Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell

by J. R. R. Tolkien

  When evening came and the feast was at an end, the king’s men remained in the hall, as their custom had been before the haunting began; and they spread their beds, and piled their arms on the benches beside them. But Beewolf was lodged in a bower by himself and lay upon a fair bed and slept the night away, for he was weary and stiff from his wrestling.

  When all men were asleep, and the night was dark, a thing befell that no man had looked for. Grinder was avenged. He was not without kin to take up the feud for him. Far away over the moorlands in her lair Grinder’s mother mourned for him, until filled with wrath and grief the old ogress herself took the road. As men lay thinking of no evil, she came to the Golden Hall and crept inside. At once she laid her claws on the man that slept nearest to the door, and tore at his flesh. Men awoke at his cries drowsy and amazed; and they groped for their swords, having no time to put on helmet or mail. Seeing so many men the old ogress fled, for great as she was, she had not the strength of Grinder her son, and was not used to walking far afield to the homes of men. But she did not go empty-handed; for she throttled the man she had seized and bore him away, while all the hall was in uproar, and men were running this way and that and hewing the air. And when morning came they found that it was the captain of the king’s knights that she had taken, and that was a grievous loss.

  When this news was brought to the king, he was weighed down with sorrow; and sent for Beewolf. And Beewolf, seeing the king look so downcast, greeted him, and asked if his sleep had been troubled with bad dreams. ‘Not dreams!’ said the king. ‘For evil has come to my house again. My captain has been taken, the best of my knights. Will there ever be an end of my woes? Under the shadows of night a monster has carried him off: this must be the work of Grinder’s dam, and her vengeance for the hurt that you gave to her son.’

  ‘This is news to me!’ said Beewolf. ‘No tale that I have yet heard ever told that two such monsters haunted your land.’

  ‘Yet that is how things are,’ said the king. ‘[Long ago >] At whiles / men that walk far abroad brought [> have brought] tidings to me, and told [> have told] that away over the moors they have seen two monsters stalking in the wilderness: the larger like a misshapen man, and the other like a great hag with long hair. But more of their kindred no one has ever discovered; for they dwell alone, and only a few know where their den lies. It is many miles away in a hidden mere, behind a waterfall that tumbles from a black cliff into the shadows far beneath. Wind blows there, and wolves howl in the hills. Dead trees hang by the roots over the pool. At night fire flickers on the water. No man knows the depth of that lake, and no beast will enter it.’

  ‘It is not a pleasant spot, that is clear,’ said Beewolf. ‘Yet someone must explore it, if this trouble is to be ended. ‘Do not despair, lord, but be merry! I will go there. I am used to swimming in deep waters, and nicors do not frighten me. I will call on Grinder’s mother in her own home, and however many doors there may be to her house, she will not escape me.’

  Then the king sprang up in joy, and thanked Beewolf for his words, promising him gold and jewels beyond all his former gifts, if he made good his boast.

  ‘All I ask,’ said Beewolf, ‘is a companion who knows the ways of your land to guide me to the spot.’

  ‘Unpeace shall go with you,’ said the king. ‘His wit is good, and he knows all tales that have come down from days of old, and he has travelled much. No man knows more of the ways of this land than he.’

  When Unpeace heard of the king’s choice he seemed to be willing, and indeed he dared not be otherwise, lest he lose the king’s favour and all honour in the land. ‘It will be a pleasure to show my friend Beewolf the marvels of this land,’ he said, and he grinned.

  Together Unpeace and Beewolf set off, and soon came upon the trail of Grinder and his dam, for much blood had been spilled upon the ground.

  The description in the original manuscript of their journey to the cliff above the lake was preserved almost word for word in the final text, but the head that they found ‘staring at the sky’ was not of course that of Ashwood but that of ‘the king’s captain’ (p. 396) who had been carried off by Grinder’s dam; and there was no mention of Beewolf’s taking Handshoe’s gloves, still less of Ashwood’s spear (see p. 394 and p. 400).

  ‘It seems that you have brought me to the right spot,’ said Beewolf; and he blew on a horn, and the blast of it echoing in the rocks aroused all the nicors, and they plunged into the lake, blowing with rage. ‘There are many unfriendly things here,’ said Unpeace.

  ‘I do not heed the nicors,’ said Beewolf. ‘I have dealt with others greater and worse in the sea.’

