Fans of British Writers discussion

Our group's common read of Beowulf [in any edition or translation --not necessarily Heany's!] won't start until tomorrow; but since tomorrow is apt to be a busy day, I thought it wouldn't hurt to get this thread going now. This will be our forum for discussions, questions, background information, review links, and anything else Beowulf-related! I'm looking forward to joining in the read before the end of the month, although because of prior reading commitment I'll have to start late myself.

Goodreads has an excellent video clip of British classical actor Julian Glover giving a dramatic reading from his own adaptation/translation of this poem, which includes snippets of the verbatim Old English. It's well worth a listen, IMO, and can be found at this link: https://www.goodreads.com/videos/2420... .

I read the Heaney version last year, after staring at the book for years instead of opening it.
It is a very readable and wonderful version. Happy reading everyone!

Has anyone started on this yet?

I hope that some members will get the opportunity to read this book. Heaney's translation is very vivid and a pleasure to read.

I've got my copy in hand (although in a different translation), and hope to start on it this weekend.

It's an interesting story, Werner.
I had the Heaney version on my shelf for years after getting it for a present(that I asked for). However, another book got in the way whenever I decided to read it. I'm glad I did finally read it, since it is such an important part of early British literature.

I'm definitely looking forward to the read! In my high school English Literature class, we read excepts from it, so I'm familiar with the basic plot. Then too, I've seen the movie The Thirteenth Warrior (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120657/ ), which is an adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel Eaters of the Dead, which Crichton based loosely on Beowulf.

I've read it twice, but not in the last 5 years. Epic poems about feats of bravery are interesting, but I have to admit it was a challenge for me. I felt like I was missing something. But I think I was trying to read more into it than what is there.

I've at last started on this as of yesterday, though I haven't gotten beyond the introductory matter yet. The edition I'm reading is Beowulf: A New Verse Translation For Fireside And Class Room (Century Co., 1923) by William Ellery Leonard of the Univ. of Wisconsin, checked out from the Bluefield College library. We also have the 2001 verse translation by Seamus Heaney (who is of course himself a world class poet), which Rosemarie has praised in the posts above. And Rosemarie, I hope you and others who've read this already will also contribute to the discussion; insights from the Heaney translation (or others --or from the original, if anybody in this group reads Old English!) will be very helpful. For my own part, though, I thought Leonard's version might be closer to the original, and more "scholarly."

Here is the opening of the Heaney version:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.


The enemy of the Danes is Grendel:

Grendel was the name of this grim demon
haunting the marches, marauding round the heath
and the desolate fens;

In Leonard's translation, those lines read:

"What ho! We've heard the glory/ of Spear-Danes, clans-men-kings,
Their deeds of olden story/ --how fought the athelings!"

"And that grim Hobgoblin/ was Grendel named by men,
Great Stalker of the marshes/ who held the moor and fen;"

The original doesn't rhyme, but Leonard mostly makes the couplets rhyme to convey a feeling of poetry in modern English, if he can do it without violating the sense of the original. (There are a few lines where that's not possible.) He does try to preserve the meter, which is characteristic of all ancient and early medieval Germanic/Scandinavian poetry. In the original, each line is divided by a marked pause in the middle [Leonard indicates this by skipped spaces, but the computer wouldn't save it that way here, so I indicated it by a slash mark] and there are four "beats," or accented syllables, to each half line; it's designed to be chanted or sung aloud in time to harp music. Also, each pair of half-lines begins with the same letter or sound (alliteration), though Leonard wasn't able to preserve that feature in the translation.

This poem actually survived in written form in only a single manuscript copy, the Nowell Codex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf... ) now in the British Museum, dated on the basis of orthography --the spellings and forms of the letters-- to around 1000; it has no title in the manuscript, but has come to be known by the name of its main character. (Leonard dates the actual written composition around 750 A.D., but judges it to be based on much older folk compositions transmitted orally.) The Codex was named for 16th-century British scholar Laurence Nowell, from whom antiquarian and book collector Sir Robert Bruce Cotton apparently acquired it; it's known to have been in Cotton's library in the mid-1600s. In 1731, it was damaged in a fire, and parts of it have crumbled since then; this has made some parts of the text difficult to read (and some of it was covered up at the edges by a modern re-binding); both Leonard and Wikipedia note that this has required scholars to do some guesswork in reconstructing the text.

