Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English

texts

Caedmon's Hymn
Bede1 about Caedmon (from the Old English translation of Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis
Anglorum, book IV chapter xxiv):

“In ðeosse abbudissan mynstre wæs sum broðor syndriglice mid godcundre gife gemæred ond
geweorðad, forþon he gewunade gerisenlice leoð wyrcan, þa ðe to æfestnisse ond to arfæstnisse
belumpon , swa ðætte swa hwæt swa he of godcundum stafum þurh boceras geleornode, þæt he
æfter medmiclum fæce in scopgereorde mid þa mæstan swetnisse ond inbryrdnisse geglængde ond
in Engliscgereorde wel geworht forþ brohte ...”

translation:

“In this abbess's monastery was a certain brother particularly glorified and honoured with a divine
gift, in that he fittingly was accustomed to make songs, which pertained to religion and virtue, so
that whatever thus he he learned of divine letters from scholars, those things he after a moderate
space of time he brought forth, in poetic language adorned with the greatest sweetness and
inspiration and well-made in the English language.”
(source: http://www.heorot.dk/bede-caedmon.html)

Caedmon's Hymn :

translation:

Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard Now we shall praise the warden of the kingdom
metudæs mehti and his modgithanc of heaven,
uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs The might of the maker and his meditations,
eci dryctin or astelidæ. The work of the glory-father, as eternal lord
he ærist scop ældu barnum He first established each of the wonders.
hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend He, holy creator, first shaped
1
Saint Bede , or Baeda , 673?-735, English historian, a Benedictine monk, called the Venerable Bede. He spent his
whole life at the monasteries of Wearmouth (at Sunderland) and Jarrow and became probably the most learned man
in Western Europe in his day. His writings, virtually a summary of the learning of his time, consist of theological,
historical, and scientific treatises. Like a modern scholar, he consulted many documents, discussed their relative
reliability, and duly cited them as sources—practices then most unusual. His theological works are commentaries
on the Scriptures in the light of the interpretations of the Church Fathers. He wrote biographical works such as the
life of St. Cuthbert (in prose and verse) and the History of the Abbots (of Wearmouth and Jarrow). His Ecclesiastical
History of the English Nation, written in Latin prose, remains an indispensable primary source for English history
from 597 to 731. It gives the most thorough and reliable contemporary account of the triumph of Christianity and
of the growth of Anglo-Saxon culture in England. He also relates the political events that had bearing on these
developments. The Ecclesiastical History has been many times translated; the best edition of the text is in Bedae
opera historica (ed. by Charles Plummer, 1896). The best known of Bede's scientific treatises are those on
chronology, held as standard for many years. Long venerated in the church, Bede was officially recognized as a saint
in 1899 and was named Doctor of the Church, the only Englishman so honored. Feast: May 27. (The Columbia
Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2008 )

