And bolt my flesh, relish me raw:
A quick cuisine—crack to jaw.
75
Often on floodways, found with kin
* * *
I took for my food
* * *
and also him.
Never sat at home
* * *
Killed in the sea with strange skill 5
And savage power, covered by waves.
76
I am a prince’s property and joy,
Sometimes his shoulder-companion,
Close comrade in arms, king’s servant,
Lord’s treasure. Sometimes my lady,
A bright-haired beauty, lays serving 5
Hands on my body, though she is noble
And the daughter of an earl. I bear
In my belly what blooms in the wood,
The bee’s delight. Sometimes I ride
A proud horse in the rush of battle— 10
Harsh is my voice, hard is my tongue.
I bear the scop’s meed when his song is done.
My gift is good, my way winning,
My color dark. Say what I’m called.
77
I am puff-breasted, proud-crested,
Swollen-necked. I strut on one foot.
I sport a fine head, high tail,
Eyes, ears, back, beak, two sides.
I ride a stiff nail, my perch above men. 5
I twist in torment when the forest-shaker
Whips and shoves; where I stand the storm-
Wind-waters roll, hail stones,
Sleet shrouds, frost slips freezing,
Snow drifts down. One-foot, hole-belly, 10
I mark the seasons with a twist of fate
I cannot change. My stake is grim.
78
When this creature comes, it gobbles ground,
Grubs earth, follows on its feet
* * *
With no skin or flesh, it always
* * *
79
My race is old, my seasons many,
My sorrows deep. I have dwelt in cities
Since the fire-guardian wrought with flame
My clean beginning in the world of men,
Purged my body with a circling fire. 5
Now a fierce earth-brother stands guard,
The first to shape my sorrow. I remember
Who ripped our race, hard from its homeland,
Stripped us from the ground. I cannot bind
Or blast him, yet I cause the clench of slavery 10
Round the world. Though my wounds are many
On middle-earth, my strength is great.
My craft and course, power and rich passage,
I must hide from men. Say who I am.
80
This mother of many well-known creatures
Is strangely born. Savage and fierce,
She roars and sings, courses and flows,
Follows the ground. A beautiful mover,
Prone to power—her clutch is deep. 5
No one knows how to catch her shape
And power in song or how to mark
The strength of her kin in myriad forms:
Her lineage sings the spawn of creation.
The high father broods over one flow, 10
Beginning and end, and so does his son,
Born of glory, and the heavenly spirit,
The ghost of God. His precious skill
* * *
All kinds of creatures who lived on the earth,
When the garden was graced with beauty and joy. 15
Their mother is always mighty and pregnant,
Sustained in glory, teeming with power,
Plenty, a feast of being, a natural hoard
For rich and poor. Her power increases
Her manifest song. Her body is a burbling 20
Jewel of use, a celibate gem with a quick,
Cleansing power—beautiful, bountiful,
Noble and good. She is boldest, strongest,
Greediest, greatest of all earth-travelers
Spawned under the sky, of creatures seen 25
With the eyes of men. She is the weaver
Of world-children’s might. A wise man
May know of many miracles—this one
Is harder than ground, smarter than men,
Older than counsel, more gracious than giving, 30
Dearer than gold. She washes the world
In beautiful tones, teems with children,
Soothes hard suffering, crushes crime.
She wraps the world in a coat of jewels
That amazes man. She is rock-cover, 35
Storm-song, ice-wall, earth’s kiss.
She dies without feeling and is born again,
Mother and offspring. Her womb is split
* * *
Open your word-hoard and make known to men
Who the great mother is with her mighty kin. 40
81
Shunning silence, my house is loud
While I am quiet: we are movement bound
By the Shaper’s will. I am swifter,
Sometimes stronger—he is longer lasting,
Harder running. Sometimes I rest 5
While he rolls on. He is the house
That holds me living—alone I die.
82
A weird creature came to a meeting of men,
Hauled itself into the high commerce
Of the wise. It lurched with one eye,
Two feet, twelve hundred heads,
A back and belly—two hands, arms, 5
Shoulders—one neck, two sides.
Untwist your mind and say what I mean.
83
I saw a creature with a strange belly
Huge and swollen, handled by a servant,
Hard-muscled and hand-strong, a mighty man
Who seized the creature, gripped it so
That the tooth of heaven began to blow 5
Out through its eye. It struggled and sang,
Bellowed from below, puffed up and passed out;
Yet it always arched up on air again.
84
* * *
We stood, tall hard twins, my brother
And I—pointed and perched on a homeland
Higher and nobler for our fierce adorning.
Often the forest, dear sheltering wood,
Was our night-cover, rain-shield for creatures 5
Shaped by God. Now grim usurpers
Must steal our homeland glory, hard young
Brothers who press in our place. Parted,
We suffer separate sorrows. In my belly
Is a black wonder—I stand on wood. 10
Untwinned I guard the table’s end.
What hoard holds my lost brother in the wide
World I will never know. Once we rode
The high side of battle, hard warriors
Keeping courage together—neither rushed 15
To the fray alone. Now unwhole creatures
Tear at my belly. I cannot flee.
