I first technically studied Beowulf when I was ten years old. My school taught us the story, and to thiI have a lot of feelings about this poem, okay.
I first technically studied Beowulf when I was ten years old. My school taught us the story, and to this day, I still remember the gruesome illustration of a crouching Grendel and his torn-off arm pinned above the mantlepiece. Obviously, we thought it was awesome.
And for the longest time, that was how I knew it: the hero Beowulf, the skulking monster Grendel, the disembodied arm. Those three things were the touchstone of the poem -- or so I thought, and every cultural reference & adaptation seemed to reinforce that belief.
Then I studied the full poem in university, and was shocked that I'd missed something so fundamental about it. "Did you know about Beowulf and the dragon?" I asked my housemate when I got home, agog. No, she hadn't either.
I'm fascinated by this effect. And maybe I was just colossally ill-informed for all those years, but I'm pretty sure most people I've polled about this poem only knew about Grendel -- and you can see this in how many cinematic adaptations only choose to show Grendel, sometimes his mother, rarely the dragon fifty years later.
My undergraduate thesis centred on the idea of the "culture-text", which is a term coined by Paul Davis re: A Christmas Carol. Certain works exist as two texts: the one that the author wrote, and the one that we collectively remember (the culture-text). So in the collective cultural 'remembered version' of Beowulf, everyone knows of Beowulf and Grendel, these two ancient and famous mythic characters pitted against each other. As I wrote in my thesis: "[P]eople know of Beowulf triumphing over Grendel, but are rarely aware of Beowulf and the dragon. Public memory usurps knowledge of the original text."
I'm intrigued by how only one half of the tale has gone on to such immortality. Maybe we like our mythic sagas to have happy endings -- not our hero wasting away from poison as an aged man -- but that doesn't seem right to me either, since we love tragedy. Is it the time jump? What is it about the dragon that doesn't fit conveniently into the cultural hivemind?
Either way. Back to the point: Beowulf is a great poem, a well-structured fable with three separate battles, which grants it the air of a fairytale. Our hero heaves himself at insurmountable obstacle after insurmountable obstacle, reaping the rewards accordingly before fate ultimately tightens its noose around his neck. It's fascinating for its depiction of a warrior culture, one in which fame and glory trumps death, in which cowards are to be decried and dispossessed, in which bravery and recklessness are valued, in which power corrupts and kings must be honourable, just, and good, and ought to show gratitude to their subjects for their loyal service. Loyalty, camaraderie, a warm hearth... and, yes, the warmth of Christian belief against the horrors of the medieval monster-ridden night.
It all ends in mutually assured destruction, however. What seems an uplifting heroic tale of the preternaturally strong Beowulf triumphing over all comers, eventually casts a dark shadow over the narrative: despite his fifty years of peace, all his life's work is easily shattered. The poem affirms a future where, despite all of Beowulf's glorious escapades, the women will lament and the men will die and his nation will be broken and overrun without him, as the feuding enemy nations move back in for vengeance. One hero can defeat all sorts of supernatural monsters (sea beasts, Grendel, Grendel's mother, the dragon) but at the end of the day, the blood-feuds will live on endlessly and base mankind will reclaim its vengeance, spilling blood for past unforgiven wrongs. An eye for an eye, until all that's left are the ravens and the wolves feasting on the corpses. A dark and sombre ending for a tale that we might prefer to remember as being about a young, strapping hero ripping off Grendel's arm and being rewarded by the king. The end, end of story, we're done.
Say this for him: Beowulf attained the glory he wanted -- in the end, his name lives on in perpetuity.
Heaney's translation is beautiful, by the by. His death (R.I.P. :() is what finally inspired me to pick up his edition, because I'd heard glowing things about it over the years. I had difficulties getting through the poem back in uni with another translation (Liuzza's, I think?), but this one is immensely readable and you can power right through.
I was also struck by some of Heaney's thoughts on translation in the introduction; it's a delight for the part of me that really just loves language & etymology:
(view spoiler)[And I eventually came upon one of these loopholes in Beowulf itself.
What happened was that I found in the glossary to C. L. Wrenn's edition of the poem the Old English word meaning "to suffer," the world þolian; and although at first it looked completely strange with its thorn symbol instead of the familiar th, I gradually realized that it was not strange at all, for it was the word that older and less educated people would have used in the country where I grew up. "They'll just have to learn to thole," my aunt would say about some family who had suffered an unforeseen bereavement. And now suddenly here was "thole" in the official textual world, mediated through the apparatus of a scholarly edition, a little bleeper to remind me that my aunt's language was not just a self-enclosed family possession but an historical heritage, one that involved the journey þolian had made north into Scotland and then across Ulster with the planters and then across from the planters to the locals who had originally spoken Irish and then farther across again when the Scots Irish emigrated to the American South in the eighteenth century. When I read in John Crowe Ransom the line "Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole," my heart lifted again, the world widened, something was furthered. The far-flungness of the word, the phenomenological pleasure of finding it variously transformed by Ransom's modernity and Beowulf's venerability made me feel vaguely something for which again I only found the words years later. What I was experiencing as I kept meeting up with thole on its multicultural odyssey was the feeling which Osip Mandelstam once defined as a "nostalgia for world culture." And this was a nostalgia I didn't even know I suffered until I experienced its fulfilment in this little epiphany. It was as if, on the analogy of baptism by desire, I had undergone something like illumination by philology. And even though I did not know it at the time, I had by then reached the point where I was ready to translate Beowulf. Þolian had opened my right-of-way. (hide spoiler)]
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