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 1/24
tha middingard moncynnæs uard
eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
firum foldu frea allmehtig
(source: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/c
%C3%A6dmons-hymn)
Deor's Lament :
Wélund him be wurm{a} wráeces cunnade
anhýdig eorl, earfoþa dréag,
hæfde him tó gesíþþe sorge ond longaþ,
wintercealde wræce, wéan oft onfond
siþþan hine Níðhád on néde legde
swoncre seonobende on syllan monn.
Þæs oferéode, ðisses swá mæg.
Beadohilde ne wæs hyre bróþra déaþ
on sefan swá sár swá hyre sylfre þing,
þæt héo gearolíce ongieten hæfde
þæt héo éacen wæs; áefre ne meahte
þríste geþencan hú ymb þæt sceolde.
Þæs oferéode, ðisses swá mæg.
Wé þæt Máeðhilde monge gefrugnon
wurdon grundléase Géates fríge,
þæt hi{m} séo sorglufu sláep ealle binóm.
Þæs oferéode, ðisses swá mæg.
Ðéodríc áhte þrítig wintra
Máeringa burg; þæt wæs mongegum cúþ.
Þæs oferéode, ðisses swá mæg.
Wé geáscodan Eormanríces
wylfenne geþóht; áhte wíde folc
Gotena ríces. Þæt wæs grim cyning.
Sæt secg monig sorgum gebunden
wéan on wénan, wýscte geneahhe
þæt þæs cyneríces ofercumen wáere.
Þæs oferéode, ðisses swá mæg.
Siteð sorgcearig sáelum bidáeled,
on sefan sweorceð, sylfum þinceð
þæt sý endeléas earfoða dæl.
Mæg þonne geþencan þæt geond þás woruld
wítig dryhten wendeþ geneahhe,
eorle monegum áre gescéawað
wislícne bláed, sumum wéana dáel.
Þæt ic bí mé sylfum secgan wille
þæt ic hwíle wæs Heodeninga scop
G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 2/24
Heaven as a roof for the children of earth [men.]
Then, afterwards, mankind’s guardian,
The eternal lord, the almighty governor,
Made the Middle-Earth, made the earth for men.
(source:
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Classics/arc
hive/bcj/17-08.htm):
Weland, from serpents, experienced misery,
the resolute warrior, he endured hardships,
had as companions to him, sorrow and longing,
wintry-cold exile, he often found woes
after Nithhad upon him laid a compulsion,
supple bounds on sinew on a better man.
As that passed away, so may this.
For Beadohild was not her brothers' death
in her mind so grievous as her own condition,
that she clearly had seen
that she was swollen with child; she could never
think confidently what must (be done) about
that.
As that passed away, so may this.
That for Maethhild, of us many have heard
that boundless became Geat's desire,
that him this sad love entirely deprived of sleep.
As that passed away, so may this.
Theodric held for thirty winters
the stronghold of the Maerings; that was known
to many.
As that passed away, so may this.
We learned of Eormanric's
wolfish mind; he ruled people far and wide
in the kingdom of the Goths. That was a savage
king.
Many a warrior sat, bound in sorrows,
expecting woe, often wished
that his kingdom would be overcome.
As that passed away, so may this.
A man sits sorrowful, bereft of joys,
in his soul it grows dark, it seems to him
that endless is his portion of sufferings.
He may then think that throughout this world
the wise Lord often makes changes,
to many men honours are shown,
dryhtne dýre. Mé wæs Déor noma;
áhte ic fela wintra folgað tilne,
holdne hláford oþ þæt Heorrenda nú
léoðcræftig monn londryht geþáh
þæt mé eorla hléo áer gesealde.
Þæs oferéode, ðisses swá mæg.
The Wanderer:
Oft him anhaga are gebideð,
metudes miltse, þeah þe he modcearig
geond lagulade longe sceolde
hreran mid hondum hrimcealde sæ,
wadan wræclastas. Wyrd bið ful aræd!”
Swa cwæð eardstapa, earfeþa gemyndig,
wraþra wælsleahta, winemæga hryre:
“Oft ic sceolde ana uhtna gehwylce
mine ceare cwiþan. Nis nu cwicra nan
þe ic him modsefan minne durre
sweotule asecgan. Ic to soþe wat
þæt biþ in eorle indryhten þeaw,
þæt he his ferðlocan fæste binde,
healde his hordcofan, hycge swa he wille.
Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan,
ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
Forðon domgeorne dreorigne oft
in hyra breostcofan bindað fæste;
swa ic modsefan minne sceolde,
oft earmcearig, eðle bidæled,
freomægum feor feterum sælan,
siþþan geara iu goldwine minne
hrusan heolstre biwrah, ond ic hean þonan
wod wintercearig ofer waþema gebind,
sohte sele dreorig sinces bryttan,
hwær ic feor oþþe neah findan meahte
þone þe in meoduhealle min mine wisse,
oþþe mec freondleasne frefran wolde,
G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 3/24
true fame, to some a portion of woe.
This of my self I wish to say--
that for a time I was the gleeman of the
Heodenings,
dear to my lord. 'Deor' was my name;
I had for many winters a good employment,
a gracious lord, until now Heorrenda,
a song-skilled man, received the land-rights
that to me the protector of earls had given
before.
As that passed away, so may this.
Source : http://www.heorot.dk/deor.html
“Often the solitary one experiences mercy for
himself,
the mercy of the Measurer, although he, troubled
in spirit,
over the ocean must long
stir with his hands the rime-cold sea,
travel the paths of exile – Fate is inexorable.”
So said the wanderer, mindful of hardships,
of cruel deadly combats, the fall of dear kinsmen
–
“Often alone each morning I must
Bewail my sorrow; there is now none living
to whom I dare tell clearly my inmost thoughts.
I know indeed
that it is a noble custom in a man
to bind fast his thoughts with restraint,
hold his treasure-chest, think what he will.
The man weary in spirit cannot withstand fate,
nor may the troubled mind offer help.
Therefore those eager for praise often bind a sad
mind
in their breast-coffer with restraint.
So I, miserably sad, separated from homeland,
far from my noble kin, had to bind my thoughts
with fetters,
since that long ago the darkness of the earth
covered my gold-friend, and I, abject,
proceeded thence, winter-sad, over the binding
of the waves.
weman mid wynnum. Wat se þe cunnað,
hu sliþen bið sorg to geferan,
þam þe him lyt hafað leofra geholena.
Warað hine wræclast, nales wunden gold,
ferðloca freorig, nalæs foldan blæd.
Gemon he selesecgas ond sincþege,
hu hine on geoguðe his goldwine
wenede to wiste. Wyn eal gedreas!
Forþon wat se þe sceal his winedryhtnes
leofes larcwidum longe forþolian,
ðonne sorg ond slæp somod ætgædre
earmne anhogan oft gebindað.
þinceð him on mode þæt he his mondryhten
clyppe ond cysse, ond on cneo lecge
honda ond heafod, swa he hwilum ær
in geardagum giefstolas breac.
[...]
Sad, I sought the hall of a giver of treasure,
Where I might find, far or near,
one who in the meadhall might know about my
people,
or might wish to comfort me, friendless,
entertain with delights. He knows who
experiences it
how cruel care is as a companion,
to him who has few beloved protectors.
The path of exile awaits him, not twisted gold,
frozen feelings, not earth’s glory.
he remembers retainers and the receiving of
treasure,
how in youth his gold-friend
accustomed him to the feast. But all pleasure has
failed.
Indeed he knows who must for a long time do
without
the counsels of his beloved lord
when sorrow and sleep together
often bind the wretched solitary man–
he thinks in his heart that he
embraces and kisses his lord, and lays
hands and head on his knee, just as he once at
times
in former days, enjoyed the gift-giving.
[...]
source ;
https://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sechard/oewand.htm

Another passage from The Wanderer :

“He who shall muse on these mouldering ruins,

And deeply ponder this darkling life,
Must brood on old legends of battle and bloodshed,
And heavy the mood that troubles his heart:
Where now is the warrior? Where is the war-horse?
Bestowal of treasure, and sharing of feast?
Alas! the bright alecup, the byrny-clad warrior,
The prince in his splendour - those days are long sped
In the night of the past, as if they never had been.”

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 4/24
(source: Routledge History of English literature.)