The man who follows my tracks of glory
For wealth and power, in a different light
May find what is wholly for his soul’s delight. 20
85
I saw a creature with a strange belly
Bound in leather
* * *
A servant held it hard from behind,
Sometimes shoved with great skill
* * *
ate afterwards, 5
Thankful for food at such a time.
86
I saw a strange sight: a wolf held tight by a lamb—
The lamb lay down and seized the belly of the wolf.
While I stood and stared, I saw a great glory:
Two wolves standing and troubling a third.
They had four feet—they saw with seven eyes! 5
&n
bsp; 87
My head is struck by a forging hammer,
Sheared close by a shaping blade,
Honed smooth by a fierce file.
Sometimes I swallow my tempered foe,
When bound by rings, I heave from behind, 5
Thrust a long limb through a hard hole,
Catch hard the keeper of the heart’s pleasure,
Twist with my tongue and turn back
The midnight guardian of my lord’s treasure,
When the conquering warrior comes to hold 10
The gift of slaughter, the joy of gold.
88
Boast of brown snufflers, tree in the wood,
High hard life, plant and pleasure,
Earth-shoot, love letter, lady’s delight—
Gold-skinned treasure of the high courts—
Ring-bound, the warrior’s weapon and joy 5
* * *
89
I was point and high pleasure for my lord
* * *
Sometimes startled he broke for the wood,
Sometimes leapt with the years’ lean grace
Over plunging streams, sometimes mounted
Steep cliff-trails home or sought hoof-proud 5
In hollows the horned shield of the troop,
Sometimes pawed at ice-grass locked like stone—
Sometimes the gray frost shook from his hair.
I rode my fierce lord’s butting brain-chair
Till my younger brother stole helm and headland. 10
Cast homeless to the brown blade, seized
By burnished steel, gutted without gore—
I felt no blood-rush, wept no death-song,
Dreamed no dark vengeance. I endured
The sharp torments of shield-biters. 15
Now I swallow black wood and water,
Bear in my belly dark stain from above.
One-foot, I guard black treasure seized
By a plundering foe that once bore
The battle-companion of the wolf far: 20
The scavenger darts from my belly blackened
And steps toward the table, the stout board
* * *
Sometimes a share of death when the day-candle
Slides down and no man’s eyes see my work
* * *
90
I am higher than heaven, brighter than sun,
Harder than steel, smoother than
* * *
sharper than salt,
Dearer than light, lighter than wind.
91
I am noble, known to rest in the quiet
Keeping of many men, humble and high born.
The plunderers’ joy, hauled far from friends,
Rides richly on me, shines signifying power,
Whether I proclaim the grandeur of halls, 5
The wealth of cities, or the glory of God.
Now wise men love most my strange way
Of offering wisdom to many without voice.
Though the children of earth eagerly seek
To trace my trail, sometimes my tracks are dim. 10
BEOWULF AND JUDITH
INTRODUCTION
I am the scorched hide that holds the stories
Of monsters and men. Sages seek me out
To decipher my strange body-tracks,
Lift up my meaning, listen to my skin.
In my gathers are tales of lost glory,
Treasure and terror, wisdom and woe.
Inside my meadhalls, men swear fealty
And faith but sometimes settle feuds
With murder and mayhem, swords and shields,
Fury and battle-flame. Once I also was attacked
By a fierce fire, a hungry blaze
That devoured many of my brothers and sisters,
And I barely escaped by flying out the window
With a singed skin. Wounded, I survived
To offer a wealth of words to the world—
Saint-song, monster-marvel, life-letter,
A Danish king, a cruel hall-demon,
A bold-hearted hero, a pleading queen,
A hoard of gold guarded by a dragon,
A holy woman-warrior, a drunken Assyrian,
A trove of stories in a harp-heavy tongue.
Say who I am who offers this time-treasure,
The word-gift of scops, sages, and scribes.
The poems in this section, Beowulf and Judith, which appear in ASPR, vol. IV, are found on folios 129r–198v of the Nowell Codex in the manuscript Cotton Vitellius A.xv, in the British Library in London. The codex also contains three OE prose texts: a portion of The Passion of Saint Christopher, The Wonders of the East, and The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle (for a text and prose translation of the entire codex, see Fulk, 2010). This Cotton Vitellius manuscript also contains the apparently unrelated Southwick Codex on folios 1–90v, which Klaeber 4 notes “contains the free translation of Augustine’s Soliloquia attributed to King Alfred, a rendering of the Gospel of Nicodemus, the prose dialogue of Solomon and Saturn, and a very brief fragment of a homily on St. Quintin” (xxv). The two codices were bound together in the early seventeenth century.
