s choice of metre does not come off and the accompanying diction is distinctly unmodern in many respects, as is the syntax (as the elaborate inversion of word order in the quotation above illustrates). It is interesting that this last translation of the first half of the twentieth century reverts to the metre adopted by Conybeare at the very beginning of the translation of Beowulf into English verse more than a hundred and twenty years earlier. The obvious drawbacks of this metre are firmly pointed out by Morgan, some of whose criticisms of blank verse in Beowulf translations had long been anticipated by commentators of earlier generations.¹⁷⁹

Though plenty of pedestrian work was also produced in the second half of the twentieth century, Beowulf generally fared better with its translators in this period than it had previously. In particular, in a context in which Beowulf itself, without patronizing qualification about its roughness, its childishness or its lack of classical proportions, was recognized at last as a great poem which could speak to modern audiences, translators focused on in the following pages would, in their varying ways, produce poetic versions of Beowulf that were convincingly modern – something that none of those considered in this chapter managed to achieve.

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¹  Haarder, Beowulf: The Appeal of a Poem; Shippey and Haarder, ed., Beowulf: The Critical Heritage; see also Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition; J. R. Hall, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Nineteenth Century: England, Denmark, America’.

²  Frantzen, Desire for Origins, p. 192.

³  Ritson, quoted by Shippey, ‘Introduction’, Shippey and Haarder, Beowulf: The Critical Heritage, p. 3.

⁴  Quoted by Isaac D’Israeli (1841), Amenities of Literature, Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature, I, 53.

⁵  Wanley, Librorum Veterum Septentrionalium, qui in Angliae Bibliothecis extant.

⁶  See Shippey, ‘Introduction’, in Shippey and Haarder, Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (p. 3).

⁷  See Kiernan, Electronic Beowulf, for digital facsimiles. Thorkelín’s transcriptions, though error-strewn, are of key importance for constructing the text of the poem, since the state of the edges of the manuscript pages deteriorated significantly in the period after the transcriptions were made.

⁸  Thorkelín, De Danorum rebus gestis seculi III & IV: Poëma Danicum dialecto Anglosaxonica; for an English translation of Thorkelín’s preface to his edition, see Bjork, ‘Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin’s Preface to the First Edition of Beowulf’: translation by Taylor Close and Robert E. Bjork at pp. 298–315.

⁹  Wackerbarth, Beowulf, p. xi.

¹⁰  Fjalldal, ‘To Fall by Ambition – Grímur Thorkelín and his Beowulf Edition’, p. 321.

¹¹  J. R. Hall, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Nineteenth Century’, p. 245.

¹²  Thorkelín, De Danorum rebus gestis, p. xix: ‘Poëtam nostram eiusqve periphrases verbum ad verbum reddere conatus sum, qva in re, si ubivis lectori non satisfecerim, eum spero benevole condonaturum fore mihi, cui cum maxima characterum confusione, et significationis vocum ambiguæ, vagæ, et sibi sæpe invicem oppositæ salebrosa varietate conflictari necessum fuit.’

¹³  Kemble, The Anglo-Saxon Poems of Beowulf, The Travellers Song and The Battle of Finnesburg, pp. xxix–xxx; Wackerbarth, Beowulf, p. xi; Osborn, ‘Translations, Versions, Illustrations’, p. 341. Shippey is less categorical: ‘[Thorkelin’s] half-line by half-line translating method makes his intended meaning hard to follow, though I do not find it as bad as is described by Cooley 1940 and Osborn 1997’ (‘Introduction’, p. 11, referring to Cooley, ‘Early Danish Criticism of Beowulf’, and Osborn, ‘Translations, Versions, Illustrations’).

¹⁴  Thorkelín’s Old English text reads (Beowulf, lines 20–3), ‘Swa sceal maþma / Gode gewircean / Fromum fegiftum / On fæder þina / Þæt hine on ylde / Eft gewunigen / Wil gesiþas / Þonne wig cume.’  Compare Klaeber’s Beowulf:

                  Swa sceal geong guma       gode gewyrcean,

                  fromum feohgiftum       on fæder bearme,

                  þæt hine on ylde       eft gewunigen

                  wilgesiþas,       þonne wig cume.