Trivial but amusing example from Wikipedia:

“For his fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a similar poem, composed by
his fictional people of Rohan who are partially modelled after the Anglo-Saxons. Part of this goes:

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? [...]
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.[6]

The Dream of the Rood:

“Hwæt! Ic swefna cyst secgan wylle,
hwæt me gemætte to midre nihte,
syðþan reordberend reste wunedon!
þuhte me þæt ic gesawe syllicre treow …”

Listen! The choicest of visions I wish to tell,

which came as a dream in middle-night,
after voice-bearers lay at rest.
It seemed that I saw a most wondrous tree
born aloft, wound round by light,
brightest of beams. All was that beacon
sprinkled with gold. [...]
Then best wood spoke these words:
"It was long since--I yet remember it--
that I was hewn at holt's end,
moved from my stem. Strong fiends seized me there,
worked me for spectacle; cursèd ones lifted me.
On shoulders men bore me there, then fixed me on hill;
fiends enough fastened me. Then saw I mankind's Lord
come with great courage when he would mount on me.
Then dared I not against the Lord's word
bend or break, when I saw earth's
fields shake. All fiends
I could have felled, but I stood fast.
The young hero stripped himself--he, God Almighty--
strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows,
bold before many, when he would loose mankind.
I shook when that Man clasped me. I dared, still, not bow to earth,
fall to earth's fields, but had to stand fast.
Rood was I reared. I lifted a mighty King,
Lord of the heavens, dared not to bend.
With dark nails they drove me through: on me those sores are seen,

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 5/24
open malice-wounds. I dared not scathe anyone.
They mocked us both, we two together [ 7 ]. All wet with blood I was,
poured out from that Man's side, after ghost he gave up.
Much have I born on that hill
of fierce fate. I saw the God of hosts
harshly stretched out. Darknesses had
wound round with clouds the corpse of the Wielder,
bright radiance; a shadow went forth,
dark under heaven. All creation wept,
King's fall lamented. Christ was on rood.
But there eager ones came
from afar
to that noble one. I beheld all that.

Source : http://lightspill.com/poetry/oe/rood.html

Beowulf
As translated by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney

King Hrothgar builds Heorot Hall

The fortunes of war favoured Hrothgar.

Friends and kinsmen flocked to his ranks,
young followers, a force that grew
to be a mighty army. So his mind turned
to hall-building: he handed down orders
for men to work on a great mead-hall
meant to be a wonder of the world forever;
it would be his throne-room and there he would
dispense
his God-given goods to young and old—
but not the common land or people's lives.
Far and wide through the world, I have heard,
orders for work to adorn that wallstead
were sent to many peoples. And soon it stood there,
finished and ready, in full view,
the hall of halls. Heorot was the name
he had settled on it, whose utterance was law.
Nor did he renege, but doled out rings
and torques at the table. The hall towered,
its gables wide and high and awaiting
a barbarous burning. That doom abided,
but in time it would come: the killer instinct
unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant.

Heorot is threatened

Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark,

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 6/24
nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him
to hear the din of the loud banquet
every day in the hall, the harp being struck
and the clear song of a skilled poet
telling with mastery of man's beginnings,
how the Almighty had made the earth
a gleaming plain girdled with waters;
in His splendour He set the sun and the moon
to be earth's lamplight, lanterns for men,
and filled the broad lap of the world
with branches and leaves; and quickened life
in every other thing that moved.

Grendel, a minster, descended from Cain’s clan, begins to prowl

So times were pleasant for the people there

until finally one, a fiend out of hell,
began to work his evil in the world.
Grendel was the name of this grim demon
haunting the marches, marauding round the heath
and the desolate fens; he had dwelt for a time
in misery among the banished monsters,
Cain's clan, whom the Creator had outlawed
and condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel
the Eternal Lord had exacted a price:
Cain got no good from committing that murder
no because the Almighty made him anathema
and out of the curse of his exile there sprang
ogres and elves and evil phantoms
and the giants too who strove with God
time and again until He gave them their reward.
So, after nightfall, Grendel set out
for the lofty house, to see how the Ring-Danes
were settling into it after their drink,
and there he came upon them, a company of the best
asleep from their feasting, insensible to pain
and human sorrow. Suddenly then
the God-cursed brute was creating havoc:
greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men
from their resting places and rushed to his lair,
flushed up and inflamed from the raid,
blundering back with the butchered corpses.

[…]
Beowulf comes to the rescue:

Time went by, the boat was on water,

in close under the cliffs.

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 7/24
Men climbed eagerly up the gangplank,
sand churned in surf, warriors loaded
a cargo of weapons, shining war-gear
in the vessel's hold, then heaved out,
away with a will in their wood-wreathed ship.
Over the waves, with the wind behind her
and foam at her neck, she flew like a bird
until her curved prow had covered the distance
and on the following day, at the due
hour, those seafarers sighted land,
sunlit cliffs, sheer crags
and looming headlands, the landfall they sought.
It was the end of their voyage and the Geats vaulted
over the side, out on to the sand,
and moored their ship. There was a clash of mail
and a thresh of gear. They thanked God
for that easy crossing on a calm sea.

When the watchman on the wall, the Shieldings' lookout

whose job it was to guard the sea-cliffs,
saw shields glittering on the gangplank
and battle-equipment being unloaded
he had to find out who and what
the arrivals were. So he rode to the shore,
this horseman of Hrothgar's, and challenged them
in formal terms, flourishing his spear:

"What kind of men are you who arrive

rigged out for combat in coats of mail,
sailing here over the sea-lanes
in your steep-hulled boat? I have been stationed
as lookout on this coast for a long time.
My job is to watch the waves for raiders,
any danger to the Danish shore.
Never before has a force under arms
disembarked so openly—not bothering to ask
if the sentries allowed them safe passage
or the clan had consented. Nor have I seen
a mightier man-at-arms on this earth
than the one standing here: unless I am mistaken,
he is truly noble. This is no mere
hanger-on in a hero's armour.
So now, before you fare inland
as interlopers, I have to be informed
about who you are and where you hail from.
Outsiders from across the water,
I say it again: the sooner you tell
where you come from and why, the better."

