Poetry
Sparrow in winter A new translation of Beowulf Lisa Gorton
Beowulf: A new translation
translated by Maria Dahvana Headley
O
Scribe $27.99 pb, 176 pp
nly one manuscript of Beowulf has survived. It was in Sir Robert Cotton’s library. Cotton had been a student of that careful genius William Camden, who, through a lifetime’s work, formulated a different view of history: not the record of victory but the recollection of lost worlds and times. He and his fellow Antiquarians searched out fragments and ruins: Roman urns in the fields, Saxon burials under St Paul’s, a giant’s thighbone under a London cellar. They collected ancient manuscripts. From the age of eighteen, Cotton began to amass his library. When he heard that the astrologer and alchemist John Dee had buried a bundle of manuscripts in a field, Cotton ‘bought the field to digge after it’ ( John Aubrey, Brief Lives). He found a copy of the Magna Carta in a tailor’s workshop. He bought the whole room in Fotheringay Castle where Mary Stuart was beheaded and had it rebuilt in his own house. Cotton’s library was six feet wide and twenty-four feet long. He named his bookshelves after the various busts he placed on top of them. The manuscript of Beowulf is named Vitellius, A. XV. because it was under the bust of Vitellius, on the top shelf, fifteen books from the left. Ben Jonson and Francis Bacon visited his library. So did parliamentarians, seeking ancient precedent for rights of parliament against the imperious impulses of Charles I. Cotton was imprisoned over a pamphlet. The king’s supporters took it to be a satire – a preposterously exaggerated version – of their opinions. As it turned out, the pamphlet had been written for the king’s father, James I. Charles’s heir being born during the hearing, Charles released the prisoners. Still, Cotton was locked out of his library. His face changed, said his friend Simon D’Ewes, ‘into a grim blackish paleness’. He died a year later. ‘They had broken his heart,’ said D’Ewes, ‘who had locked up his library from him’ ( Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen, Historical Memoirs of the House of Russell, 1833). Some generations later, Cotton’s library became the property of the nation. In October 1731, the Gentleman’s Magazine reported, under ‘Casualties’: A Fire broke out in the House of Mr Bently … which burnt down that part of the House that contained the King’s and Cottonian Libraries. Almost all the printed Books were consumed and part of the Manuscripts …
The librarian Dr Bentley, it was said, leapt out of a window.
He wore a wig and a nightgown; he had the Codex Alexandrinus under one arm. The heat of the fire left the pages of Beowulf, said one restorer, ‘compressed and corrugated, with the edges burnt, and in many cases, broken, torn, and dirtied’. The manuscript has been restored, sometimes helpfully, over hundreds of years. Now the British Museum has photographs of it online: its pages – inlaid, rebound – eroded at the edges. Some of the poem is lost. It is perhaps a fitting history for a poem about time’s heroes and monsters, its hoards and ruins. But Beowulf ’s precarious history makes for uncertainty: about the age of the manuscript; about the age of the poem it records; about some of the words in it.
The poem deserves to be rescued from the racist and sexist legacy of many of its translators The manuscript is thought to date from early in the eleventh century, or earlier. The poem’s proem describes the founding of the Scylding dynasty. As Kevin S. Kiernan points out in Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript (1981, 1996), this suggests the manuscript was written after 1016, when the Scylding Cnut the Great conquered England. Cnut’s father, Swein Forkbeard, had spent decades pillaging and plundering. Some raiders killed their prisoner the bishop of Canterbury Ælfheah, for instance, by pelting him with bones from their feast. A manuscript celebrating the ancient deeds of Danes and Scyldings (argues Kiernan) is more likely to have been written after the decades of terror and carnage when a Danish Scylding ruled the kingdom. Two scribes wrote out the manuscript. The poem’s narrator is Christian; its warriors live in a faraway, long-ago world of ring-fealty and blood-feuds. ‘They bent themselves to idols,’ says the narrator. ‘That was their nature, these heathens, hoping at the wrong heavens …’ Beowulf starts and ends with a funeral: it draws all its warriors’ feats briefly out of oblivion. It was already, in the scribes’ time, an old poem – or, at the least, was written to sound like an old poem. This gap – of time, of place, of perspective – between the poem’s narrator and its characters raises another uncertainty: what relationship the manuscript had to oral tradition. It’s like that debate about Homer and The Iliad and The Odyssey: whether Homer should be considered the author of those works or the ‘label’ for a long oral tradition set down in writing at last (see, for instance, Barbara Graziosi, Inventing Homer: The early reception of epic, 2002). For a long time, Beowulf scholars took the poem to be a jumble of old stories, a source. They sought, through it, their own unlovely purposes: evidence in Schleswig-Holstein territorial disputes; evidence of Teutonic warrior-prowess. It was Tolkien who, in his 1936 lecture ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, convincingly asserted the value of the poem as a poem, a work of conscious artistry, and in that way helped to inaugurate popular modern translations by, among others, Edwin Morgan, Michael Alexander, Seamus Heaney, and now, Maria Dahvana Headley. Headley’s novel The Mere Wife (2018) retold Beowulf from the perspective of Grendel’s mother. In the book, Grendel’s mother is an army veteran suffering from PTSD and amnesia in suburban America. She lives in the mountains by a lake, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021
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