I have four different translations of Beowulf, and I am having hard time picking one up. I an leaning towards Tolkien's translation. Anyone is reading it in his translation?

One of my Goodreads friends gave Tolkien's translation a very good five-star review, here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... . I'm not familiar with it myself, but there's no doubt that Tolkien was highly qualified for the project. (In fact, if the BC library had a copy, it probably would have been the translation I'd have picked!)

Poetry of those days used a lot of alliteration, instead of end rhymes.

I think that if you have a choice of translations, pick the one you enjoy reading the most.

Thank you! I think I would try Tolkien's translation then. I read it in original and loved it.

The account the poet gives, near the beginning of Beowulf, of the ship-burial of Hrothgar's ancestor Scyld gave the impression (at least to me) that the ship, laden with grave goods, was sent out unmanned to sea, wherever the waves would carry it. That seems to be the implication of the line "Let the billows bear him/ gave him to the deep" and of the words "And no man can say sooth ...who took up that freight."

However, in researching that in more detail, the information I've found all indicates that though, among Scandinavian and Germanic peoples in antiquity and the early Middle Ages, ship burials were very common for deceased kings and chieftains, the ships weren't normally sent out to sea. Rather, they were used as a huge coffin to hold the body and grave goods, and interred in the ground or in a mound. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_bu....) The most famous ship burial from early England is the one excavated at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk (https://www.britannica.com/place/Sutt... ).

Leonard notes that modern historians accept Hygelac as an actual king of the Geats, who ruled in the 6th century A.D., and that the raid on the Frisian coast in which he was killed, referred to by the poet here, is also historically attested. I'm pretty sure that a couple of other people referred to here, in the poet's other discussions of past events that he also interjects into Beowulf's story, were also real-life people. Both Bede and The Anglo Saxon Chronicle identify a Hengist as one of the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon and Jute invasion of Britain in the 5th century; and I believe that "Eormenric," a king mentioned in Part XVIII, is a variant spelling of Ermanaric (d. in the 370s) king of the Ostrogoths at the time of the Hunnish invasion of Europe. (The name rang a bell, because I'd read about the latter in The End of the Ancient World & the Beginnings of the Middle Ages by Ferdinand Lot.) That lends some credence to Leonard's conjecture (p. 54) that perhaps Beowulf really lived, though he considers the exploits recounted here purely fictional.

I started reading Beowulf in Tolkien’s translation. In 1920, he began teaching Old English at the University of Leeds and at around the same time started translating Beowulf. He finished it in 1926, but never published it. However, about a decade later he published a paper that has changed the way the poem was studied. In his seminal essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” Tolkien suggested that the meaning of the poem had been ignored in favor of archeological and philological study. Also, prior to the essay many scholars considered the poem to be a mess because the author was mixing pagan beliefs and Christian ideas. Remember that Grendel is a descendent of Cain. But the narrator repeatedly reminds us that he is telling a tale from the old days. Tolkien claims that the events of the poem, insofar as they are real, occurred in about 500 A.D. But the poet was a man of the new days, when the British Isles were being converted to Christianity. And so, while he tells how God girded the earth with the seas, and hung the sun in the sky, he again and again reverts to pagan values. Also, there is the finality of death. No one, including Beowulf, is said to be going on to a better place.
Tolkien kept writing comments and explanations to his translation till the end of his life. I started reading the translation, trying to keep up with the comments to each page but gave up. Now I am switching to Heaney’s translation.

Rosemarie wrote: "Poetry of those days used a lot of alliteration, instead of end rhymes."
Interestingly, the alliterating sound is rarely repeated from one line to the next.

Back when I was in high school (I graduated in 1970), excerpts from Beowulf were still required reading in the English curriculum in the U.S. and, I presume, would have been in the secondary school curriculum in the U.K. and probably Canada and Australia as well. I realize that wouldn't have been the case for those who grew up in non-Anglophone countries. But I'm curious --among those who got their secondary schooling in English-speaking countries, but who graduated later than I did, were you still required to study about this poem and read parts of it?

I've linked above to part of the Wikipedia article on Beowulf. But the entire article, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf , is a treasure-trove of background information, summaries of scholarly opinion(s), material about translations, ideas for further reading, etc. (I expect to refer to it again!) Of course, readers should be aware that the plot summary there involves "spoilers" (if you don't already know the plot before you start reading!).

