Beowulf

Hwaet!
Lo!
Ja,
So,
Bro!

A few thoughts on reading four different translations of Beowulf.

Gaeð a wyrd swa hio scel.
Fate goeth ever as she must.
Alltid går ödet som det skall.
Fate goes ever as fate must.
Bro, fate can fuck you up.

I'm honestly surprised at how good the story itself is. I expected a 1000-plus-year-old poem about a warrior to be a lot more simplistic; and yet, while I'm sure a modern reader will add extra depths of it (and miss some depth the author thought they made clear), there's so much here. There's the hero myth, with Campbell's hero's journey seemingly already in place all those years ago; Beowulf starts out as a typical impossibly valiant and righteous hero and ends up an old man out of his depth. So many other characters around him do the same; Hrothgar too old to fight, Grendel's mother desperate to avenge her only son, the dragon who just wants to sleep on its hoard until it becomes fairytale...

Oft sceall eorl monig ānes willan wrǣc ādrēogan, swā ūs geworden is. Ne meahton wē gelǣran lēofne þēoden rīces hyrde rǣd ǣnigne, þæt hē ne grētte gold-weard þone...
Oft must it be that many men through one man's will shall suffer woe, even as is now befallen us. We could not advise our king beloved, the shepherd of this realm, to any well-counselled course, that he should not approach the keeper of the gold...
Ofta måste mången jarl för ens skull lida förföljelse, såsom oss vederfarits. Ej kunde vi öfvertala med något råd den käre fursten, rikets herde, att ej angripa den der guldväktaren...
Often when one man follows his own will many are hurt. This happened to us. Nothing we advised could ever convince the prince we loved, our land’s guardian, , not to vex the custodian of the gold...
One man slipped down this slope, he alone deciding, but we rest are roped to him; many will suffer similar fates now. No counsellor could convince our king, our old and beloved protector, that he shouldn't come at the guardian of this gold...

And then there's how well it still works as an actual story centered around battles. There's actual action in this, in glorious, gory detail.

Þā gēn gūð-cyning mǣrða gemunde, mægen-strengo slōh hilde-bille, þæt hyt on heafolan stōd nīþe genȳded; Nægling forbærst...
Now once more the king of battles recalled his renownéd deeds, with might strength he smote with his warlike sword, and fast in the head it stood driven by fierce hate. Naegling burst asunder!
Då tänkte stridskonungen än en gång på sin ära och hjeltekraft, slog till med svärdet, så att det, drifvet af fiendekraft, fastnade i hufvudet. Då brast Nägling...
Inspired again by the thought of glory, the war-king threw his whole strength behind a sword-stroke and connected with the skull. And Naegling snapped.
Invigorated by the thought of victory, the king used all his strength to strike, lunging at possibility. Naegling was the victim of the swing, snapping like a straw.

But there's also the historical detail of it - which probably depends on exactly who you think the Geats are or where it was originally thought up (having grown up on the west coast of Sweden, I guess I'm partial). It's not a story of one person, it's a story set right at the peak of the migration period, with kingdoms rising and falling, conquering and disappearing, marrying and beheading, and even outright picking up and moving somewhere else. It's incredibly tempting to read it as one of very few even vaguely accurate histories of Scandinavia in the 4- and 500s, centuries before Lindisfarne drew a before/after line in the sand and a full 500 years before the church started writing things down Officially... and you probably shouldn't, whatever Tolkien's VERY extensive (and varying in interest) notes say. Yeah, some of the people mentioned here probably existed in real life, but there are also dragons and ogres, so. But still; the story is one of a kingdom starting to disappear from the map, peoples facing an unknown future. As both Heaney and Headley point out in their notes, that still makes it incredibly relevant.

(It's weird that Beowulf isn't more widely read in Sweden, that we've let the English claim it for themselves even though it's (supposedly) set here. Not that we need any more romanticising of a violent past, but... weird.)

