Beowulf: a new translation

Contents

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

Beowulf

Acknowledgments

BEOWULF

Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times–bestselling author and editor. Her books include the novels The Mere Wife, Magonia, Aerie, and Queen of Kings, and the memoir The Year of Yes. With Neil Gaiman, she is the coeditor of Unnatural Creatures. Her stories have been short-listed for the Shirley Jackson, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards.

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Copyright © Maria Dahvana Headley 2020

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For Grimoire William Gwenllian Headley,

who gestated alongside this book,

changing the way I thought about love, bloodfeuds,

woman-warriors, and wyrd.

Introduction

My love affair with Beowulf began with Grendel’s mother, the moment I encountered her in an illustrated compendium of monsters, [1] a slithery greenish entity standing naked in a swamp, knife in hand. I was about eight, and on the hunt for any sort of woman-warrior. Wonder Woman and She-Ra were fine, but Grendel’s mother was better. She had a ferocious look and seemed to give precisely zero fucks, not that I had that language to describe her at that point in my life. In the book I first saw her in, there was no Grendel, no Beowulf, no fifty years a queen. She was just a woman with a weapon, all by herself in the center of the page. I imagined she was the point of whatever story she came from. When I finally encountered the actual poem, years later, I was appalled to discover that Grendel’s mother was not only not the main event but also, to many people, an extension of Grendel rather than a character unto herself, despite the significant ink devoted to her fighting capabilities. It aggravated me enough that I eventually wrote a contemporary adaptation of Beowulf—The Mere Wife, a novel in which the Grendel’s mother character is a protagonist, a PTSD-stricken veteran of the United States’ wars in the Middle East. That might have been the end of it, but by that point I’d tumbled head over heels into Beowulf itself, and was, like everyone who ever translates it, obsessed.

It’s a somewhat unlikely object of obsession, this thousand-ish-year-old epic. Beowulf bears the distinction of appearing to be basic—one man, three battles, lots of gold—while actually being an intricate treatise on morality, masculinity, flexibility, and failure. It’s 3,182 lines of alliterative wildness, a sequence of monsters and would-be heroes. In it, multiple old men try to plot out how to retire in a world that offers no retirement. Hoarders of all kinds attempt to maintain control of people, halls, piles of gold, and even the volume of the natural world. Queens negotiate for the survival of their sons, attempt to save their children by marrying themselves to warriors, and, in one case, battle for vengeance on their son’s murderers. Graying old men long for one last exam to render them heroes once and for all. The phrase That was a good king recurs throughout the poem, because the poem is fundamentally concerned with how to get and keep the title Good. The suspicion that at any moment a person might shift from hero into howling wretch, teeth bared, causes characters ranging from scops to ring-lords to drop cautionary anecdotes. Does fame keep you good? No. Does gold keep you good? No. Does your good wife keep you good? No. What keeps you good? Vigilance. That’s it. And even with vigilance, even with courage, you still might go forth to slay a dragon (or, if you’re Grendel, slay a Dane), die in the slaying, and leave everyone and everything you love vulnerable. The world of the poem—a fantastical version of Denmark in the fifth to early sixth century and the land of the Geats, in present-day Sweden—is distant, but the actions of the poem’s characters are familiar.

As much as Beowulf is a poem about Then, it’s also (and always has been) a poem about Now, and how we got here. The poem is, after all, a poem about willfully blinkered privilege, about the shock and horror of experiencing discomfort when one feels entitled to luxury.

There are many translations out there, enough that you could read one a day for months and not repeat. They make up a startlingly diverse corpus of interpretations and styles, with the occasional screeching veer into new plot points. (How about the transgressive and fairly persuasive notion that the last survivor of a forgotten tribe, in burying his people’s gold, transforms by curse into the dragon?) [2] Every English-language translator’s take on how to translate this text is motivated by different ideas of how to use modern English to convey things inexpressible in it.

This translation, for example, was completed during the first months of my son’s life. Parenting a baby is listening to someone use a language in which certain sounds mean a slew of things, and one must rely heavily on context to gain clarity; a language in which there is no way to translate accurately the ancient sound that means hungry, because, to the preverbal speaker, the sound means and is used to signal a compendium of things, something more like belly hurt—longing—breast—empty mouth—bottle—swallow—milk—help.

While this gloss is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it’s not far from the actuality of Old English translation. It’s possible to make a case for more than one definition of many words, and the challenge is to land on an interpretation that braids rationally into the narrative, without translating a male warrior into a bear, or a woman warrior into a literal sea wolf rather than a metaphoric one. [3] You must choose wisely, and then, somehow, structure those wise (or frustrated) choices into poetry.

With this text, perfection is impossible. The poem was written in the language we now call Old English, sometime between the mid-seventh and the end of the tenth centuries, and exists in a lone manuscript copy, the Nowell Codex. The version contained therein was written down sometime between AD 975 and 1025, by two scribes, A and B, with different handwriting and different tendencies toward error. Add to this the fact that the manuscript isn’t intact: bits of poem were lost over the centuries—first in the gestation of the written version itself, which was at the mercy of memory and (presumably) mead, and later, in a library fire in 1731, which badly singed the edges of the manuscript. It was rebound in the late nineteenth century, and in the interim, its edges crumbled beyond resurrection. Worms feasted. Least visibly and most significantly, scribal emendations changed the nature of the story in both subtle and unsubtle ways. [4] Gaps were plugged with metric maybes, and lacunae inserted into lines that appear whole, to make sense of shifts in tone. All this is to say that Beowulf has been wrangled with, wrung out, and reworked for centuries. It’s been written upon almost as much by translators and librarians as it was by the original poet(s) and scribes.

The original Beowulf was composed by an author who imagined a world in which a monster is infuriated by loud music, a dragon ripples luxuriously about beloved gold, an elderly woman is able to make viable physical war against all the king’s men, and a young warrior can hold his breath for a full day while fighting sea monsters, winning his battle only because God shines a spotlight on a slaying sword. A perfect translation would require the translator to time travel fantastically rather than historically—more Narnia than Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. As if this weren’t enough, the language of the poem is as much a world-building tool as the plot is, engineered with the poet’s own anachronistic filter, an archaic, lyric lexicography. [5]

"If you wish to translate, not re-write, Beowulf, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in 1940, your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day the poem was made." [6]

Tolkien and I wouldn’t have agreed when it comes to the sort of language required for a translation of Beowulf—perceptions of literary and traditional language vary widely depending on who’s doing the perceiving, and Tolkien had a liking for the courtly that I do not share—but we agree that the original’s dense wordplay must be reckoned with.

Amid a slew of regressions in the past half decade, I must cite a win—the democratization of information. Access to formerly gate-kept texts has been radically broadened. Until recently, it was a cotton-gloved privilege to view the original manuscript of Beowulf. Now a click, and there you are, looking at handwriting a thousand years old: "Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon . . ." Not only is the original accessible to anyone with an internet connection, so are a huge number of translations and volumes of evolving scholarship, many long out of print. This translation exists because of that access.

It is both pleasurable and desirable to read more than one translation of this poem, because when it comes to translating Beowulf, there is no sacred clarity. What the translated text says is