28 January 2009
I’m taking a course on Beowulf at UC Berkeley this semester. (The professor is Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe for those who know who’s who in the field.) I’ve read the poem before, of course, but only in translation. This is the first time I’ll be reading the poem in the original Old English. So, inspired by others like David Plotz, who blogged the Bible for Slate, and Ammon Shea, who wrote Reading the OED, I decided to blog about my impressions of the poem as I translate and read. Beowulf isn’t nearly as long as either of those two works, but I have to translate. There will be about two blog entries per week through May, roughly corresponding to one entry for each of the poem’s fits.
Beowulf is, of course, the great epic poem of Anglo-Saxon England, filled with heroes, monsters, and dragons and has as its major theme of the search for nobility in death. The text I’ll be reading is Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 4th Edition, edited by R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. For those of you not familiar with medieval works, it really does make a difference what version you read. The editorial decisions made in taking a handwritten manuscript to print, especially a damaged one like the Beowulf manuscript, really make a difference.
Beowulf survives in only one manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, occupying folios 129r-198v. (That’s the shelf mark, essentially the library call number of the manuscript. Medieval manuscripts are usually paginated by numbered sheets, or folios, divided into recto (front) and verso (back) sides.) The poem consists of 3182 extant lines (originally it was probably somewhat longer, but scribal error and damage have taken their toll), divided into a prologue and 42 (or 43, depending on how you count) fits, or sections.
Like all Anglo-Saxon poetry, Beowulf is in alliterative verse. It does not rhyme; instead it relies on alliteration, rhythm, and meter. But enough of introductory stuff and on to the poem. I’ll fill in background info as I go.
Hwæt! Wē Gār-Dena in ġeardāgum,
þēodcyninga þrym ġefrunon,
Like a lot of Old English poetry, Beowulf begins with Hwæt!, roughly translated as Listen! or Lo! The whole first two lines read in translation:
Listen! We have heard of the glory in days of yore
of the glory of the kings of the people of the Spear-Danes.
A good start. It grabs you with the martial verbiage. It also introduces you to one of the first contradictions of the poem, or at least of its critical reception. The poem is set mostly in Denmark and the hero, Beowulf, is a Geat, from what is now southern Sweden. Despite the fact that it is written in Old English and the story is not known to have existed in Scandinavia, the subject of the poem has nothing to do with England. But Hamlet was a Dane too, so I guess it still qualifies as English literature.
This prologue, which consists of the first 52 lines of the poem, is all about Scyld Scefing, the legendary founder of the Danish kingdom. Scyld washes up on the Danish shore, Moses-like, as an infant and grows to become a great king and patriarch. The first half of the prologue describes his rise and the second describes his funeral. This is not directly related to the meat of the Beowulf plot, but Scyld’s great-grandson is Hrōðgār, the beleaguered Danish king whom Beowulf will rescue from the predations of the monster Grendel.
When you hit line 10, you come across the word hronrāde. Literally, this means whale-road, a figurative term for the sea or ocean. This is a kenning, a type of poetic metaphor. Because Anglo-Saxon poetry is alliterative, you need a lot of synonyms beginning with different letters to maintain the alliteration. Now if you look up kenning in just about any reference, the example given, almost without exception, will be whale-road. Now I know why this is; whale-road appears in the first ten lines of Beowulf, easy pickings for a first-semester freshman taking a survey course in English Lit.
On line 18 you run into the name Beow, or at least that’s how Klaeber’s gives it. It actually appears as Beowulf in the manuscript. No, it’s not THE Beowulf of the poem; he doesn’t appear until later. This is another guy, Scyld’s son. Different edited versions split on this name; some give it as Beow, others as Beowulf. Other stories about Scyld give his son’s name as Beow, so that appears to be the “correct” one, despite what the Beowulf manuscript says. This has given rise to the speculation that the scribes, knowing that the poem was about some guy named Beowulf, and mistakenly wrote that name instead of Beow. Both Beow and Beowulf work metrically.
So Scyld is a great king, a bēaga bryttan (line 35), or dispenser of rings. In the Germanic traditions kings were ranked according to how much loot they could give to their minions. This concept is revisited endlessly throughout the poem.
But like any king, Scyld eventually dies and is given a grand funeral. He is set in a boat, laden with weapons, armor, and treasure and the boat is pushed out to sea where (lines 50-52):
Men ne cunnon
secgan tō sōðe, selerædende,
hæleð under heofenum, hwā þæm hlæste onfēng.
Men do not know
truth be told, neither counselors
nor heroes under heaven, who unshipped that cargo.
(Next time: Fit I, lines 53-114)