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 8/24
The leader of the troop unlocked his word-hoard;
the distinguished one delivered this answer:
"We belong by birth to the Geat people
and owe allegiance to Lord Hygelac.
In his day, my father was a famous man,
a noble warrior-lord named Ecgtheow.
He outlasted many a long winter
and went on his way. All over the world
men wise in counsel continue to remember him.
We come in good faith to find your lord
and nation's shield, the son of Halfdane.
Give us the right advice and direction.
We have arrived here on a great errand
to the lord of the Danes, and I believe therefore
there should be nothing hidden or withheld between us.

[…]

Beowulf fights Grendel:

Mighty and canny,
Hygelac's kinsman was keenly watching
for the first move the monster would make.
Nor did the creature keep him waiting
but struck suddenly and started in;
he grabbed and mauled a man on his bench,
bit into his bone-lappings, bolted down his blood
and gorged on him in lumps, leaving the body
utterly lifeless, eaten up
hand and foot. Venturing closer,
his talon was raised to attack Beowulf
where he lay on the bed; he was bearing in
with open claw when the alert hero's
comeback and armlock forestalled him utterly.
The captain of evil discovered himself
in a handgrip harder than anything
he had ever encountered in any man
on the face of the earth. Every bone in his body
quailed and recoiled, but he could not escape.
He was desperate to flee to his den and hide
with the devil's litter, for in all his days
he had never been clamped or cornered like this.
Then Hygelac's trusty retainer recalled
his bedtime speech, sprang to his feet
and got a firm hold. Fingers were bursting,
the monster back-tracking, the man overpowering.
The dread of the land was desperate to escape,
to take a roundabout road and flee
to his lair in the fens. The latching power
in his fingers weakened; it was the worst trip
the terror-monger had taken to Heorot.

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 9/24
Seamus Heaney on his translation of Beowulf:
[…] The poem called Beowulf was composed some time between the middle of the seventh and the
end of the tenth century of the first millennium, in the language that is today called Anglo-Saxon or
Old English. It is a heroic narrative, more than three thousand lines long, concerning the deeds of a
Scandinavian prince, also called Beowulf, and it stands as one of the foundation works of poetry
in English. The fact that the English language has changed so much in the last thousand years
means, however, that the poem is now generally read in translation and mostly in English courses
at schools and universities. This has contributed to the impression that is was written (as Osip
Madelstam said of The Divine Comedy) ‘on official paper’, which is unfortunate, since what we are
dealing with is a work of the greatest imaginative vitality, a masterpiece where the structuring of
the tale is as elaborate as the beautiful contrivances of its language. Its narrative elements may
belong to a previous age but as a work of art it lives in its own continuous present, equal to our
knowledge of reality in the present time.
The poem was written in England but the events it describes are set in Scandinavia, in a ‘once
upon a time’ that is partly historical. Its hero, Beowulf, is the biggest presence among the warriors
in the land of the Geats, a territory situated in what is now southern Sweden, and early in the poem
Beowulf crosses the sea to the land of the Danes in order to rid their country of a man-eating
monster called Grendel. From this expedition (which involves him in a second contest with
Grendel’s mother) he returns in triumph and eventually rules for fifty years as king of his homeland.
Then a dragon begins to terrorize the countryside and Beowulf must confront it. In a final climatic
encounter, he does manage to slay the dragon, but he also meets his own death and enters the
legends of his people as a warrior of high renown.
We know about the poem more or less by chance, because it exists in one manuscript only. The
unique copy (now in the British Library) barely survived a fire in the eighteenth century and was
then transcribed and titled, retranscribed and edited, translated and adapted, interpreted and taught,
until it has become an acknowledged classic. For decades it has been a set book on English
syllabuses at university level all over the world. The fact that many English departments require it
to be studied in the original continues to generate resistance, most notably at Oxford University,
where the pros and cons of the inclusion of part of it as a compulsory element in the English course
have been debated regularly in recent years.
For generations of undergraduates, academic study of the poem was often just a matter of
construing the meaning, getting a grip on the grammar and vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon, and
being able to recognize, translate and comment upon random extracts that were presented in the
examinations. For generations of scholars too the interest had been textual and philological; then
there developed a body of research into analogues and sources, a quest for stories and episodes in
the folklore and legends of the Nordic peoples that would parallel or foreshadow episodes in
Beowulf. Scholars were also preoccupied with fixing the exact time and place of the poem’s
composition, paying minute attention to linguistic, stylistic and scribal details. More generally, they
tried to establish the history and genealogy of the dynasties of Swedes, Geats and Deanes to which
the poet makes constant allusion; and they devoted themselves to a consideration of the world-view
behind the poem, asking to what extent (if at all) the newly established Christian religion, which
was fundamental to the poet’s intellectual formation, displaced him from his imaginative at-
homeness in the world of his poem – a pagan Germanic society governed by heroic code of

