by Tom Birkett
the land, the cliffs beside the ocean ( brimclifu) gleaming, and sheer headlands and capes thrust far to sea’; here the last two phrases reflect the chiasmus of the
original ( beorgas steape, side sænæssas). The element of parallelism is weakened, however, by the insertion twice of the conjunction ‘and’, and it is doubtful whether
the compound nouns brimclifu and sænæssas require such lengthy translations.
Final y among examples from lines 210–228, it may be noted that what appears in
the 1940 translation as ‘shirts ..., war-raiment’, il ustrating the expanded parallel in its simplest form, i.e. simplex word paralleled by a compound, is translated in 1926
as ‘mail-shirts ..., raiment of war’, i.e. as a compound word paralleled in this case by a three-word phrase, with a chiastic correspondence of the nouns in this phrase to
50 See Tolkien, trans., Beowulf: A Translation, p. 2.
51 See Ibid., pp. 1–11.
52 All the examples given in the present paragraph from the 1926 translation of lines 210–228 of Beowulf (numbered 171 to 186 in the prose) appear on p. 19 of Tolkien, trans., Beowulf: A Translation.
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the parts of the compound: a parallel, it is true, but not of the type that is present in the original. It may be noted that the typescript of the 1926 translation made by
Christopher Tolkien in 1940–42 and published in 2014 reflects a change made by his
father from his original translation of syrcan hrysedon as ‘their mail-shirts clashed’
to ‘their mail-shirts they shook’, showing that J. R. R. Tolkien eventual y plumped for an understanding of hrysedon as transitive.53
For the sake of completeness a brief account may be given of the treatment in
Tolkien’s 1926 translation of the three parallels il ustrated above, with my own translation, from other lines in Beowulf than 210–228. The parallel of sense but not of syntax at lines 632b–633a is conveyed in 1926 as: ‘when I went up upon the sea and
sat me in my sea-boat’, where the syntactic difference between the two elements
in the parallel is less marked than in the original, and again there is an intrusive
‘and’.54 The compound word paralleled by a two-word phrase at lines 16b–17a (‘Life-
lord, Glory’s Ruler’) appears in the 1926 translation as: ‘the Lord of Life who rules
in glory’, where the compound in the original becomes a three-word phrase, and
the second element in the parallel becomes a subordinate, relative clause.55 Final y,
the example at lines 2340–2341a of the summarising parallel in its simplest form
(compound paralleled by simplex word: ‘forest-wood..., linden) is translated in 1926
as: ‘no wood of the forest, no linden shield’, where the effect is that of a balanced
parallel with a slight difference of syntax between its two elements.56
These differences are interesting and hard to explain: they require, indeed, a
separate study of their own. It is conceivable that at the time he made his 1926 translation Tolkien had not yet given the parallelism in Beowulf the attention he later felt it deserved, but more likely that what seems to be a relative lack of attention to parallelism here is due to a view of translation that he later came to express in 1940
and may have held when working on the 1926 translation. If his view when doing
so was that ‘The proper purpose of a prose translation is to provide an aid to study’, as it was in 1940,57 then it must be said on the basis of the examples given here that the 1926 translation does not, on the face of it, provide an ideal aid to studying
the parallelism of Beowulf. On the other hand he may at the same time have held the view, also expressed in 1940, that ‘Perhaps the most important function of any
translation used by a student is to provide not a model for imitation, but an exercise for correction.’58 His readers were perhaps expected to find the examples of parallelism for themselves.
Beowulf and Heaney
We are dealing here with six types of parallel expression, which I list here in the
order in which they have been discussed above: the summarising parallel, the
53 See Tolkien, trans., Beowulf: A Translation, pp. 19 and 194–5.
54 Ibid., p. 31.
55 Ibid., p. 13.
56 Ibid., p. 81.
57 See Tolkien, ‘Prefatory Remarks’, p. x.
58 Ibid., p. xvi.
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partial parallel, the balanced parallel, the expanded parallel, the parallel of sense but not of syntax, and the parallel of a compound word by a two-word phrase.59 The first
four of these have been exemplified with the help of Tolkien’s literal, 1940 translation of lines 210–228 of Beowulf, while the fifth and sixth (plus an additional example of the summarising parallel, showing it in its simplest form) have been il ustrated
from elsewhere in the poem with examples of my own, accompanied by my own
literal translations. I shall now examine in the same order Heaney’s treatment of the
relevant passages in his translation.
There is first the case of lines 210b–211a, a summarising parallel, which appears
in Heaney’s translation as follows:
the boat was on water,
in close under the cliffs.60
Here the failure to parallel ‘the boat’ means that the element of summary in the orig-
inal is lost. What Heaney has produced here is an expansion in the second line of
the adverbial ‘on water’ in the first. Heaney’s version might alternatively be analysed as comparable to the partial parallel of Old English poetry, in that part of the initial sentence, ‘on water’, is paralleled syntactical y by ‘under the cliffs’ in the following phrase, where ‘in close’ replaces a potential syntactic parallel to ‘the boat was’.
