Beowulf

by Frederick Rebsamen

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction to the Perennial Classics Edition

  Introduction

  I

  II

  III

  Genealogies

  Selected Proper Names

  Suggested Readings

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  For advice, encouragement, and criticism, my grateful thanks to the following:

  To Fred Robinson for telling me that, in constant search of the right words, I was neglecting certain matters of quantity and secondary stress. Though I have not been able to consistently capture all of the Old English forms after much revision of the manuscript, this translation is now much better than it might have been without that warning, and Beowulf scholars will note how I have profited by Fred’s intelligent essays clarifying several disputed passages.

  To Dick Ringler and the five students in his Beowulf study group for spending an entire afternoon comparing a sample of my work with the original, an uncommonly generous response to my request for Dick’s esteemed opinion of the translation, and for the fine encouragement of this perceptive group, which has given me a chronic boost.

  To Joe Tuso, whose critical edition of Beowulf reflects his long acquaintance with the poem, for understanding what I have tried to do and for giving me the kind of strong and informed approval that every writer cherishes.

  To Carl Berkhout for spending much time with his helpful advice on many subjects relative to this translation.

  I am grateful to my editor, Cass Canfield Jr., for making this second edition possible, and to John Williams for seeing this edition through the press.

  Especially to L. D. Clark, longtime friend and ruthless critic, who spent too many hours applying the skills of his acclaimed scholarly writing to three early drafts of the introduction and keeping me from making all kinds of silly mistakes—then giving praise to the poetry at a time when I needed it, along with unflagging encouragement from the first day of work to the last.

  Finally, the greatest debt of all, to the anonymous poet who created this wonderfully conceived work of early medieval imagination and wrapped it in such ringing verses that I heartily wish all students of English literature could read it in the language in which he composed it. I find that I cannot improve upon my dedication of an earlier book on Beowulf: “To the poet, whoever he was, whose song gave a richer light to that first bright flare of English civilization, this book is gratefully dedicated.”

  Introduction to the Perennial Classics Edition

  Except for a few small changes that need no introduction, I am concentrating upon improvement of the poetry in this edition. Alliteration (with a change in one initial sound) remains the same, and the other “rules” of Old English verse forms are followed as far as it is practical to do so in Modern English.

  As in the first edition, although it is impossible to translate Beowulf line by line, nothing of any importance is omitted. Old English was a partially inflected language and a poet could therefore do things with word-order intolerable in Modern English, things that I have “corrected” for the sake of clarity. This has necessarily led me astray from the text in places, but I have always returned to the text and caught up with what I missed.

  Again I have avoided a sprinkling of commas and semicolons, but I have used them, along with dashes, when necessary. The best way to understand this translation is simply to read slowly with pauses between verses when it seems natural. Too much punctuation would destroy the rhythm of Old English poetry.

  I am grateful to my editor, Cass Canfield Jr., for making this updated edition possible.

  Introduction

  In 1936, J. R. R. Tolkien delivered a lecture before members of the British Academy entitled “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The wisdom and eloquence of this lecture finally delivered Beowulf from historians, archaeologists, mythologists, linguists—the list is long. Conceding that students of all these disciplines can find much to ponder there, he said, however, that “it is plainly only in the consideration of Beowulf as a poem, with an inherent poetic significance, that any view or conviction can be reached or steadily held,” and further remarked that “Beowulf is in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite overshadows the historical content, and is largely independent even of the most important facts . . . that research has discovered.”

  In this translation of Beowulf —the only translation I am aware of that attempts throughout to imitate the Old English poetic form as closely as is practical in Modern English—I have tried to respect those words in every line. However, because of the modern reader’s unfamiliarity with ancient Germanic poetry and Anglo-Saxon history, any translation should be prefaced by a discussion of those aspects of the poem which establish a matrix for the poet’s invention: the historical background, the principal characters, the structure of the poem, the dates of composition and of the manuscript, the source and importance of Beowulf, the poet’s compromise between Christianity and paganism, and a description of the Old English poetic form, as well as a few words about Beowulf himself and the three monsters.

  Historical Background

  Beowulf is a poem, a work of fiction, centered on Beowulf and his fights with monsters. Yet many historical/legendary characters and events are mentioned in the poem, and the Danes, Swedes, and Geats provide the necessary background for Beowulf’s long and eventful life.

  Both history and legend place the Danes and Swedes within the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., the North Germanic “Heroic Age” reflected in much of medieval Icelandic prose and poetry. The Danes lived in what is now Denmark and the southern tip of Sweden. Hrothgar, whose great hall was somewhere on the island of Zealand, is their king at the beginning of the poem, and the other members of that dynasty are accounted for in the course of the narrative. The Swedes, whose hostilities among themselves and against the Geats through three generations are featured in “installments” during the final third of the poem, lived in Sweden north of the “great lakes,” Vänern and Vättern.