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 10/24
honour, one where the attainment of a name for warrior-prowess among the living
overwhelms any concern about the soul’s destiny in the afterlife.
However, when it comes to considering Beowulf as a work of literature, one publication stands
out. In 1936, the Oxford scholar and teacher J.R.R. Tolkien published an epoch-making paper
entitled ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, which took for granted the poem’s integrity and
distinction as a work of art and proceeded to show in what this integrity and distinction inhered.
Tolkien assumed that the poet had felt his way through the inherited material – the fabulous
elements and the traditional accounts of an heroic past – and by a combination of creative intuition
and conscious structuring had arrived at a unity of effect and a balanced order. He assumed in
other words, that the Beowulf poet was an imaginative writer rather than some kind of back-
formation derived from nineteenth-century folklore and philology. Tolkien’s brilliant literary
treatment changed the way the poem was valued and initiated a new era – and new terms – of
appreciation.
It is impossible to attain a full understanding and estimate of Beowulf without recourse to this
immense body of commentary and elucidation. Nevertheless, readers coming to the poem for the
first time are likely to experience something other than mere discomfiture when faced with the
strangeness of the names and the immediate lack of known reference points. An English-speaker
new to The Iliad or The Odyssey or The Aeneid will probably at least have heard of Troy and Helen,
or of Penelope and the Cyclops, or of Dido and the Golden Bough. These epics may be in Greek
and Latin, yet the classical heritage has entered the cultural memory enshrined in English so
thoroughly that their worlds are more familiar than that of the first native epic, even thought it was
composed centuries after them. Achilles rings a bell, not Scyld Sc fing. Ithaca leads the mind in a
certain direction, but not Heorot. The Sibyl of Cumae will stir certain associations, but not bad
Queen Modthryth. First-time readers of Beowulf very quickly rediscover the meaning of the term
‘the Dark Ages’, and it is in the hope of dispelling some of the puzzlement they are bound to feel
that I have added the marginal glosses that appear in the following pages.
[...]What happens in between [the beginning and the end of the poem] is what W.B. Yeats would
have called a phantasmagoria. Three agons – three struggles in which the preternatural force-for-
evil of the hero’s enemies comes springing at him in demonic shapes; three encounters with what
the critical literature and the textbook glossaries call ‘the monsters’ – in three archetypal sites of
fear; the barricaded night-house, the infested underwater current and the reptile-haunted rocks of a
wilderness. If we think of the poem in this way, its place in world art becomes clearer and more
secure. We can conceive of it re-presented and transformed in performance in a bunraku theatre in
Japan, where the puppetry and the poetry are mutually supportive, a mixture of technicolor
spectacle and ritual chant. Or we can equally envisage it as an animated cartoon (and there has
been at least one shot at this already), full of mutating graphics and minatory stereophonics. We can
avoid, at any rate, the slightly cardboard effect that the word ‘monster’ tends to introduce, and give
the poem a fresh chance to sweep ‘in off the moors, down through the mist-bands’ of Anglo-Saxon
England, forward into the global village of the third millennium.
Nevertheless, the dream element and overall power to haunt come at a certain readerly price. The
poem abounds in passages that will leave an unprepared audience bewildered. Just when the
narrative seems ready to take another step ahead, it sidesteps.[...]
Within [the] phantasmal boundaries [of the poem's universe], each lord’s hall is an actual and a
symbolic refuge. Here are heat and light, rank and ceremony, human solidarity and culture; the
duguþ share the mead-benches with the geogoþ, the veterans with their tales of warrior-kings and
hero-saviours from the past rub shoulders with young braves – þegnas, eorlas, thanes, retainers –
keen to win such renown in the future. The prospect of gaining a glorious name in the wœl-rœs (the
rush of battle-slaughter), the pride of defending one’s lord and bearing heroic witness to the

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 11/24
integrity of the bond between him and his hall-companions – a bond sealed in the gl o and gidd of
peace-time feasting and ring-giving – this is what gave drive and sanction to the Germanic
warrior-culture enshrined in Beowulf.
Heorot and Hygelac’s hall are the hubs of this value system upon which the poem’s action turns.
But there is another, outer rim of value, a circumference of understanding within which the heroic
world is occasionally viewed as from a distance and recognized for what it is, an earlier state of
consciousness and culture, one that has not been altogether shed but that has now been
comprehended as part of another pattern. And this circumference and pattern arise, of course, from
the poet’s Christianity and from his perspective as an Englishman looking back at places and
legends that his ancestors knew before they made their migration from continental Europe to their
new home on the island of the Britons. As a consequence of his doctrinal certitude, which is as
composed as it is ardent, the poet can view the story-time of his poem with a certain historical
detachment and even censure the ways of those who lived in illo tempore:
Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed
Offerings to idols, swore oaths
That the killer of souls might come to their aid
And save the people. That was their way,
Their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts
They remembered hell.
[175–80]

At the same time, as a result of his inherited vernacular culture and the imaginative sympathy that
distinguishes him as an artist, the poet can lend the full weight of his rhetorical power to Beowulf
as he utters the first principles of the northern warrior’s honour-code:
It is always better
To avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
Means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
Win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
That will be his best and only bulwark.
[1384–9]

In an age when ‘the instability of the human subject’ is constantly argued for if not presumed, there
should be no problem with a poem that is woven from two such different psychic fabrics. In fact,
Beowulf perfectly answers the early modern conception of a work of creative imagination as one in
which conflicting realities find accommodation within a new order; and this reconciliation occurs,
it seems to me, most poignantly and most profoundly in the poem’s third section, once the dragon
enters the picture and the hero in old age must gather his powers for the final climactic ordeal. From
the moment Beowulf advances under the crags, into the comfortless arena bounded by the rock-
wall, the reader knows he is one of those ‘marked by fate’. The poetry is imbued with a strong
intuition of wyrd hovering close, ‘unknowable but certain’, and yet, because it is imagined within a
consciousness that has learned to expect that the soul will find an ultimate home ‘among the
steadfast ones, this primal human emotion has been transmuted into something less ‘zero at the
bone’, more metaphysically tempered.
[…] It has often been observed that all the scriptural references in Beowulf are to the Old
Testament. The poet is more in sympathy with the tragic, waiting, unredeemed phase of things
than with any transcendental promise. Beowulf’s mood as he gets ready to fight the dragon – who

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 12/24
could be read as a projection of Beowulf’s own chthonic2 wisdom refined in the crucible of
experience – recalls the mood of other tragic heroes: Oedipus at Colonus, Lear at his ‘ripeness is
all’ extremity, Hamlet in the last illuminations of his ‘prophetic soul’:
No easy bargain
Would be made in that place by any man.
The veteran king sat down on the cliff-top.
He wished good luck to the Geats who had shared
His hearth and his gold. He was sad at heart,
Unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.
His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain.

