Lisa Gorton

Only 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’:

Sparrow in winter

A new translation of Beowulf

Lisa Gorton

Beowulf: A new translation

translated by Maria Dahvana Headley

Scribe $27.99 pb, 176 pp

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,

but her son Gren is drawn to the fenced estate of Herot, where the rich white wife Willa lives in a mansion within a gated community. The Mere Wife, a clever retelling, recasts the poem as a conflict of race and class in contemporary America. In doing so, it challenges the racism that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon scholars and translators brought to their interpretation of the poem’s ‘monsters’. In perhaps its nadir, the translator John-Josias Conybeare glossed Grendel: ‘In later ages, a Highlander, an American Indian, or even a runaway Negro, have assumed, in the eyes of their more civilized neighbours, the same aspect of terror and mystery’ (John Josias Conybeare, Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, 1826). Headley’s The Mere Wife, and also her Beowulf, follow John Gardner’s novel Grendel (1971), Edwin Morgan’s long poem ‘Grendel’ (1976–81), and Toni Morrison’s essay ‘Grendel and His Mother’ (in The Source of Self-Regard, 2019): they sympathise with the ‘monsters’.

Headley is right, I think, that the poem needs and deserves to be rescued from the racist and sexist legacy of many of its translators. As it happens, in Beowulf there is a runaway slave fleeing a brutal master; the narrator’s sympathy is with the slave. Whoever wrote Beowulf recovered stories from a tradition that the Roman poet and diplomat Sidonius Apollinaris (c.430–489), for instance, considered ‘barbarian thrumming’. He complained in a letter to Catullinus:

Why – even supposing I had the skill – do you bid me compose a song … placed as I am among long-haired hordes, having to endure German speech, praising oft with wry face the song of the gluttonous Burgundian who spreads rancid butter on his hair? Do you want me to tell you what wrecks all poetry? Driven away by barbarian thrumming the Muse has spurned the six-footed exercise ever since she beheld these patrons seven feet high. (translated by W.B. Anderson, 1936)

The Beowulf poet heard something else in that ‘barbarian thrumming’ of ‘patrons seven feet high’.

It is a defining question for Beowulf’s translators: what are these ‘monsters’? Or, how can this melancholy, digressive poem, with its feeling for customary life, and its avowed Christianity, contain such creatures: the flesh-eating Grendel, descendant of Cain, tormented by the sound of harps; his avenging mother, the strongest fighter in the poem, living under a mere; and a fire-breathing dragon, distraught at the theft of a golden cup? They are real within the world of the poem; they are, at the same time, from the narrator’s perspective, eschatological. This kind of split and doubling gives the poem its peculiar force: the golden hall, the hall under the mere, the golden hoard: all are closed in; all are broken open. Its warriors are great; its warriors are burned on the pyre. Or, as Edwin Morgan’s long poem from Grendel’s point of view starts: ‘It is being nearly human / gives me this spectacular darkness.’

Headley’s introduction starts: ‘My love affair with Beowulf began with Grendel’s mother.’ Headley argues for a new interpretation of a textual crux. At one point in the manuscript, Grendel’s mother is described as a ‘mere-wyl[-]’. Did that scribe mean wylf (wolf) or wyf (lady)? Which is to say: how human is Grendel’s mother? Headley’s translation emphasises the mother’s warriorstrength. Where Seamus Heaney’s translation describes her as ‘that swamp-thing from hell, / the tarn-hag in all her terrible strength’, Headley has ‘the reclusive night-queen, / the mighty mere-wife’. It is a lesson in how background assumptions shape translation.

Headley’s translation of Beowulf emphasises immediacy. ‘Bro,’ it starts. In her introduction, Headley explains: ‘I did spend a lot of time imagining the narrator as an old-timer at the end of the bar, periodically pounding his glass and demanding another. I saw it with my own eyes.’ As this might suggest, Headley’s translation treats Beowulf as a poem of the oral tradition.

There is much to be said for this. In his 1936 essay, Tolkien remarked that, ‘the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day the poem was made’. As a consequence, the poem has suffered some terrible translations. One starts, ‘What ho!’ Perhaps it could be said that not all archaisms are alike; the Anglo-Saxon ones are archaic after their own fashion: they are kennings, at once thingy and strange. They find no equivalent in ‘eftsoon’.

Headley wants, she says, a ‘bloody and juicy’ poem. Against, for instance, Heaney’s closely worked, consistent, ‘foursquare’ language, Headley has taken words from everywhere all at once, seemingly at random. ‘His words were heard and heralded, / and yes, yes, bro! The man was more than just talk.’ Sometimes such knowingness cloys, particularly in the proem, in some brutal adaptations of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’: ‘we all know a boy can’t daddy / till his daddy’s dead’; and, ‘daddying for decades after his own daddy died’. It seems as though some parts of the poem bored Headley into inordinate alliteration. Headley’s is a free, novelistic rewriting of the poem; it does not try to capture the compactness of the original, with its four-stress lines. But, when the characters speak, when the set-up is dramatic, this translation has passages of clarity and imagination: ‘She raised her voice in mourning, keening for her kin / as the pyre was lit … Fire comes from the same / family as famine.’

In its desire for immediacy, Headley’s translation sacrifices that curious time-structure in Beowulf: the narrator’s distance from the poem’s characters. Headley imagines the storyteller saying, ‘I saw it with my own eyes.’ But the narrator of Beowulf doesn’t see it all happening as it happens; the narrator announces, before Beowulf’s last fight, that Beowulf will die. The poem makes such dramatic irony into a tragic irony of time. For its characters, the poems’ world is fierce, immediate, and uncertain; for the narrator, that world is finished. What remains of it is the poem: a wrought thing. The poem in its original has sometimes only four (compound) words in a line. Its sense is compressed into its sounds; its sounds make a structure in time. It remembers, but it does not save.

That feeling of distance in time is what makes sense of the poem’s strange structure. Beowulf has a beginning and an ending and, between them, a gap of fifty years; its beginning and its ending are opposed and bound. The structure of the whole poem recalls the structure of a single line of Anglo-Saxon poetry, which has two sides with a caesura between them; across that gap, alliteration binds the line together. In the beginning, Beowulf goes to help an ageing king who has ruled fifty years in a hall of gold and now faces a monster he cannot defeat. Beowulf kills Grendel and Grendel’s mother and returns, a hero, to his own king, and says what happened. Fifty years later, Beowulf is an ageing king who has ruled fifty years in a hall of peace and now