We might translate the latter, ‘Thus must a young man bring it about by his goodness/liberality, by generous gifts of treasure while under the protection of his father, that his dear companions may remain with him in his old age, when war comes.’

¹⁵  Thorkelin, p. vii: ‘Inter omnia monumenta veteris orbis Danici, quæ tempus edax rerum nobis requivit, admirabile de Scyldingis Epos publici nunc iuris factum eminet. Habemus enim hic irriguos fontes, unde religionis poëseosqve notitia, et gentis nostræ rerum seculis III et IV gestarum series deduci possit.’

¹⁶  Grundtvig, Bjowulf’s Drape.

¹⁷  See Tinker, The Translations of Beowulf, pp. 22, 25.

¹⁸  Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, IV (1805), 398–408, 414–17; on metre, he declares, ‘It appears to me that the only rule of the Saxon versification which we can now discover is that the words are placed in that peculiar rhythm or cadence which is observable in all the preceding extracts’ (p. 416). Later he would write that in their poetry the Anglo-Saxons ‘used no rules at all’ (History of the Anglo-Saxons, 3rd ed., III, 301).

¹⁹  ‘In no country can the progress of the poetical genius and taste be more satisfactorily traced than in our own. During that period which this work attempts to commemorate, we find it in its earliest state. It could indeed have been scarcely more rude to have been at all discernible’ (Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 3rd ed., III, 299).

²⁰  Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 3rd ed., III, 326; quoted by Frantzen, Desire for Origins, p. 194; for a longer extract, see Shippey and Haarder, Beowulf: The Critical Heritage, pp. 161–6. On the growth of interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century, see Payne, ‘The Rediscovery of Old English Poetry in the English Literary Tradition’.

²¹  The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 3rd ed., III, 327.

²²  Henderson, Iceland; or the Journal of a Residence in that Island during the Years 1814 and 1815, II, 329–30; reprinted in Shippey and Haarder, Beowulf: The Critical Heritage, pp. 156–7.

²³  Conybeare, Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry; the work was published posthumously, Conybeare having died in 1824.

²⁴  Illustrations, p. 35.

²⁵  Illustrations, p. 82. We might translate Conybeare’s Latin as follows: ‘We have heard something concerning the glory of the kings of the people of the warlike Danes in ancient days, how the princes then were strong in their courage.’

²⁶  Conybeare, Illustrations, pp. 80–1; quoted by Liuzza, ‘Lost in Translation’, pp. 285–6.

²⁷  Illustrations, p. 81.

²⁸  D’Israeli, Amenities of Literature, I, 57.

²⁹  In the notes that accompany his Old English text and Latin translation Conybeare comments on Hwæt we (p. 82): ‘There is a little abruptness, if not obscurity, in this sentence; the same use of “Hwæt” will be found in Canto 24, l. 3 [line 1652]. It somewhat resembles the H οιη of Hesiod’ (i.e., an exclamation calling for silence).

³⁰  Illustrations, p. 38, corresponding to Beowulf, lines 194–201.

³¹  Shippey, ‘Introduction’, p. 27.

³²  See J. R. Hall, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Nineteenth Century’, p. 246; for Conybeare’s and Madden’s collations, see Kiernan, Electronic Beowulf. On Thorpe’s edition (and translation), see here.

³³  Kemble, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Poems of Beowulf, The Travellers Song and The Battle of Finnesburg; on Kemble’s edition, see J. R. Hall, ‘The First Two Editions of Beowulf’.

³⁴  Kemble, The Anglo-Saxon Poems, pp. xxix–xxx.

³⁵  The Anglo-Saxon Poems, p. xxx.

³⁶  ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Nineteenth Century’, p. 248.

³⁷  See Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, pp. 33–7.