Here the poet attains a level of insight that approaches the visionary. The subjective and the
inevitable are in perfect balance, what is solidly established is bathed in an element that is
completely sixth-sensed, and indeed the whole, slow-motion, constantly self-deferring approach to
the hero’s death and funeral continues to be like this. Beowulf’s soul may not yet have fled ‘to its
destined place among the steadfast ones’, but there is already a beyond-the-grave aspect to him, a
revenant quality about his resoluteness. This is not just metrical narrative full of anthropological
interest and typical heroic-age motifs; it is poetry of a high order, in which passages of great lyric
intensity – such as the ‘Lay of the Last Survivor’ (lines 2247-66) and, even more remarkably, the
so-called ‘Father’s Lament’ (2444-62) – rise like emanations from some fissure in the bedrock of
the human capacity to endure:
It was like the misery endured by an old man
Who has lived to see his son’s body
Swing on the gallows. He begins to keen
And weep for his boy, watching the raven
Gloat where he hangs; he can be of no help.
The wisdom of age is worthless to him.
Morning after morning, he wakes to remember
That his child is gone; he has no interest
In living on until another heir
Is born in the hall…
Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed
And sings a lament; everything seems too large,
The steadings and the fields.

Such passages mark an ultimate stage in poetic attainment; they are the imaginative equivalent of
Beowulf’s spiritual state at the end, when he tells his men that ‘doom of battle will bear [their] lord
away’, in the same way that the sea-journeys so vividly described in lines 210-28 and lines 1903-24
are the equivalent of his exultant prime.
At these moments of lyric intensity, the keel of the poetry is deeply set in the element of
sensation while the mind’s lookout sways metrically and far-sightedly in the element of pure
comprehension – which is to say that the elevation of Beowulf is always, paradoxically, buoyantly
down-to-earth. And nowhere is this more obviously and memorably the case than in the account of
the hero’s funeral with which the poems ends. Here the inexorable and the elegiac combine in a
description of the funeral pyre being got ready, the body being burnt and the barrow being
constructed – a scene at once immemorial and oddly contemporary. The Geat woman who cries
out in dread as the flames consume the body of her dead lord could come straight from a late-
twentieth-century news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo; her keen is a nightmare glimpse into the
2
Pertaning to the underground or the underworld.

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minds of people who have survived traumatic, even monstrous events and who are now being
exposed to the comfortless future. We immediately recognize her predicament and the pitch of her
grief and find ourselves the better for having them expressed with such adequacy, dignity and
unforgiving truth:
On a height they kindled the hugest of all
Funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke
Billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
And drowned out their weeping, wind died down
And flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
Burning it to the core. They were disconsolate
And wailed aloud for their lord’s decease.
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....

[…]

Exercises

Definitions Multiple Choice

(Words from Seamus Heaney on Beowulf)

Choose the correct word for each provided definition.

1. verb be a hindrance or obstacle to; block passage through

A. inhabit B. dissolve C. academic D. 5. adj. operating as a unit; formed or united into a whole
kenning E. impede A. unified B. adorn C. begrudge D. don E.
finder
2. verb invade in great numbers; live on or in a host, as of
parasites; occupy in large numbers or live on a host 6. verb hang in the air; fly or be suspended above; move to and
A. conjure B. implacable C. metrical D. fro; be undecided about something; waver between conflicting
infest E. succor positions or courses of action; be suspended in the air, as if in
defiance of gravity; hang over, as of something threatening, dark,
3. noun the manner in which something is expressed in words; the or menacing
articulation of speech regarded from the point of view of its A. accordB. constraint C. litany D. fen E. hover
intelligibility to the audience
A. constraint B. scorch C. grouseD. narrative E. 7. noun assistance in time of difficulty; verb help in a difficult
diction situation
A. accordB. diction C. latent D. finicky E.
4. noun 100 fen equal 1 yuan in China; low-lying wet land with succor
grassy vegetation; usually is a transition zone between land and
water 8. adj. the rhythmic arrangement of syllables; based on the meter
A. dolphin B. litany C. splice D. bias E. fen as a standard of measurement

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 14/24
A. retrieve B. metrical C. unified D.
finicky E. resonate 18. adj. of leaf shapes; of leaves composed of several similar parts
or lobes; consisting of two or more substances or ingredients or
9. verb change in outward structure or looks; increase or decrease elements or parts; composed of many distinct individuals united to
(an alternating current or voltage); change (a bacterial cell) into a form a whole or colony; noun an enclosure of residences and other
genetically distinct cell by the introduction of DNA from another building (especially in the Orient); a whole formed by a union of
cell of the same or closely related species; convert (one form of two or more elements or parts; (chemistry) a substance formed by
energy) to another; change or alter in form, appearance, or nature; chemical union of two or more elements or ingredients in definite
subject to a mathematical transformation; change from one form proportion by weight; verb put or add together; combine so as to
or medium into another form a whole; mix; create by mixing or combining; calculate
A. inhabit B. transform C. incandescent D. principal and interest; make more intense, stronger, or more
latent E. litany marked
A. reverent B. infest C. compound D. grouse
10. noun something of small importance E. litany
A. metrical B. implacable C. waive D. trivia E.
cascade 19. verb engage in plotting or enter into a conspiracy, swear
together; ask for or request earnestly; summon into action or bring
11. noun an ornamental caparison for a horse; a lyric poet; verb into existence, often as if by magic
put a caparison on
A. splice B. sprinkle C. fen D. bard E. conjure A. kenning B. dolphin C. unified D.
impede E. conjure
12. noun (Arthurian legend) a nephew of Arthur and one of the
knights of the Round Table 20. adj. characteristic of informal spoken language or conversation
A. sprinkle B. adorn C. Gawain D. dolphin A. finder B. hover C. decree D. colloquial E. collapse
E. moor
21. verb cover completely or make imperceptible; put under
13. noun the act of constraining; the threat or use of force to water; sink below the surface; go under or as if under water; fill or
control the thoughts or behavior of others; the state of being cover completely, usually with water
physically constrained; a device that retards something's motion A. kenning B. submerge C. moor D. retrieve
A. stacked B. finicky C. sprinkle D. E. collapse
bizarre E. constraint
22. noun optical device that helps a user to find the target of
14. adj. conspicuously or grossly unconventional or unusual interest; someone who is the first to observe something; someone
A. implacable B. bizarre C. sniff D. colloquial who comes upon something after searching
E. dolphin A. troll B. latent C. grouseD. finder E. impede

