7 March 2009
More gifts are given, this time to Beowulf’s men, including a payment for the man killed by Grendel. Then the rest of the fit is a diversion, the recounting of a song sung by Hrothgar’s scop, the story of Hnæf and Finn. Hnæf, a Dane, visits his sister, Hildeburh in Friesland, where she is married to the King of the Frisians, Finn. There is some unspecified treachery and the Danes are attacked. (Possibly by a party of Jutes—but the text is unclear. The Jutes may be working with the Frisians, or the Jutes and the Frisians may be one and the same people, or maybe the Jutes are actually monsters; the word for Jute and the word for giant are identical, eoten. Presumably the Anglo-Saxon audience was familiar with the tale and wouldn’t be confused by the elliptical references.)
Anyway, after days of fighting Hnæf is slain and his retainer Hengist becomes the leader of the Danish contingent. Hengist and the remnant of the Danish troops control the mead-hall and the Frisians are too few to dislodge them, so, with winter coming on, the two sides come to an uneasy truce. The fit ends with the funeral pyre of Hnæf and his nephew, Hideburh’s and Finn’s son, who was also killed in the fighting.
Now the edited text I’ve been editing is the 2008 fourth edition of Klaeber’s Beowulf, edited by R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. (Frederick Klaeber, the original editor, died in 1954.) Overall, it’s a good text and the emendations are, by and large, fairly conservative and thoroughly explained in notes. But the text has one whopper of an emendation in this fit—they’ve added a whole new character. Actually, they’ve just named the anonymous scop who sings the song of Hnæf and Finn.
The line in question is 1066, which Fulk, et.al., render as, starting at line 1065:
gomenwudu grēted, ġīd oft wrecen,
ðonne Healgamen Hrōþgares scop
æfter medobenċe mænan scolde
Finnes eaferan(The lyre greeted, the song often recited,
then Healgamen Hrothgar’s scop
along the mead-bench should tell of
Finn’s son.)
What Fulk, et.al., have done is capitalize Healgamen, which literally means hall-entertainment, making it into the name of the scop. There is also an emendation on line 1068a, where they change the dative plural eaferum, sons, to the accusative singular eaferan. Most editors treat both healgamen, hall-entertainment, and Finnes eaferan, Finn’s son, as grammatically equivalent, they are both objects of the verb mænan. Other editors insert the preposition be, about, before Finnes to accomplish this (which, since be takes the dative as object, also solves the problem of the dative eaferum, but it creates a problem with meter. The traditional translation is:
(Then Hrothgar’s scop, along the mead-bench, should recite the hall-entertainment about Finn’s sons.)
Fulk, et.al., claim that mænan does not mean recite in any other appearance in Old English, it only means to tell of. And since you can’t “tell of” hall-entertainment, healgamen cannot be the object of the verb. Instead, it is the object of the sentence and the name of the scop.
While this makes elegant grammatical sense and conserves the text in the manuscript (no additional prepositions necessary), it flies in the face of the naming conventions in the story. No other character has an allegorical name like this. And elsewhere Fulk, et.al., roundly criticize other commentators who would turn Unferth’s name into an allegorical one. Also, while perhaps mænan does not exactly mean to recite, it alliterates with medobenċe and that is probably the reason for its being chosen—the audience being trusted to understand the unusual sense. In the end, this is not a conservative emendation at all. Living with imperfect grammar, usage, or meter is much more conservative than introducing a whole new name into the story.
This probably sounds like a lot of “inside baseball” talk and a lot of fuss over what is actually just the capitalization of one letter, but it is illustrative of the issues faced in dealing with this poem, as well as other Old English works. There are lots of other cases of similar issues throughout the poem—albeit none that go so far as to create a new name for a character. After 1,000 years, we’re still arguing over exactly what the poem says. This isn’t a case of where the manuscript is damaged and there is argument over what it said originally. Nor is it a case of whether or not the scribe made an error. The words on the manuscript page are clear to read, it’s what they mean that is murky.
Before I end, I want to highlight the word gomenwudu. It means lyre or harp, but literally it’s entertainment-wood. It’s just a really neat compound and Old English is replete with fun words like this.
Next up, how Hengist and the Danes get back at Finn.