³⁸  Kemble, The Saxons in England, I, v.

³⁹  Kemble, The Saxon Poems, p. xxxii.

⁴⁰  Heyne, ed., Beowulf. Mit ausführlichem Glossar; Grein, ed., Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie, I, 255–341, and Beovulf nebst den Fragmenten Finnsburg und Valdere; Ettmüller, ed., Carmen de Beovulfi Gautarum regis rebus praeclare gestis atque interitu; Holder, ed., Beowulf; Holthausen, ed., Beowulf nebst dem Finnsburg-Bruchstück.

⁴¹  Ettmüller, trans., Beowulf. Heldengedicht des achten Jahrhunderts; Grein, trans., Beowulf. These translations were followed by versions by Simrock, Beowulf. Das älteste deutsche Epos (1859, in alliterating stress-metre), Heyne, Beowulf. Angelsächsisches Heldengedicht (1863, in iambic pentameter) and others (see Tinker, The Translations of Beowulf). Translations were also produced in French (Botkine, Beowulf, Épopée Anglo-Saxonne, 1877, in prose), Italian (Grion, ‘Beovulf: poema epico anglosassone del vii secolo’, 1883, in imitative metre), Swedish (Wickberg, Beowulf, en fornengelsk hjeltedikt, 1889, in imitative metre) and Dutch (Simons, Béowulf, Angelsaksisch Volksepos, 1896, in iambic pentameter).

⁴²  See here.

⁴³  Kemble, A Translation of the Anglo-Saxon Poem of Beowulf, p. l.

⁴⁴  Thorpe, ed. and trans., The Anglo-Saxon Poems; Arnold, ed. and trans., Beowulf, a Heroic Poem of the Eighth Century; Earle, trans., The Deeds of Beowulf.

⁴⁵  J. R. Clark Hall, trans., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg; Tinker, trans., Beowulf; Child, Beowulf and the Finnesburh Fragment.

⁴⁶  Wackerbarth, Beowulf, pp. ix–x.

⁴⁷  Wackerbarth, an Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism, dedicated his translation to Nicholas Wiseman, soon to be Archbishop of Westminster and Cardinal; on Wackerbarth’s life, see F. L. E., ‘Obituary, Francis Diedrich Wackerbarth’ (Wackerbarth adopted the name Athanasius on being received into the Catholic Church: hence the ‘A.’ in the byline of his Beowulf translation).

⁴⁸  Wackerbarth, Beowulf, p. xii.

⁴⁹  Wackerbarth, Beowulf, p. viii.

⁵⁰  Lumsden, trans., Beowulf, an Old English Poem.

⁵¹  Brooke, The History of Early English Literature, I, 17–131.

⁵²  The History of Early English Literature, I, ix. In the same year another verse translator of Beowulf, J. L. Hall, would ask, ‘Is it proper, for instance, that the grave and solemn speeches of Beowulf and Hrothgar be put in ballad measures, tripping lightly and airily along?’ (J. L. Hall, Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon Poem, p. viii).

⁵³  Brooke rejects blank verse as a medium for translating Old English poetry, ‘as it is weighted with the sound of Shakespeare, Milton, or Tennyson, and this association takes the reader away from the atmosphere of early English poetry’ (The History of Early English Literature, I, x); cf. Isaac D’Israeli’s comments on Conybeare’s selections in iambic pentameter, above, p. 49.

⁵⁴  The History of Early English Literature, I, x; Brooke continues (ibid.), ‘The original form is destroyed, and with it our imagination of the world to which the poet sang, of the way he thought, of how he shaped his emotion.’

⁵⁵  The History of Early English Literature, I, 38.

⁵⁶  The History of Early English Literature, I, x.

⁵⁷  See Webb, ‘Brooke, Stopford Augustus (1832–1916)’.

⁵⁸  Garnett, trans., Beowulf: An Anglo-Saxon Poem, and The Fight at Finnsburh.