  The identity of the Geats remains obscure, though in this poem they must have lived in Southern Sweden, between the Danes and the two lakes, a territory I have referred to as “Götland” in this translation. Gregory of Tours, who wrote his history of the Franks near the end of the sixth century, says that a king named Hygelac (“Clochilaico” in his Latin) conducted a raid in Frankish territory around the year 520. An anonymous eighth-century history of the Franks repeats this statement. So we may think of Hygelac’s disastrous expedition up the Rhine, when we come to it in Beowulf, as having occurred around 520, and date the fictional events in the poem accordingly. Gregory and the anonymous historian identify Hygelac as a Danish king, but a third manuscript, the eighth-century Liber Monstrorum, written in England, says that “Huiglaucus” was king of the “Getis.” Exactly who these “Getis” were, and the Geats of Beowulf, has never been clearly determined.

  Hygelac, whose sister was Beowulf’s mother, is king of the Geats at the beginning of the poem, and at the end Beowulf has replaced Hygelac’s son on the throne and ruled for fifty years. Beowulf’s father, Ecgtheow, was a Waegmunding, a tribe unknown outside this poem. Wiglaf, who appears at the end of the poem as Beowulf’s successor, is also a Waegmunding. There is no mention of Beowulf’s wife (if he had one) or any descendants.

  The Principal Characters

  Seventy-five personal names appear in Beowulf, along with thirty-two names of places, families, nations, and swords. I have listed sixty-five of these names in an appendix for reasons there given, but while they lend a richness to the poem that would have been appreciated by an Anglo-Saxon audience, t
he modern reader need be primarily concerned with only a few. Only ten characters speak, four of them of minor importance. Thus the reader may concentrate on the six important speakers—Hrothgar, his queen Wealhtheow, Unferth, Hygelac, Wiglaf, and Beowulf—and of course the three monsters.

  Structure

  The structure of Beowulf is a gratifying surprise, completely unexpected in an age which favored straightforward heroic lays concerning conflicts between human beings. It is unlike any other poem in English literature or any other Germanic literature, and Tolkien’s description of Beowulf as a “heroic-elegiac poem” emphasizes its uniqueness.

  After a genealogy of the Danes and the establishment of Hrothgar in his great new hall, we learn of the ravages of Grendel and the arrival of Beowulf to help. From these opening lines through Beowulf’s fights with Grendel and Grendel’s mother and his return to his homeland, the progress is “interrupted” from time to time by allusions to earlier people and events, as brief as five lines and as long as ninety-two. These compact allusions provide a shift from Beowulf’s fights with monsters to the more conventional tales of conflicts among humans, and are presented as pauses in the narrative and contrasts with or reflections of Beowulf’s character and his deeds. The pace is relaxed and the narrative rich in details, with entertaining interludes like Unferth’s challenge and Beowulf’s response, and the description of the victory feast after Grendel’s death.

  The final third of the poem becomes strongly elegiac, an account of Beowulf as an old man fighting his final, futile battle, the end of a long and remarkable life. Worked into this section, not in chronological order but in a natural way, are four accounts of the Geat-Swede conflicts. There are also three accounts of Hygelac’s last battle, Beowulf’s nostalgic reminiscences, two anonymous speeches which contain some of the most beautiful elegiac verses in English literature, the introduction of Wiglaf, and a long, foreboding speech by an anonymous “messenger” to the Geats awaiting news of Beowulf’s fight with the dragon. The handling of time in this section anticipates modern literature and greatly enhances its elegiac quality.

  Thus the entire poem is an account of Beowulf’s fights with three monsters surrounded by and interlarded with “digressions,” as they are too often called, which round out the poem and give it that rich background that so annoyed early critics who wished to have Beowulf fighting other heroes instead of monsters. It was in response to this sort of criticism that Tolkien delivered his lecture, explaining why the poem is exactly right as it is, and pointing out that the contrast between the Grendel and dragon sections is “essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting, an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death.”

  Date of Composition and of the Manuscript

  The unique manuscript of Beowulf, produced about 1000 A.D., was preserved in ways unknown and eventually included in the great library of Sir Robert Cotton, who died in 1631. This manuscript, copied on vellum by two scribes, was damaged at the top and outer edges by a fire in 1731, which obscured letters and some entire words. But the Icelandic scholar Grimur Thorkelin made a copy of the manuscript in 1787, before the scorched leaves had badly crumbled, and also commissioned a professional copyist ignorant of Old English to make another copy, imitating the Old English insular script, in that same year. The importance of these two copies, and of the early editions of the poem beginning with Thorkelin’s in 1815, is profound, as the reading of any page of Frederick Klaeber’s edition of Beowulf will indicate. Though there are some uncertain readings here and there, and a few leaves are badly damaged, a good modern edition presents the poem as about 95 percent sound, a miraculous survivor of the ravages of history.

  The manuscript is obviously faithful for the most part to the original composition. The rich language and innovative quality of both poetry and structure indicate that a major talent, strong enough to override the few corruptions and possible interpolations of later scribes, composed the poem pretty much as we have it.