I finished the book today, and my review is here (it has no spoilers!): https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... .

One aspect of Beowulf that's evoked much discussion over the years is the role of religion in the poem. (I didn't go into that at all in my review, because I felt the latter was pretty long already; but, as a person of faith myself, that dimension --here, and in literature in general-- is interesting to me, and perhaps to others.) The setting of the story is clearly 6th-century Scandinavia; the Vikings of that time and place were still pagan, so if the written poem as we have it draws (as I and many others believe it does) on older oral material going back to that time, that material would be originally composed by pagans and reflect their outlook. But the author of the poem in its present form is just as obviously a professing Christian, writing for an audience at a time when Christianity had been accepted by most Anglo-Saxons. So we have an old pagan story overlaid with a Christian viewpoint.

One pagan concept that survives in the text is "Wyrd" (Fate), which is referred to frequently. Viking thought was apparently strongly determinist; in their view, everything that happens is foreordained, and humans can't change it. Some have thought (and I don't have citations or links to refer to, since I can't always recall where I've read things), and I believe they may be correct, that this reflects a view of history that was essentially cyclic --what will happen has happened before, and will again. (That would explain the detailed mythology about Ragnarok and the events leading up to it, and the idea of the regeneration of the world after it; it's a cyclic eschatology rather than a linear one, as the Christian eschatology is.)

Interesting observation about the cyclic nature of the history, Werner. Do you think that is why the story is also cyclic: it starts with a funeral and ends with another one?

Werner wrote: "One aspect of Beowulf that's evoked much discussion over the years is the role of religion in the poem. (I didn't go into that at all in my review, because I felt the latter was pretty long already..."
I also read somewhere (and don't remember where) that the poet of Beowulf was trying to “christianize” the Germanic folklore and that he/she treated and interpreted the pagan personages in the poem according to the tradition of Biblical exegesis of the Old Testament; the poet deliberately paralleled the pagan Germanic past with the pre-Christian world of the Old Testament with the aim of demonstrating the prefiguration of the Christian world in his native heritage.

Oksana wrote: "Interesting observation about the cyclic nature of the history, Werner. Do you think that is why the story is also cyclic: it starts with a funeral and ends with another one?"

I hadn't thought about that in those terms, Oksana; but the beginning and end of the poem do frame it with funerals!

I'm thinking the author of "Beowulf," writing in his time and setting the story looking back to the past, based his story on oral tales, myths, and history from that pagan era. The historical sidelines in the poem may seem unrelated and superfluous to the modern reader, but the readers of "Beowulf" at the time would have been familiar with those old oral tales and history and able to relate with them. When I first read the Christian references mingled with the pagan beliefs in the story, I had to remind myself that Christianity was spreading into Scandinavia and the best way to teach a new belief was to intermingle the beliefs in order that they may be better accepted.

The edition of Beowulf I read was translated by Ernest J.B. Kirtlan in narrative prose rather than as a poem, so I will read now the Heaney
translation.

J. Duncan Spaeth, then an English professor at Princeton Univ., translated Beowulf (and apparently some other Anglo-Saxon writings) into modern English in his Old English Poetry: Translations Into Alliterative Verse with Introductions and Notes, published in 1921. Before I read Leonard's, that was the only translation of the work I'd been exposed to, because the excerpts in both Adventures in English Literature and British Literature for Christian Schools (the textbook I had in high school and the one I used when we were home schooling) are taken from it.

In messages 10-11 above, for comparative purposes, some lines from the poem are quoted in both Heaney's and Leonard's translations. In Spaeth's version, the same passages read:

"List to an old-time lay of the Spear-Danes,
Full of the prowess of famous kings,
Deeds of renown that were done by the heroes...."

"The demon grim was Grendel called;
March-stalker huge, the moors he roamed.
The joyless creature had kept long time
the lonely fen...."

An interesting (at least to me!) aspect of the religious references here is the positive treatment of Beowulf's spirituality. If we assume a core of historical basis for the poem in events in 6th-century (500s) Scandinavia, none of these people would have been baptized Christians. (The first recorded missionary activity in the region took place in Denmark in the early 700s.) Early in the poem, Hrothgar and his people are depicted as resorting to pagan sacrifices in an attempt to get supernatural help against Grendel's depredations (which, in the historical context, is a very realistic picture of exactly what they'd have done), and the poet dismisses this as a useless appeal to "gods" that are actually demonic.