⁵⁹  Tinker, The Translations of Beowulf, p. 86.

⁶⁰  Garnett, Beowulf, p. xi.

⁶¹  Ibid.

⁶²  See n. 52, above.

⁶³  J. L. Hall, Beowulf, p. viii.

⁶⁴  Hall, Beowulf, p. vii.

⁶⁵  Hall, Beowulf, p. viii.

⁶⁶  Hall, Beowulf, p. vii.

⁶⁷  Morris and Wyatt, trans., The Tale of Beowulf, Sometime King of the Weder Geats.

⁶⁸  [Watts,] unsigned review, p. 386.

⁶⁹  [Watts,] unsigned review, p. 385.

⁷⁰  Morgan, Beowulf, p. vii.

⁷¹  Osborn, ‘Translations, Versions, Illustrations’, p. 349.

⁷²  Lindsay, William Morris: His Life and Work, p. 365; MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for our Time, p. 649.

⁷³  Boenig, ‘The Importance of Morris’s Beowulf’; Liuzza, ‘Lost in Translation’; Chris Jones, ‘The Reception of William Morris’s Beowulf’.

⁷⁴  Tilling, ‘William Morris’s Translation of Beowulf: Studies in his Vocabulary’.

⁷⁵  ‘The Importance of Morris’s Beowulf’, p. 11.

⁷⁶  ‘Lost in Translation’, p. 293.

⁷⁷  ‘Lost in Translation’, p. 291; ‘The Importance of Morris’s Beowulf’, p. 7.

⁷⁸  Tilling, ‘William Morris’s Translation of Beowulf’, p. 165; on Morris’s translations from Old Norse, see further Quirk, ‘Dasent, Morris and Principles of Translation’; see also Swannell, ‘William Morris as an Interpreter of Old Norse’.

⁷⁹  ‘William Morris’s Translation of Beowulf’, p. 174.

⁸⁰  Morris and Magnússon, trans., Völsunga Saga, p. 304.

⁸¹  Morris and Magnússon, trans., Grettis Saga, pp. 89–90.

⁸²  Morris and Magnússon, trans., The Song of Atli, p. 446.

⁸³  Morris, The Aeneids of Virgil, p. 1.

⁸⁴  The Tale of Beowulf, p. 194.

⁸⁵  ‘The Importance of Morris’s Beowulf’, p. 12.

⁸⁶  Smith, ed., Choice Specimens of English Literature.

⁸⁷  ‘Battle of Brunanburh’, ed. Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson, III, 18–23.

⁸⁸  MS Eng 952 (4), Houghton Library, Harvard University.

⁸⁹  Conybeare, Illustrations, p. 89. Note also Conybeare’s verse translation of the same passage:

               Him answering straight, the chieftain freely oped

               The treasury of his speech: ‘Our race and blood

               Is of the Goth, and Higelac our lord:

               My sire was known of no ignoble line.’ (Illustrations, p. 40)

There is no sign of influence of this version in Tennyson’s translation.

⁹⁰  Ricks, Tennyson, p. 292. See also Alexander, ‘Tennyson’s “Battle of Brunanburh”’; Irving, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade: Tennyson’s Battle of Brunanburh’.

⁹¹  D’Israeli, Amenities of Literature, I, 80–92, ‘Beowulf; the Hero-Life’, quotations at pp. 44 and 92, respectively.

⁹²  Disraeli, Amenities of Literature, ‘Beowulf: the Hero-Life’, I, 51–8.

⁹³  ‘A Primitive Old Epic’.

⁹⁴  Howe, ‘Beowulf in the House of Dickens’.

⁹⁵  Henry Morley, English Writers, pp. 253–64; Sketches of Longer Works in English Verse and Prose, pp. 1–14.

⁹⁶  Household Words, 17, 459.

⁹⁷  Ibid.

⁹⁸  D. J. Palmer notes, ‘To Henry Morley belongs the distinction of being the first to devote an academic career in England solely to English Studies’ (Palmer, The Rise of English Studies, p. 50).