Swylce giōmor-gyd Gēatisc mēowle, bunden-heorde, song sorg-cearig. Sǣde geneahhe, þæt hīo hyre here-geongas hearde ondrēde wæl-fylla worn, werudes egesan, hȳnðo ond hæft-nȳd. Heofon rēce swealg.
There too a lamentable lay many a Geatish maiden with braided tresses for Beowulf made, singing in sorrow, oft repeating that days of evil she sorely feared, many a slaying cruel and terror armed, ruin and thraldom's bond. The smoke faded in the sky.
Slikt sorgkväde kvad en kvinna av gautaätt för att hon fruktade mycket manfall och mordisk härnad, smälek och fångenskap. Full av rök var luften.
A Geat woman too sang out in grief; with hair bound up, she unburdened herself of her worst fears, a wild litany of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded, enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.
Then another dirge rose, woven uninvited by a Geatish woman, louder than the rest. She tore her hair and screamed her horror at the hell that was to come: More of the same. Reaping, raping, feasts of blood, iron fortunes marching across her country, claiming her body. The sky sipped the smoke and smiled.

And all because one guy whipped his slave, who ran away and stole a goblet, which awoke the dragon, which forced an old and tired man to fight to the death, and his successor to throw away the riches for honour's sake. Also known as "every other war in this story". It's fate AKA history coming for the Geats, and they know that 1500 years from now, people won't even agree on where and who they were.

A few thoughts on the translations:

I understand Tolkien's importance in lifting this story up to Literature. That said, both his and Wickberg's translations are a bit too respectful for my taste. They try to recreate the poem as it was, even though the world it was written in, the events it alludes to, not only no longer exist but are almost completely forgotten - arguably were already fading into mist by the time it was written down and had "CHRIST (who btw is this new thing called 'English') RULES OK" scrawled all over it. Translating the stories of Scyld and Ingeld as if everyone knew them already, as if Beowulf was part of a greater context, doesn't work. There is no objective Beowulf anymore. It has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into our context. It's not for nothing that both Heaney and Headley explicitly put work into establishing the actual narrator; whether a dignified old Ulsterman telling stories by the fire, or an old drunk at the bar demanding that the kids listen to him.

Nobody knows what to do with Modthryth. "If we assume that there's a 'not' or an 'unlike' in here somewhere..." The only one who seems to actually revel in the idea of a queen becoming a figure of fear, of actually making a mark on history, is Headley.

There's something to be said that Tolkien is the only one of the four to take that Geatish woman screaming out her grief at the end and reduce her to "many a Geatish maid"... It's also a bit ironic that Tolkien, who complained so much about LotR translations getting too flowery, extends the text by quite a bit in his attempt to turn it into a 19th century fairytale.

Oh yeah, they're four different stories. Tolkien writes historical fairytale; Wickberg heroic history; Heaney poetic elegy; Headley barbed-wire action movie.

Asking for a historically correct translation of Beowulf is a bit like asking for historically correct Shakespeare - not only are they already wildly anachronistic to begin with, but the world they depict and were written in no longer exist. Tolkien and Wickberg try to create an illusion of antiquity and authenticity simply by rewinding their language a couple of decades, and it's partly a very good illusion, though I honestly find Wickberg more readable; Tolkien gets lost in outlining LotR (he really stole a LOT here) and trying in vain to make the meter work in prose, though his notes make up for a lot of it. Wickberg at least writes solidly in a 19th century tradition, stuffy and high-minded and with dreams of the glorious Germanics of yore in his eye. Heaney and Headley, on the other hand, aren't ashamed of modernising, and of getting inside the characters as something more than just long-dead agents of Fate; Heaney viewing it through his Irish-English-Gaelic history, and Headley coming at it from the other direction, peppering the text with curses and memes like it's a twitter thread - yet they both somehow keep that depth of both language and myth. It's easy to get hung up on Headley's more ultra-modern passages, and not all of them work, but it's not like Tolkien didn't throw in modernisms either (a text this heavy on allegory and kennings HAS to be modernised to work). So Heaney puts the emphasis on the shifting fates of peoples, conquered but persisting; Headley on the myth, the women and monsters eclipsed by the shining hero.

For me: Tolkien for the notes, Heaney for weight and beauty, Headley for sword-edge and sheer joy of language.

So, yeah, hwaet a ride, bro.