  ‘Yet it may prove hard to deal with many foes at a time,’ said Unpeace. ‘See here, my friend, I will give you a gift for your aid. You set no store by weapons, I know, but do not despise this one; for it may prove a strong help at need.’ Then he gave to Beewolf a curious blade: upon it there were many signs and figures, and at the edges snakes were drawn that the bite of the blade should [..... illegible >] be deadly; but the haft was long and was made of wood. Beewolf took the sword, thinking that it was given in friendship; and now he stood up and made himself ready.

  ‘How will you get down, my friend?’ said Unpeace.

  ‘It will not be the first time that I have dived into deep water,’ answered Beewolf; ‘and though this cliff be ten fathoms tall I have seen taller.’

  On the sword with the wooden haft given to Beowulf by Unpeace, not present in the final form of Sellic Spell, see the commentary on Beowulf, pp. 210–11.

  From this point to the end of Sellic Spell the final text followed the original manuscript A for the most part very closely, with only slight changes in wording here and there; such differences as there are between the two narratives are set out in the notes that follow.

  The ogress, mother of Grinder, in her lair is of course introduced quite differently in A, where she was the object of the expedition:

  The nicors gathered round him and tore at him with their tusks; but the corslet of mail was cunningly woven and they did no hurt to him. The old ogress in her cave soon learned that some man from the world above had entered her pool where she had dwelt many ages untroubled. She was angry and came forth from her house.

  In the final text Beewolf, confronting the ogress, thrust at her with the spear that had been Ashwood’s, but ‘with a blow of her hand she snapped the haft in two’. In the original version, in which Ashwood was not present in the story, the sword that Unpeace had given to Beewolf reappears here:

  He smote her with the sword that Unpeace gave him, and the treacherous blade betrayed him; for the edges turned upon her hide, and with a blow of her hand she snapped the wooden haft in two.

  In the episode of the hugely heavy and ancient sword, hanging on the wall of the cave, with which Beewolf struck off her head, it seemed to him in the later version that the light that sprang up ‘came from the sword, and that the blade was on fire’; in A he thought that it was from the further chamber, where Grinder lay, that the light had come. Here Beewolf thrust aside the gigantic stone that blocked the entry into that chamber with the aid of Handshoe’s gloves, showing that (as noticed earlier, p. 394) the magic gloves had entered the story before the story in the original manuscript was completed. When Beewolf had got rid of the stone, in the original text as written, there follows a curious passage:

  He entered the chamber and there he saw great wealth of gold and gems that Grinder had gathered over the years. Ashwood’s great spear was standing against the wall. There were also many bones upon the floor, and these he gathered in a bag, meaning to bury them, for among them he thought were some that had belonged to Handshoe.

  This passage, from ‘Ashwood’s great spear’, was struck through. That mention is very puzzling, since there has been nothing in this manuscript, either as first written or in later additions and alterations, to explain how a spear belonging to ‘Ashwood’ could be leaning against the wall of Grinder’s cave (see p. 39
8).

  The treachery of Unpeace and Beewolf’s arduous escape from the mere scarcely differ at all in the two versions; but a curious point is that where the final text has ‘But not a nixy was to be seen in the lake’ the original manuscript has ‘No nicor was to be seen now in the lake, for they had all vanished when the heads of the ogres were cut off.’

  In the treatment of the story of the huge sword that Beewolf found in the monsters’ caverns the versions differ markedly. The description in the original version of the sword as the king examined the hilts, which were all that was left of it, was preserved unchanged; but then followed:

  That treasure remained long in the hoard of the king of the Golden Hall, but whether any blade was afterwards made for it is not told.

  There was thus no germ here of the final story (p. 383), in which Unfriend, now the king’s smith, was appointed to make a magnificent blade to be joined to the hilts; the sword that he made he gave to Beewolf ‘as a peace-offering’, which he received, and named it Gildenhilt. But it is interesting to see that ‘upon it were many signs and figures, and at the edges snakes were drawn so that their bite should be deadly’; for these same words were used in the original story of the treacherous sword that Unpeace gave to Beewolf as they looked down into the mere (p. 399).