While he never makes any explicitly Christian statements in the poem, though, Beowulf more than once expresses submission to the will of a supreme being who's totally in control of events; and at the end of the poem, the poet expresses confidence in the hero's heavenly reward. Leonard poses the question in his comments, "Did Beowulf become a Christian?"

IMO, we'd be incorrect to assume that the poet is claiming that. But while some medieval (and modern) Christians were quite explicit in consigning all pagans to hell, the majority view was less narrow, and that goes back into the attested writings of even the early church. All Christians agreed that Christ's death on the cross is what makes salvation possible for humans; but many held that its benefit can apply to pagans who never heard of him, but who still responded as best they could to the light of general revelation and the promptings of conscience. (For more detail, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_E... .) That seems to be the way the poet portrays Beowulf.

An interesting question would be whether Beowulf's assertions of belief in and submission to a single superintending Deity over human affairs were invented by the Christian author of the present poem, or whether they're present in the earlier pagan sources. I've never read The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson (the main medieval written source for Viking beliefs); but accounts of Viking beliefs that are dependent on it, almost to the point of being paraphrases or adaptations of it, that I have read indicate a belief in an unnamed and all-powerful Creator, who's far above the day-to-day Viking pantheon of Odin and his family. (The latter are basically depicted as humans raised to ultra-long life, supernatural wisdom, and great but not unlimited power; the sagas never credit Odin with anything to do with creating the world.) Whether this is a later Christian interpolation or (as I think it may be) a survival of a primitive monotheism is debated among scholars; but if it's the latter, such references as we have in Beowulf would be consistent with it. (In the poem, for instance, Beowulf doesn't presume to name this being or to actually pray to Him.)

Werner, There are references in Beowulf to Weird which translates to Fate. Beowulf seems to believe in Fate as a determinate of the events that occur in one's life and this would not coincide with Christianity. It seems the author of "Beowulf" is superimposing Christian elements to his characters. God as we know it through Christian teachings would not be the reality in Beowulf's life in 6th century Scandinavia. The author, who is assumed to possibly be a missionary and writing from the perspective of the future looking back in time, gives Beowulf some Christian elements. The author's beliefs are what may be expressed in Beowulf's seemingly Christian references in regard to a single supreme being and it is perhaps Fate as the supreme controlling element (though not a Creator or god) that Beowulf may be addressing or would normally be addressing in his era. There is certainly a co-mingling of the pagan and Christian by the author, writing in his own time, indicating the spread of Christianity and the desire to attain its acceptance by the populace by not dismissing or completely denigrating the old beliefs. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down??

I don't have the scholarly background to be certain - just my layman's thoughts.

Elizabeth wrote: "The author, who is assumed to possibly be a missionary...."

Even if not a missionary, very likely in holy orders, since priests and monks tended to be almost the only people who could read and write in England (and most other European countries) at that time. You're certainly correct that Beowulf (assuming he was an actual person) would have held normal Viking beliefs for his time, such as a belief in Wyrd, and that he neither would have been familiar with distinctive Christian beliefs nor held them himself. (I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought he did; and our poet, of course, would have known that he didn't!) And yes, in working with people in cultural settings where Christianity and paganism still vied for popular acceptance, Christian clergy certainly did try, wherever possible, to ease the transition by accommodating or re-interpreting the old beliefs. (There are many known instances of this, from all over northern Europe.)

Elizabeth wrote: "...it is perhaps Fate as the supreme controlling element (though not a Creator or god) that Beowulf may be addressing or would normally be addressing in his era."

Actually, Wyrd was not thought of as an animate being that you could address as such; and I don't recall any instances where Beowulf actually prays in the poem. He does speak of "the Lord's doom" (VI, using that word in the old sense, of a sentence pronounced on the guilty), and refers to "God" (IX), "holy Lord, the wise God" (X), "the God of men" (XXXVII), etc. Since whatever oral sources the poet used to compose the poem we have here are now lost, we can't say for sure what they contained (even if we do have a scholarly background --which where Scandinavian studies are concerned, I don't have either; you and I both are just interested laymen!). Every one of these references may be pure invention by the poet. My only point is that, if they aren't, they can be understood in a 6th-century Viking context. If they do reflect vestiges of a primitive monotheism, this God-concept doesn't incorporate any idea that's unique to Christian theology ("God as we know it through Christian teachings"). This God is not one whom mere mortals can address, whom they have any special claim on, nor who's made any particular plan for their salvation.