Secondly, for lines 212b–213a, a partial parallel in the original (‘waves rolled,
sea against sand’) Heaney has simply ‘sand churned in surf’, which ignores the
parallelism in the original altogether. Thirdly, the chiastic balanced parallel at
lines 214b–215a of the original (‘bright trappings, wargear wellmade’) becomes in
Heaney’s translation: ‘a cargo of weapons, shining war-gear’, where the two phrases,
taken together in their entirety, could be seen as approximating to the parallel of the
‘sense but not of syntax’ type, though what is most striking here is the expansion
of ‘weapons’ with the phrase ‘shining war-gear’. The syntactic equivalence and the
chiasmus in the original are in any case lost.
Fourthly, the expanded parallel at lines 221–223a of the original comes across in
Heaney’s translation as follows:
those seafarers sighted land,
sunlit cliffs, sheer crags
and looming headlands, the landfall they sought.
A parallel involving expansion is undeniably present here. It is doubtful, however,
59 These are six out of the ten types of parallel that it is possible to extrapolate from Campbel , ‘Old English Epic Style’, pp. 20–2. The remaining four, not considered here, are as follows: a parallel to the subject or object placed between the elements of a periphrastic verb; a parallel separated by an intervening clause from the expression paralleled; an undivided parallel to a divided expression; and a parallel uninflected if the case is clearly indicated in the expression paralleled. It is partly for reasons of space that these types are not considered here, and partly because they differ from the other six in being so foreign to present-day English usage as to justify a failure by modern translators to reflect their syntactic arrangement with precision.
60 The four examples given in this and the next three paragraphs from Heaney’s
t
ranslation of lines 210–228 of Beowulf all appear on p. 9 of Heaney, trans., Beowulf.
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whether the adjective ‘sunlit’, which presumably reflects the infinitive blican (‘to gleam’, ‘gleaming’), in the original, should form part of the parallel. The simplex
noun land (‘land’), which in the original is both the object of the finite verb gesawon (‘saw’) and the subject of the infinitive blican (‘gleam’) in an accusative and infinitive construction,61 finds an extended expanded parallel, as shown above, first in
the compound noun brimclifu (‘sea-cliffs’), and secondly in the chiastic balanced parallel beorgas steape, side sænæssas (‘hil s steep, long sea-capes’). This extension of the parallel strongly suggests that its emphasis is on land as object of gesawon rather than as subject of blican, and that blican, the referent of which finds no further mention, does not form part of the parallel. This emphasis on the land the seafarers
simply saw rather than on the effect it had on the eye seems to be recognised by
Heaney in his phrase ‘the landfall they sought’, which has no equivalent in the
original. On the other hand he seems to want to continue the idea of the effect on
the eye (‘sunlit’) with the adjective ‘looming’, which has no equivalent in the original either: a not altogether successful attempt to have the best of both worlds, which is
hardly fair to the original. Furthermore, the conjunction ‘and’ weakens the effect of
parallelism in ‘sheer crags and looming headlands’, and the chiasmus in the original
is lost.
As for the example given above of the expanded parallel in its simplest form
(simplex paralleled by a compound, as in ‘shirts…, war-raiment’, Beowulf lines 226b–227a), Heaney has:
There was a clash of mail
and a thresh of gear.
Here there is no expansion but rather an element of balance in the phrases ‘clash of
mail’ and ‘thresh of gear’, the effect of which, however, is weakened by the intrusive
‘and’. It may be noted incidental y that with these phrases Heaney avoids the ques-
tion of whether the verb hrysedon (‘rattled’) in line 226b should be understood as transitive or intransitive.
Fifthly, the example of the parallel of sense but not of syntax at lines 632b–633a of
Beowulf, given above with my somewhat awkward literal translation (‘when I onto sea ascended, a boat occupied’) is translated by Heaney as follows:
…when I put to sea.
As I sat in a boat….62
It may first be noted that the phrasing here, involving an intransitive verb plus
an adverbial in the second phrase as well as in the first, shows syntactic equiva-
lence rather than difference, and in this respect recal s the balanced parallel of Old English poetry. In the original, however, both elements in the parallel belong to the
same subordinate clause, introduced by þa (‘when’), whereas Heaney puts a full stop between his two phrases and inserts the conjunction ‘As’, making the second phrase
61 On the accusative and infinitive construction in Old English, see Bruce Mitchel , Old English Syntax, 2 vols (Oxford, 1985), II, pp. 867–8 and 872–8.
62 See Heaney, trans., Beowulf, p. 21.
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begin a new sentence with a further subordinate clause. This does not seriously
misrepresent the meaning of the original, it is true, but hardly reflects its style.
Sixthly, Heaney has clearly chosen not to reproduce in his translation the
compound word paralleled by a two-word phrase (‘Life-lord, Glory’s Ruler’) at lines
16b–17a of Beowulf. He gives instead a parallel of sense but not of syntax:
The
Lord
of
Life,
the glorious Almighty.
Final y, the example of the summarising parallel in its simplest form (compound
word paralleled by a simplex one), il ustrated above from Beowulf lines 2340–41a (‘forest-wood…, linden’), becomes in Heaney’s translation:
that linden boards would let him down,
and timber burn.63
If ‘and’ were omitted here, and ‘that’ left out of account, this would indeed reflect
the summarising parallel characteristic of English poetry, but not of the specific,
minimal type that the original shows.