  In A the description of the concluding feast celebrating Beewolf’s return from the mere was much less elaborate than in the final text, since the latter (p. 382–3) was derived from the description in A (p. 395) of the first feast, held following Beewolf’s fight with Grinder in the Golden Hall. This is all that was said in A:

  Merry indeed was the feast that day, and now Beewolf sat in high honour beside the king himself; and rich gifts were given to him. All the gold that he got in Grinder’s cave the king returned to him and more beside in recompense for his companion, Handshoe, whom the ogre had slain. And twelve good men well armed the king appointed to be his followers and to serve him.

  The story as told in A of Beewolf’s departure from the Golden Hall and his reception in his own country, his wedding of the king’s daughter, and his becoming the king of that land in after days, was preserved without change in the final text. There is only one last detail to notice. In the A manuscript there is a pencilled addition (not found anywhere else in these papers) to Beewolf’s words concerning his name (see p. 384):

  ‘Beewolf I used to be called, when I was at home. Now some call me the knight of the golden hilts; yet I see no reason to change my old name.’

  *

  § 3 SELLIC SPELL: THE OLD ENGLISH TEXT

  It is not difficult to see that the Old English text of Sellic Spell was not written until there was a Modern English text of the work in some form in existence, even if incomplete in that form.

  The opening of the original text in the manuscript ‘A’, given in § 2, p. 387 reads thus:

  Once upon a time there was a King in the North of the world and in his house there was a young lad, who was not like other young lads. When he was a child he was found in a bear’s den up in the mountains, and the hunters took him to the king . . . .

  The text of the first revision of the initial text, found in the same manuscript ‘A’, is very close to the final text in this opening passage (§ 1, p. 360):

  Once upon a time there was a King in the North of the world who had an only daughter, and in his house there was a young lad who was not like the others. One day some huntsmen in his land had come upon a great bear in the mountains, and tracked it to its lair and killed it, and in the lair they found a man-child.

  And the Old English text begins thus:

  On ǽrdagum wæs wuniende be norþdǽlum middangeardes sum cyning, þe ángan dohtor hæfde. On his húse wæs éac án cniht óþrum ungelíc. For þam þe hit ǽr gelamp þæt þæs cyninges huntan micelne beran gemétton on þam beorgum, ond hie spyredon æfter him to his denne, and hine þǽr ofslógon. On þam denne fundon hie hysecild.

  The following example is even more striking. In § 2, p. 389, I have given a passage from the A manuscript, as first written, beginning:

  After a time, when Beewolf had grown to man’s size and more, news came to the land that the king of a country across the water was troubled by an ogre. Of what sort the monster was, and where he came from, no one could tell; but the tales told that he used to stalk men in the shadows . . .

  My father struck out the whole passage line by line as far as ‘thinking the ogre might eat others who would be missed more’, and wrote in rapid pencil a new text in the gaps between the lines - this being close to the final text (§ 1, p. 362):

  One day, when Beewolf had grown to man’s size and more, he heard men talking in the hall, and there was one who told how the king of a far country had built himself a house. The hall was roofed with gold, and all the benches were carven and gilded . . .

  The Old English text has here:

  Hit gesǽlde, siþþan Béowulf mannes wæstm oþþe wel máran begeat, þæt he æt sumum sǽle hýrde menn gieddian on healle. Þá cwiddode án þæt sum útlandes cyning him micel hús atimbrode. Héah wæs seo heall, and hire hróf gylden; ealle bence þǽr inne wrǽtlice agræfene wǽron ond ofergylde . . .

  I suppose that it cannot be said that this actually proves that the Old English was translated from the A manuscript, but to assert the contrary seems artificial and altogether improbable. On the other hand, if the Old English text was a translation from the tale already existing in Modern English, I am unable to explain my father’s apparently contradictory statement (introduction to Sellic Spell p. 355) ‘I have given my tale a Northern cast of expression by putting it first into Old English’.

  The carefully written Old English text ends with the words, at the foot of a page, ‘Hraþe æfter þon ongann seo sunne niþer gewítan, wurdon sceadwa lange ofer eorðan. Þá arás se cyning; menn ónetton of þǽre healle.’ ‘Soon afterwards the sun began to sink in the west and the shadows grew long; and the king arose, and men hurried from the hall’ (§ 2, p. 392). The story here was the original form found in the manuscript A before further development: when Handshoe and Beewolf faced the entry of Grinder together.