⁹⁹  English Writers, pp. 265–78. On Morley as a ‘populariser of literature’, see Hunter, ‘Morley, Henry (1822–1894)’.

¹⁰⁰  Brooke, The History of Early English Literature, I, 17–131 (quotations at p. 102). On Brooke, see esp. Haarder, Beowulf: The Appeal of a Poem, pp. 111–16.

¹⁰¹  Ten Brink, History of English Literature, I, To Wyclif, p. 28.

¹⁰²  Bradley, ‘Beowulf’, Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.); see Shippey, ‘Introduction’, Beowulf: The Critical Heritage, p. 67.

¹⁰³  On these, see here.

¹⁰⁴  J. R. Clark Hall, Beowulf (prose), p. xx; cf. Kemble’s characterization of Anglo-Saxon history in general: ‘The subject is a grave and solemn one : it is the history of the childhood of our own age, – the explanation of its manhood’ (Kemble, The Saxons in England, I, v).

¹⁰⁵  J. R. Clark Hall, Beowulf (prose), pp. xvii, xviii. The perceived childishness of Beowulf is also reflected in Wackerbarth’s view of his translation of it as representing ‘an amusing Tale for my little Nephews and Nieces’ (quoted above, p. 53). Turner had compared the style of Old English poetry to the kind of language evident in the efforts of ‘our children’ (The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 3rd ed., III, 160).

¹⁰⁶  J. R. Clark Hall, Beowulf (verse), p. ix.

¹⁰⁷  J. R. Clark Hall, Beowulf (verse), p. x.

¹⁰⁸  [Taylor,] The Monthly Review; reprinted in Shippey and Haarder, Beowulf: The Critical Heritage, pp. 132–6 (quotations at p. 136).

¹⁰⁹  Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837.

¹¹⁰  Frantzen, Desire for Origins, p. 195.

¹¹¹  Sharon Turner was quick to retort, ‘[Thorkelín] is not entitled to claim it as a Danish poem; it is pure Anglo-Saxon; and though I grant that the Anglo-Saxon language is very like that of the old Icelandic poetry which has survived, yet it is a similarity with great idiomatic and verbal differences. It is by no means identity’ (The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 3rd ed., III, 326–7, n. 2).

¹¹²  J. R. Hall, ‘The First Two Editions of Beowulf’, p. 242. For a brief overview of nationalist appropriations of Beowulf in the nineteenth century, see also David, ‘The Nationalities of Beowulf: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes’.

¹¹³  Leo, Altsächsische und angelsächsische Sprachproben,  p. xi (‘eine deutsche Mundart im engsten Sinne des Wortes’), quoted by Eric Stanley, The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism, p. 8.

¹¹⁴  Leo, ed., Beowulf, das älteste deutsche, in angelsächsischer Mundart erhaltene, Heldengedicht.

¹¹⁵  Simrock, trans., Beowulf. Das älteste deutsche Epos; von Wolzogen, trans., Beovulf (Bärwelf). Das älteste deutsche Heldengedicht.

¹¹⁶  Shippey, ‘Introduction’, pp. 37, 71; see further John Hill, ‘Beowulf Editions for the Ancestors’.

¹¹⁷  Shippey, ‘Introduction’, p. 74.

¹¹⁸  Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 3rd ed., III, 326.

¹¹⁹  J. R. Hall, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Nineteenth Century’, p. 435.

¹²⁰  D’Israeli, Amenities of Literature, I, 91; D’Israeli goes on (ibid.) to express his views about Kemble’s translation, criticizing its literalness: ‘Such versions may supply the wants of the philologist, but for the general reader they are doomed to read like vocabularies.’

¹²¹  Morley, Sketches of Longer Works, p. 14.

¹²²  Brooke, English Literature from the Beginning to the Conquest, p. 83.

¹²³  Brooke, The History of Early English Literature, I, 25.

¹²⁴  The History of Early English Literature, I, 31.