I have followed Tolkien in referring to his word-by-word translation of lines
210–228, quoted above, as a literal translation, which it essential y is. (It could
perhaps have been still more literal, with plural expressions rather than ‘war-gear’
and ‘war-raiment’ to reflect the plurality of guðsearo and guðgewædo at lines 215a and 227a respectively, and a round-bracketed ‘they’ before ‘roped’ at line 226a to indicate that sæwudu is the object of sældon.) It is the kind of translation that Heaney should have had at his elbow when translating Beowulf, and it is deeply regrettable that Tolkien did not translate the whole of Beowulf in this way. Present-day translators of Beowulf, whatever their target language, are in general unlikely to have Tolkien’s profound knowledge of Old English or his sensitivity to its literary manifestations,
and would be helped, as Heaney would have been, by a literal, word-for-word,
line-by-line translation of the poem with no literary pretensions, following as far
as possible the word-order of the original, and showing clearly how the words of the
original relate to each other syntactical y.64 If Tolkien is correct in saying, as quoted above, that for students, at least, the most important function of a translation is to provide ‘an exercise for correction’, Heaney may be said to have fulfilled this function in his translations of both Henryson’s Testament and Beowulf. Heaney’s own assessment of the treatment of parallelism in his translation is in my view correct:
‘The appositional nature of the Old English syntax ... is somewhat slighted here.’65
It is indeed.
63 Ibid., p. 3.
64 Among modern translations of Beowulf known to me, the one that comes closest to fulfilling these criteria is John Porter, trans. and rev., Beowulf: Text and Translation (Ely, 2008) (first published London, 1975).
65 Heaney, trans., Beowulf, p. xxix.
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Conclusion: Beowulf in Irish?
Let me return in conclusion to the title of this essay and to the quotation from Bede, above. The books to which Bede is here referring would almost certainly have been
in Irish.66 Has the time not now come for a translation of Beowulf into Irish? It is not for me to say who should undertake this or whether it should be into verse or
prose, but something of a model for it might be found in Bo Almqvist’s and Dáithí
Ó hÓgáin’s Irish translations, into verse and prose respectively, of passages of Old
Norse-Icelandic skaldic poetry and the prose passages from the sagas in which they
are quoted.67 The prose style of the Icelandic sagas is very different, it is true, from the epic style of Old English poetry, and skaldic poetry, while sharing a common
ancestry with Old English poetry and certain of its characteristics, differs from it
stylistical y and metrical y in a number of ways.68 A potential translator of Beowulf into Irish would nevertheless do well to take a preliminary look at Skálda, the book of translations by Almqvist and Ó hÓgáin. If asked who would read an Irish translation of Beowulf, I would reply: in the first instance, the speakers and readers of Irish for whom Skálda was intended, and university students of Irish and English. And once such a translation was complete, I would ask: why should a graphic version of
it not be made, on the model of Colmán Ó Raghal aigh’s An Táin, his graphic
novel with speech balloons in Irish based on the Old Irish prose epic Táin Bó Cúailnge?69
Is it too much to hope that an Irish translation of Beowulf, made, if necessary, with the help of a literal translation of the kind I have described, might thus inspire a
popular version in Irish that in turn would lead readers to the translation itself, and even to the original Old English, without the intervention of any Modern English
translation? Very possibly. But if Beowulf is to be ‘a book from Ireland’, a version of it in Irish is surely what is needed.
66 It is conceivable that they would have been in Latin: see Joseph Falaky Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland (Ithaca, NY, 1997), pp. 9–10. I say
‘would have been’ because there is of course no question here of books that were known for certain to have existed!
67 Bo Almqvist and Dáithí Ó hÓgáin, Skálda: Éigse is Eachtraíocht sa tSean-Lochlainn (Baile Átha Cliath, 1995).
68 See L. M. Hol ander, The Skalds: A Selection of their Poems with Introduction and Notes, 2nd edn (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), pp. 1–24, and the articles in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk (Oxford, 2005; rev. edn 2007) by Russell Poole (on ‘Metre and Metrics’, pp. 265–84), Diana Whaley (on ‘Skaldic Poetry’, pp. 479–502), and Þórir Óskarsson (on the ‘Rhetoric and Style’ of Old Norse-Icelandic prose, pp. 354–71).
69 Colmán Ó Raghal aigh, An Táin: Úrscéal Grafach, with artwork by The Cartoon Saloon (Clár Chlainne Mhuiris, 2006).
6
The Forms and Functions of Medieval Irish Poetry
and the Limitations of Modern Aesthetics
Elizabeth Boyle
The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the corpus of medieval
Irish poetry is broader, more challenging, and more imbued with poetic
possibility than the relatively narrow range of oft-anthologised, oft-adapted
poems would suggest. After an overview of the limited forms of poetry which have
tended to be studied, translated and anthologised, and a discussion of some of the
key methodological issues, I offer three examples of rather different, and hitherto