  Following the last page of the carefully written and finished Old English text are two further pages showing my father working on the preliminary stage of the version in the old language. These seem to have been written fluently, but scribbled in a very thick, soft pencil that makes the text extremely hard to decipher; however, it can be done to quite a large extent. The story in this form is taken on from Hrothgar’s conferring the hall of Heorot on Beewolf; and it breaks off in the course of the fight with Grinder (a passage that was preserved in the final text, (§ 1 p. 371): ‘This was not at all the fare that he sought. But Beewolf would not let him go; and when Grinder drew back, he sprang up’.

  The Old English text of Sellic Spell now follows. I have not thought it desirable to provide a translation, because unless one translated it in a painfully literal fashion it would be misleading; and the interest of this text lies chiefly, in my view, in its demonstration of my father’s fluency in the ancient tongue.

  On ǽrdagum wæs wuniende be norþdǽlum middangeardes sum cyning, þe ángan dohtor hæfde. On his húse wæs éac án cniht óþrum ungelíc. For þam þe hit ǽr gelamp þæt þæs cyninges huntan micelne beran gemétton on þam beorgum, ond hie spyredon æfter him to his denne, and hine þǽr ofslógon. On þam denne fundon hie hysecild. Þúhte him micel wundor, for þam þe þæt cild wæs seofonwintre, and gréat, and æghwæs gesund, bútan hit nan word ne cúþe, ac grunode swá swá wildéor; for þam þe beran hit aféddon. Hie genómon þæt cild; ac náhwǽr ne mihton hie geáxian hwanon hit cóme, ne hwelces fæderes sunu hit wǽre. Þá gelǽddon hie þæt cild to þam cyninge. Se cyning onféng his, and hét afédan hit on his hírede and manna þéawas lǽran.

  Him ne geald, swáþéah, þæt fóstorcild his fóstres léan: ac gewéox and ungehýrsum cniht gewearþ, and wæs sláw and asolcen. Late leornode he manna geþéode. Láþ wæs him ǽlc geweorc, ne nolde h
e ná his willes gelómena brúcan ne wǽpnum wealdan. Hunig wæs him swíþe léof, and he sóhte hit oft be wudum; oftor þéah réafode he béocera hýfe. For þam hét man hine Béowulf (and he ǽr nǽnne naman hæfde), and á siþþan hátte he swá.

  Hine menn micles wyrðne ne tealdon: léton hine for héanne, ne ne rýmdon him nǽnne setl on þæs cyninges healle; ac he wunode on hyrne. Þær sæt he oft on þam flette. Lýt spræc he mid mannum. Þá gelamp hit æfter firste þæt se cniht weaxan ongann wundrum hrædlíce, and swá swá he híerra wéox, swá wearþ he á strengra, oþ þæt óþre cnihtas and éac weras hine ondrǽddon. Næs þá lang to þon þæt he fíf manna mægen hæfde on his handum. Þá wéox he giet má, oþþæt his earma gripe wearþ swá swá beran clypping. Nǽnig wǽpn ne bær he, and gif he abolgen wearþ, þá mihte he man in his fæþme tocwýsan. Swá forléton menn hine ána.

  Se Béowulf gewunode þæt he swamm oft on þǽre sǽ, sumera and wintra. Swá hát wæs he swá se hwíta bera, and his blód hæfde beran hǽto: þý ne ondrǽdde he nǽnne ciele.

  Þá wæs on þǽre tíde sum swíþe sundhwæt cempa, Breca hátte, Brandinga cynnes. Se Breca gemétte þone cniht Béowulf be þam strande, þá he æt sume cierre cóm fram sunde be þam sǽriman.

  Þá cwæþ Breca: ‘Ic wolde georn lǽran þé sundplegan. Ac húru þú ne dearst swimman út on gársecg!’

  Þá andswarode Béowulf: ‘Gif wit bégen onginnaþ on geflit swimman, ne béo ic se þe ǽrest hám wende!’ Þá déaf he eft on þa wægas. ‘Folga me núþa be þínre mihte!’ cwæþ he.

  Þá swummon hie fíf dagas, and Breca ná ne mihte Béowulf foran forswimman; ac Béowulf wæs swimmende ymb Brecan útan, ne nolde hine forlǽtan. ‘Ic ondrǽde me þearle þæt þu méþige and adrince,’ cwæþ he. Þá wearþ Breca ierre on móde.