¹²⁵  The History of Early English Literature, I, 29; see also his English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest, p. 63.

¹²⁶  Brooke, The History of Early English Literature, I, vii.

¹²⁷  See MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons; MacDougall points to four postulates of this myth in its most highly developed form: the inherent superiority of Germanic peoples, both in character and in their institutions; the Germanic origin of the English people; the unparalleled freedom of English political and religious institutions, which is inherited from Germanic forefathers; the burden of world leadership that the English bear since they, ‘better than any other Germanic people, represent the traditional genius of their ancestors’ (p. 2).

¹²⁸  Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, p. 172.

¹²⁹  Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, p. 180.

¹³⁰  Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, p. 24.

¹³¹  See J. R. Hall, ‘Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Anglo-Saxonism: The Question of Language’, p. 133.

¹³²  On Jefferson and Old English, see further Hauer, ‘Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language’; Frantzen, Desire for Origins, pp. 203–7.

¹³³  J. R. Hall, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Nineteenth Century’, p. 448; see also Frantzen, Desire for Origins, pp. 207–13.

¹³⁴  Hall, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Nineteenth Century’, p. 448.

¹³⁵  [Longfellow,] ‘Anglo-Saxon Literature’, pp. 104–6; for the translation from Beowulf, see also The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, pp. 739–40.

¹³⁶  Longfellow, ‘Anglo-Saxon Literature’, p. 102.

¹³⁷  Longfellow, ‘Anglo-Saxon Literature’, p. 104.

¹³⁸  Ibid.

¹³⁹  Longfellow, ‘Anglo-Saxon Literature’, p. 106.

¹⁴⁰  Garnett, Beowulf, Preface to Second Edition, p. xv; Hall, Beowulf, p. vii (see Tinker, The Translations of Beowulf, pp. 84, 95).

¹⁴¹  Tinker, trans., Beowulf, translated out of the Old English, p. 5.

¹⁴²  Child, trans., Beowulf and the Finnsburh Fragment; Gummere, trans., The Oldest English Epic. In a previous article, Gummere had rejected the claims of blank verse for translating Beowulf – too grand for a ‘primitive’ epic like Beowulf – and of syllabic rhyme – it carries us ‘far back into the glories of our national past’ but ‘is easy and garrulous where Beowulf is breathless and rough’ (Gummere, ‘The Translation of Beowulf, and the Relations of Ancient and Modern English Verse’, pp. 53, 48); cf. the comments of D’Israeli and Brooke on blank verse translations, above, nn. 49 and 53, respectively. On American translations, see further John Hill, ‘Beowulf Editions for the Ancestors’, pp. 67–9.

¹⁴³  Gummere, trans., Beowulf (Harvard Classics ed.), p. 1.

¹⁴⁴  Longfellow, ‘Anglo-Saxon Literature’, p. 93.

¹⁴⁵  Robert Young notes indeed that the racial designation ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ‘was originally used predominantly in North America, and introduced into English precisely to describe the English abroad, the diasporic population’ (The Idea of English Ethnicity, p. 181), adding, ‘“Anglo-Saxon” referred to indeterminate English people, of any kind, in any place’ (ibid.). On American Anglo-Saxonism, see Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism; J. R. Hall, ‘Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Anglo-Saxonism: The Question of Language’; VanHoosier-Carey, ‘Byrhthoth in Dixie: The Emergence of Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Postbellum South’.

¹⁴⁶  See Osborn, Updated Bibliography to Tinker, The Translations of Beowulf, pp. 155–79; Bjork and Niles, A Beowulf Handbook, ‘Works Cited, Translations’, pp. 379–81.

¹⁴⁷  I should point out that nearly 250,000 of the ‘Beowulf’ hits in these searches were specifically with reference to the Beowulf-cluster software operating system.

¹⁴⁸  Joy and Ramsey, ‘Introduction: Liquid Beowulf’, p. xxx.