  The date of the original composition will be forever debated. In earlier years, most scholars agreed that the poem was composed at some time during the life of Bede, the great Northern English teacher, biographer, and historian who died in 735. However, the supremacy of Mercia (the English Midlands) after Bede’s death, under two successive kings who dominated all of England south of the Humber River, provided the best of poets with powerful patrons, and the later eighth century is therefore favored by some as a likely period for the poem’s composition. Recently an entire book and a book-length anthology of essays have been published indicating that the Beowulf poet may have lived at any time between the late seventh century and the early eleventh. The important question is this: When and where lived an Anglo-Saxon king with enough wealth and sophistication to sponsor such a skillful poet as this, who must have been in demand at the best of courts?

  The Source and Importance of Beowulf

  Anglo-Saxon England is curiously viewed by most as a place of warring primitive tribes worshiping pagan gods and dominated by illiterate kings constantly fighting among themselves and drinking the nights away while their unlettered minstrels recited tales of conquest and bloodshed, sheltering in smoky halls strewn about with bones and cracked drinking horns. This may well have been true of some kingdoms from the first arrivals of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in England around 450 and on down through the final conquest of the Romano-Celtic inhabitants about a century later, but beginning with the Christianization of Kent in 597 and the ensuing arrival in Northumbria of Celtic Christian missionaries from Wales, Ireland, and Iona, with the establishment of monastic seats of learning under several very literate and sophisticated kings, that picture must be drastically altered.

  Anglo-Saxon audiences loved to hear tales of the early North Germanic peoples like the Danes, Swedes, and Geats of the sixth century, just as we enjoy books and movies about Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More, Henry’s many wives and his daughter Elizabeth and all the battles and courtly intrigues of the sixteenth century. A poem like Beowulf—i.e., long and leisurely, distinguished by tales of the North Germanic Heroic Age—could have been composed at any time between about 650 and the beginning of serious Danish and Norwegian invasions of England after the first third of the ninth century. Northumbria in the seventh century was ruled for a time by two kings, Oswald and his successor, Oswiu, brothers who had been well educated when young by Celtic Christian teachers on the island of Iona. Following them came another educated king, Aldfrith, whose twenty-year reign (685–705) made possible the learning, scholarship, and artistic production of Northumbrian monasteries during the Age of Bede, from the late seventh century through the first third of the eighth. During this period were produced the many fine literary works of Bede, including the first great coordinated history of the European Middle Ages, his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede’s friend Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne, produced one of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts of any period anywhere in the world, the Lindisfarne Gospels. During this same period a magnificent stone cross, now preserved at the Ruthwell Church in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, and originally standing some eighteen feet tall, was produced by a master artist, who included, along the margins on two faces of the cross, runic inscriptions which form an early Northern version of one of the finest poems in Old English, “The Dream of the Rood,” in which the cross of the Crucifixion speaks, telling its marvelous story.

  Immediately following this period, and covering most of the rest of the eighth century, two Mercian kings, Aethelbald and Offa, made their courts the most powerful throughout England south of the Humber, Offa being treated by Charlemagne as a friend and equal worth corresponding with. During the reign of either of these kings, Beowulf could have been composed. In fact, from the Age of Bede down to the Viking Age in England (an unlikely time for an English poem praising
Danes), a number of kings in various areas of England held courts rich and knowledgeable enough to attract such a man as the Beowulf poet.

  In addition to the learning and sophistication of several Anglo-Saxon kings, an early-seventh-century cenotaph ship burial in East Anglia, known as the Sutton Hoo burial, has given us an example of the numerous treasures and exquisite artwork to be found at the court of one early king, items too rich and varied to describe here but sufficient to rank him with any king in the Germanic world. Museums throughout England contain a splendid variety of other treasures; literary descriptions and manuscript illuminations add to this picture of royal wealth. And who knows what evidence of the magnificence of Anglo-Saxon courts disappeared after the Battle of Hastings?

  The Old English poetry that has survived, most of it in four great manuscripts, is almost all a blend of the old Germanic poetic form with the new Christian teaching that was first composed, according to Bede, by Caedmon in the third quarter of the seventh century. It is much earlier than any other vernacular poetry in medieval Europe and in many ways distinct from the later recorded Icelandic poetry, the only other sizable body of early Germanic poetry that has survived in manuscript. The great variety of length and subject matter of Old English poetry, the more than 30,000 lines that have come down to us, precludes any kind of summary here. It is a noble body of verse, including many poems of great beauty and strength that fully reward the effort required to learn how to read them.

  It was in this tradition that the Beowulf poet, innovative though he was, composed his work, and we may imagine the splendor of a court wherein such a poet may have worked. The hall would be hung with rich tapestries, furnished with handsomely wrought benches and trestle tables, distinguished by a “high-seat” inlaid with ivory and burnished with gold, the king’s table graced with imported glass and silverware, elaborate drinking horns and cups of precious metals and stones. The royal family and important members of the king’s retinue would be richly dressed, with brooches, bracelets, necklaces, and armlets of gold and garnets. Fine hawks and dogs and horses, heirloom armor and weapons, saddles and bridles often adorned with ivory and silver, would be a part of this picture. And of course the ever-present minstrel with his harp would be there at the feet of his king, ready to recite from his large repertory when the moment was right.