The manuscript has a long and somewhat obscure history. It was probably first held in the courts or monasteries, eventually coming into private hands at the closing of the monasteries under Henry VIII. It came into the hands of the seventeenth-century collector Sir Robert Cotton and was later donated to the British Museum. A fire in 1731 destroyed part of the collection, and the edges of the manuscript were burned before it could be saved by being tossed out a window (Klaeber 4, xxvi). The codex was in this damaged state when the Icelandic historian Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín commissioned a transcription to be made in 1787 and then made a second, somewhat flawed transcription himself from the first. Some of the damaged or lost letters in the manuscript have been supplied by the Thorkelín transcripts. The manuscript was rebound in 1845 to halt further loss from crumbling and decay. Judith follows Beowulf in the Nowell Codex, though there is some manuscript evidence that Judith may have initially been the opening poem (or pulled from another manuscript source) and Beowulf the closing poem in the collection (Klaeber 4, xxv–xxvi; Orchard, 1985, 1). The fire damage to Judith was less than that to Beowulf. The collector Franciscus Junius (1589–1677) made a copy of Judith sometime before 1651, which proved valuable in establishing portions of the text damaged by fire (Griffith, 1997, 8).
The Nowell Codex is written in two hands. The prose texts and Beowulf to the middle of line 1939 (1936 in this translation) are written in one hand, and the rest of Beowulf and Judith in another. Dobbie (1953, xiii) notes that we can be reasonably certain of the loss of about thirty-five folios in the Nowell Codex in three locations: (1) a substantial section at the beginning of The Legend of Saint Christopher; (2) another substantial portion at the beginning of Judith (part of Judith and possibly another poem); and (3) a small portion at the end of Judith.
Fulk notes that the linguistic features of the Nowell Codex suggest that they were copied from different sources and says: “Why these particular texts were collected in one book is not plain, but one influential explanation that has been offered is that the manuscript is devoted to narratives about monsters” (2010, x). Orchard notes that “it was Kenneth Sisam who first considered that the Beowulf-manuscript may have been compiled on the basis of an interest in monsters which is exhibited by at least four of the five texts it contains” (1985, 1). He develops this theme, arguing that “the heathen warriors and monster-slayers … have themselves become monsters in Christian eyes” (1985, 169). Orchard goes on to explain:
But if the old heroes were becoming slowly demonized, then new biblical and Christian heroes, like Judith and Christopher in the Beowulf-manuscript, were emerging to fight their own demons, and to be fêted in the traditional heroic diction and manner of the past. The Anglo-Saxon literary tradition is one in which Christian virtue
s and pagan heroic diction become gradually intertwined, and the past is constantly reassessed and reinterpreted in the light of the new learning. In such an atmosphere old heroes find new audiences, whether those heroes come from a germanic past, like Beowulf (or, in Iceland, Grettir), or from a Classical tradition, like Hercules or Alexander, inherited alongside the new Latin learning. (1985, 170)
The collection in the Nowell Codex may contain stories of heroes and monsters or monstrous men in a variety of intersecting or cross-cultural traditions. J. R. R. Tolkien argued in his seminal essay in 1936 that the monsters in Beowulf must have some relevance to the human passions and feuds in the poem that destroy kinship ties and bring cultures down into the symbolic claws of the Grendelkin or the inexorable maw of the dragon of greed or the worm of time. Whether we see heroes like Beowulf finally as subject to such forces or not remains a much debated issue. But the poems and prose explorations in this codex seem to be gathered together to explore these important issues.
BEOWULF
Beowulf has often been considered the earliest English epic, though it does not closely resemble classical epics often associated with the term. Tolkien preferred the term “heroic-elegiac poem,” emphasizing the movement toward an elegiac tone in the latter half of the poem (1936, 275). Perhaps the poem, like the Danish hall Heorot, moves from building to burning, from epic to elegy. The editors of Klaeber 4 suggest calling it “a long heroic poem set in the antique past” (clxxxvii), which is an apt, broadly generic description. The poem not only moves back and forth between epic and elegy, between historical materials and mythic elements; it also contains different subgenres. Joseph Harris argues that “the Beowulfian summa includes genealogical verse, a creation hymn, elegies, a lament, a heroic lay, a praise poem, historical poems, a flyting, heroic boasts, gnomic verse, a sermon, and perhaps less formal oral genres” (236). John Hill notes that Beowulf is a “poem of arrivals and departures,” with a narrative structure full of “chiastic structures, envelope patterns, ring patterns, interlace effects or ‘digressive’ jumps ahead and invited recollections of past kings and events, with both forward and backward shifts” (3–4). The temporal jumps often emphasize the connection between past history, present action, and predicted future events.
Readers often remember the poem primarily as a series of great battles between Beowulf and the monsters, but nearly half of the poem consists of speech acts of various sorts, from the scop’s celebrant story of Finnsburg in the Danish court to the messenger’s prediction of the great wars to come after Beowulf’s death. Orchard notes that more than 1,200 lines are given over to about forty speeches in the poem (2003, 203). In the middle of this movement back and forth between speech acts and direct action, there occurs the singular act of Hrothgar’s reading of the runes or images on the sword hilt brought back from Grendel’s lair by Beowulf after his killing of Grendel’s mother. Lerer argues that “the hilt stands as a figure for the poem itself” (337) and notes that it points forward in time from the audience of Danes listening to the king and scop in the poem to the audience of readers in Anglo-Saxon England. In the context of the Danish audience in the poem, it is a foreshadowing of a culture to come. In the context of an Anglo-Saxon readership, it is a looking back at the roots of their literate culture.
The Complete Old English Poems Page 69