¹⁴⁹  Joy and Ramsey, ‘Liquid Beowulf’, p. xxx, referring to Eagleton, ‘Hasped and Hooped and Hirpling: Heaney Conquers Beowulf’, p. 16.

¹⁵⁰  Shippey, ‘Introduction’, p. 74.

¹⁵¹  Joy and Ramsey, ‘Liquid Beowulf’, p. xxxi, quoting Niles, ‘Introduction: Beowulf, Truth, and Meaning’, p. 9.

¹⁵²  Greenfield and Robinson, A Bibliography of Publications on Old English Literature.

¹⁵³  Frantzen, ‘By the Numbers: Anglo-Saxon Scholarship at the Century’s End’, pp. 483–6.

¹⁵⁴  On the perceived childishness of Beowulf, see here.

¹⁵⁵  Ker, The Dark Ages, p. 253.

¹⁵⁶  The Dark Ages, pp. 252 and 253.

¹⁵⁷  Kermode, ‘The Modern Beowulf’, p. 2.

¹⁵⁸  Frantzen, ‘By the Numbers’, p. 483.

¹⁵⁹  Kermode, ‘The Modern Beowulf’’, p. 2.

¹⁶⁰  Cf. the title of Ettmüller’s 1875 edition of the poem: Carmen de Beovulfi Gautarum regis rebus praeclare gestis atque interitu, quale fuerit ante quam in manus interpolatoris, monachi Vestsaxonici, inciderat. Ettmüller sets out to present Beowulf as it was ‘before it fell into the hands of an interpolator, a West Saxon monk’.

¹⁶¹  Klaeber, ‘Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf’; for a summary, see Klaeber, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, pp. xlviii–li (‘The Christian Coloring’).

¹⁶²  Klaeber, ed., Klaeber’s Beowulf, ed. Fulk, Bjork and Niles; on the earlier editions of ‘Klaeber’, see Fulk, ‘The Textual Criticism of Frederick Klaeber’s Beowulf’.

¹⁶³  Wright, Beowulf, p. 9.

¹⁶⁴  Crane, ‘To Thwack or Be Thwacked’, p. 320.

¹⁶⁵  Ibid.

¹⁶⁶  C. W. Kennedy, trans., Beowulf: The Oldest English Epic.

¹⁶⁷  ‘To Thwack or Be Thwacked’, p. 228.

¹⁶⁸  Kennedy, Beowulf, p. vii.

¹⁶⁹  Crane, ‘To Thwack or Be Thwacked’, p. 228.

¹⁷⁰  Morgan, Beowulf, pp. ix–x.

¹⁷¹  Osborn, ‘Translations, Versions, Illustrations’, p. 358.

¹⁷²  Waterhouse, trans., Beowulf in Modern English. Contemporary reviewers damned the translation with faint praise: Stanley Rypins declared it to be ‘a reflection rather of scholarly competence than of poetic sensibility’ and opined that in her choice of blank verse as her metre Waterhouse ‘handicaps herself unnecessarily with a crippling burden’ (review, p. 421); J. N. Scannell described it as ‘a competent and workmanlike volume’ but was of the view that ‘Beside the poetic grandeur of the original Miss Waterhouse’s verse is, inevitably, flat and prosaic’ (review, pp. 300 and 301); more positive was R. M. Lumiansky, who liked Waterhouse’s choice of metre and welcomed the translation as ‘an accurate, highly readable version of the poem’ (review, p. 248). G. Storms felt that Waterhouse’s ‘execution is, in the main, pleasant and reliable’ (review, p. 141).

¹⁷³  Waterhouse, Beowulf in Modern English, p. ix.

¹⁷⁴  Ibid.

¹⁷⁵  Ibid.

¹⁷⁶  See n. 172, above.

¹⁷⁷  Morgan, Beowulf, p. xii.

¹⁷⁸  Morgan, Beowulf, p. x.

¹⁷⁹  See especially Gummere, ‘The Translation of Beowulf’ (1886); see n. 142, above.