15. noun open land usually with peaty soil covered with heather 23. verb wish ill or allow unwillingly; be envious of; set one's
and bracken and moss; one of the Muslim people of north Africa; heart on
of mixed Arab and Berber descent; converted to Islam in the 8th A. dolphin B. codex C. begrudge D. litany E. bard
century; conqueror of Spain in the 8th century; verb secure with
cables or ropes; come into or dock at a wharf; secure in or as if in 24. adj. vulnerably delicate; easily broken or damaged or
a berth or dock destroyed; lacking solidity or strength and liable to break
A. litany B. inhabit C. moor D. conjure E. A. compound B. fragile C. begrudge D. transient
fragile E. moor

16. noun sensing an odor by inhaling through the nose; verb inhale25. noun the act of sprinkling or splashing water; a light shower
audibly through the nose; perceive by inhaling through the nose that falls in some locations and not others nearby; verb scatter
A. resonate B. accord C. sniff D. diction E. with liquid; wet lightly; cause (a liquid) to spatter about,
bizarre especially with force; rain gently; distribute loosely
A. transform B. reverent C. sprinkle D.
17. adj. not presently active; potentially existing but not presently decree E. litany
evident or realized
A. incandescent B. latent C. constraint D. litany E. 26. adj. feeling or showing profound respect or veneration;
succor showing great reverence for god

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 15/24
A. bias B. academic C. Gawain D. transformE. sniff
reverent E. finder
34. noun a small or minor detail
27. verb be received or understood; sound with resonance A. inhabit B. minutia C. troll D.
A. conjure B. don C. reverent D. litany E. collapse E. bizarre
resonate
35. noun either of two saclike respiratory organs in the chest of
28. noun a plate makes an inked impression on a rubber-blanketed vertebrates; serves to remove carbon dioxide and provide oxygen
cylinder, which in turn transfers it to the paper; structure where a to the blood
wall or building narrows abruptly; a natural consequence of A. narrative B. lung C. fragile D. retrieve
development; a horizontal branch from the base of plant that E. infest
produces new plants from buds at its tips; a compensating
equivalent; the time at which something is supposed to begin; 36. adj. having the same consonant at the beginning of each
verb produce by offset printing; create an offset in; cause (printed stressed syllable
matter) to transfer or smear onto another surface; compensate for A. alliterative B. academic C. litany D. cascade
or counterbalance; make up for E. hew
A. infest B. fragile C. offset D. colloquial E. implacable
37. noun a junction where two things (as paper or film or magnetic
tape) have been joined together; joint made by overlapping two
29. adj. consisting of or characterized by the telling of a story;
ends and joining them together; verb join by interweaving strands;
noun a message that tells the particulars of an act or occurrence or
join together so as to form new genetic combinations; join the
course of events; presented in writing or drama or cinema or as a
ends of; perform a marriage ceremony
radio or television program
A. compound B. splice C. litany D. metrical E.
A. unified B. narrative C. latent D. alliterative
retrieve
E. submerge

38. verb run after, pick up, and bring to the master; recall
30. adj. emitting light as a result of being heated; characterized by
knowledge from memory; have a recollection; get or find back;
ardent emotion or intensity or brilliance
recover the use of
A. finder B. incandescent C. waive D. inhabit E.
A. metrical B. troll C. stalk D. succor E. retrieve
bough

39. adj. incapable of being placated

31. noun any of various small toothed whales with a beaklike
A. impede B. don C. trivia D. implacable E.
snout; larger than porpoises; large slender food and game fish
moor
widely distributed in warm seas (especially around Hawaii)
A. submerge B. fen C. accord D. dolphin
40. noun a stiff or threatening gait; the act of following prey
E. minutia
stealthily; a hunt for game carried on by following it stealthily or
waiting in ambush; a slender or elongated structure that supports a
32. verb be present in; be inside of; inhabit or live in
plant or fungus or a plant part or plant organ; material consisting
A. inhabit B. conjure C. lung D. finder E.
of seed coverings and small pieces of stem or leaves that have
kenning
been separated from the seeds; verb walk stiffly; go through (an
area) in search of prey; follow stealthily or recur constantly and
33. verb lie in wait, lie in ambush, behave in a sneaky and
spontaneously to
secretive manner; wait in hiding to attack; be about
A. stalk B. cascade C. alliterative D. transient
A. impede B. narrative C. lurk D.
E. fen

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 16/24
 ! J .R .R. Tolkien’s Beowulf translation, reviewed. "
Source : slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/05/j_r_r_tolkien_s_beowulf_translation_reviewed.html
Katy Waldman

Wordbank:

academic · bard · bedrock · begrudge · bias · bizarre · cascade · codex · colloquial · come ·
constraint · diction · don · emend · finder · finicky · fragile · gawain · hew · impede · implacable
· incandescent · kenning · latent · litany · lung · metrical · narrative · offset · resonate · retrieve
· reverent · sir · stalk · succor · trivia · unified · waive