Thanks, Werner. I was reading about the "Norns" in Norse mythology who were depicted as three women (more than 3 in some references) and their ability to construct the content of time: one is Urd, “The Past,” the second Verdandi, “What Is Presently Coming into Being” and the third Skuld “What Shall Be”. They were the ones who created and controlled fate, although were not worshiped and could not be appealed to in order to intervene in one's present or future. One's fate was set and unchangeable.
"fate will unwind as it must"

Elizabeth, thanks for sharing this background information about the Norns. (They're also described in the retelling of the Edda by Annie and Eliza Keary, The Heroes of Asgard: Tales from Scandinavian Mythology, and other sources.) Yes, they were thought to produce and control Fate in the form of an actual woven fabric, supposedly endowed with existential power over the course of human events.

The Beowulf poet doesn't use the word Norns, but that's probably the idea being referred to in the line:
"But unto them the Lord gave / the webs of weal-in-war" --a "web" being, of course, a thing that's woven (X). Leonard's footnote at that point says: "That is, as if woven by the Norns (heathen conception) and then disposed of by God (Christian conception)."

Werner wrote: “You're certainly correct that Beowulf (assuming he was an actual person) would have held normal Viking beliefs for his time, such as a belief in Wyrd, and that he neither would have been familiar with distinctive Christian beliefs nor held them himself.”


I was wondering, Werner, whether you were aware of a very old article written by Brodeur and Marie Padgett Hamilton (Hamilton, Marie Padgett. “The Religious Principle in Beowulf.” PMLA, vol. 61, no. 2, 1946) where the authors tried to press the pagan concept of wyrd into the service of Christianity. They argued that “wyrd” in Beowulf was subject to the dictates of God and therefore could not be considered as an entirely pagan concept.

No, Oksana, I wasn't aware of the article; I'll have to see if the Bluefield College library has it. (We have a considerable run of back issues of the Publications of the Modern Languages Assn., but I'm not sure if it goes back all the way to 1946.) I don't doubt, though, that the Christian author of Beowulf as we have it probably meant for us to understand the references to Wyrd (which I'd guess were too strongly embedded in the oral tradition behind the written poem to purge out completely) in that light. (But in the earlier oral precursors of the written poem --probably going back close to the time of the events-- it would certainly have originally been "an entirely pagan concept.")

JSTOR has this article if you have an access to this database. I do believe that fate in Beowulf is a part of the pagan beliefs though.

Yes, Oksana, we do have access to JSTOR. Thanks for the tip!

Great! If you have access to JSTOR, there is another good article about Fate and God in Beowulf. Tietjen, Mary C. Wilson. “God, Fate, and the Hero of ‘Beowulf.’” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 74, no. 2
I have just finished reading Heanley's translation of the poem. I only read the book in original Old English. What a pleasure it was to read it translated. Some passages that did not make sense to me when I read it in original, all of a sudden became coherent and comprehensible.

Thanks for letting me know about the Tietjen article, Oksana! I'll check that one out too.

Wow! I'm really impressed that you can read Old English, and well enough to read an epic poem in it. Kudos! Nobody else that I know can, with the exception of one or two professors here at BC who have PhD.s in English.

I had to read it and translate as a part of my History of English language classes. I don’t think I can read it easily now. But interestingly, I am studying Finnish now and actually finding some cognates from the Old English!

That is interesting, Oksana, since my understanding is that (unlike most Scandinavian languages) Finnish is not a Germanic language. It probably incorporates Germanic loan words, though.

Yes, language learning you don't continue to use tends to atrophy. That's sadly been the case with most of what I did learn of the languages I had to study in my secondary and post-secondary education.

Yes, Finnish is a Uralic language. But I am still finding a lot of cognates with Germanic and even Russian languages. It is actually very exciting. Like stumbling upon an old friend in the middle of a foreign city.

That's cool, Oksana! Best wishes with your studies.