A new Beowulf translation has come flowing out of the fiend-infested mist: The author is J .R .R. Tolkien, who upon his
death in 1973 left behind reams of lecture notes about the poem, as well as a typescript. According to his son
Christopher, the typescript, “on very thin paper ,” is in poor condition, the “right-hand edges being darkly discoloured and
in some cases badly broken or torn away .” In this it bears “an odd resemblance to the Beowulf manuscript itself ,” almost
consumed in an 18th-century fire, “the edges of the leaves … scorched and subsequently crumbled.”
Katy Waldman is a Slate staff writer.
The sense of precariousness and melancholy in that shared detail is reflected in the poem as a whole . (Tolkien, with his
love of scholarly _______________, would have loved the coincidence of two texts dissolving at the margins .)
Beowulf begins when a mysterious foundling arrives at Denmark from shores unknown and ends with a gray-haired king
on a pyre, his spirit passing into the beyond. The bright tale in between is transient—already disintegrating at the edges
long before it was even written down—and past those borders _______________ the monsters, incomprehensible, laden
with our oldest fears.
Tolkien was 34 when he finished the translation, one year into his post as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Ahead
of him lay decades of Old English scholarship and study, as well as The Hobbit, The Silmarillion , and the Lord of the
Rings trilogy, for which he’s best known. “I have all Beowulf translated, but in much hardly to my liking ,” he wrote to a
friend in 1926. He would later go back and _______________ the manuscript as his thoughts on the poem evolved; the
edition coming out this month splices the heroic _______________ with extras and deleted scenes—notes, commentary,
a poetic condensation of his prose translation (the Lay of Beowulf), and a _______________ retelling, the Sellic Spell,
that reads a lot like fan fiction.
Tolkien’s aim, according to his son’s introduction, was to _______________ “as close as he could to the exact meaning
in detail of the Old English poem, far closer than could ever be attained by translation into ‘alliterative verse .’ ” So this
Beowulf runs unmetered, in sentences, without the characteristic Anglo-Saxon thumping beats. Tolkien once wrote that
Old English poetry was “more masonry than music ,” and his prose translation largely reflects that architectural
_______________. Stacked clauses and other syntactical pileups _______________ the tune, though you can
sometimes hear a _______________ rhythm: “Eagerly the warriors mounted the prow, and the streaming seas swirled
upon the sand.”
Luckily, the plot and mood elements of Beowulf survive the form-switch. This is still the story of a Geatish warrior who
crosses the sea to _______________ the people of Denmark and their once-glorious king. For 12 years a monster called
Grendel has haunted Hrothgar’s meadhall, gobbling up his men, upsetting its order of wealth and song. Beowulf defeats
Grendel by tearing off his arm, and then dives into a demonic mere to finish off his mother. He returns in victory to
Geatland, weighed down with Hrothgar’s gifts of treasure, and rules for 50 years—“aged guardian of his rightful land .”

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 17/24
And then a dragon wakes in a deep, gold-glittering barrow and begins to fill the sky with fire. Beowulf must kill the worm
in a final act of bravery, which he carries out at the cost of his own life. Menaced by political enemies, kingless, his
people conduct his funeral and wait for the end.
Womp. Of course, Beowulf is more than that suddenly collapsed _______________ of _______________. It’s a rising
and a setting, remote, strange, and sad, and it contains some of literature’s brightest illuminations and deepest, least
knowable darks. In his 1936 essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics ,” Tolkien made an argument for the poem not
just as a historical or cultural document but as a work of art. His theory—that behind the text hovers a _______________
and masterfully potent creative imagination—transformed the way the world read Beowulf. People began to see the
loveliness in it (the lamplight, the hearth heat, the bonds of kinship) _______________ by the elegy (“resting places
swept by the wind robbed of laughter .”) Novels could explore its philosophical root system. Seamus Heaney could write
in the 2000 introduction to his own translation: “This is not just _______________ _______________ full of
anthropological interest and typical heroic-age motifs; it is poetry of a high order, in which passages of great lyric
intensity … rise like emanations from some fissure in the _______________ of the human capacity to endure.”
Shoot. Oh shoot. I shouldn’t have mentioned Heaney. I’m sorry. Now I feel like I need to compare the two Beowulfs, and
though I can’t speak to their relative scholarship, in terms of pure, thane-devouring pleasure, there’s no real contest. “It is
a composition not a tune ,” wrote Tolkien of the Anglo-Saxon original. Yet the Irish _______________ Heaney made it
both. His Beowulf, at once airier and rougher, feels more contemporary, less bogged down in _______________
minutiae. Grendel equals “reaver from hell ,” “dark death-shadow who lurked and swooped in the long nights on the
misty moors .” By contrast, here is Tolkien: “Grendel was that grim creature called, the ill-famed haunter of the marches
of the land, who kept the moors, the fastness of the fens, and unhappy one, inhabited long while the troll-kind’s home.”
I understand how some might prefer Tolkien’s version. The description, stately and involved, seems sprinkled with an
Arthurian grandeur; readers who love the Lord of the Rings may _______________ to that high _______________ and
steady, exact pacing. And it’s not that Tolkien can’t do immediacy. When he first conjured the dragon—“Now it came
blazing, gliding in looped curves, hastening to its fate”—I was breathless (and very reminded of Smaug). But he just as
often loses the story’s thread in a kind of _______________ hairsplitting. After that _______________ dragon sentence,
we get: “The shield well protected the life and limbs of the king renowned a lesser while than his desire had asked, if he
were permitted to possess victory in battle, as that time, on that first occasion of his life, for him fate decreed it not .” I
think that means that Beowulf’s arms buckled in the flames, but the translator’s admirable fidelity to—and, likely, his
matchless handle on—the precise turnings of the Old English fogged up the action.
But maybe you _______________ your right to those sorts of complaints when you open a Tolkien rendering of Beowulf.
(And it’s important to remember that Tolkien never intended this manuscript for publication .) The fantasy-shaper of
Middle Earth was also a “don’s _______________ ,” a leading scholar more or less fluent in Greek, Latin, Old English,
Welsh, Finnish, and a handful of Germanic Gothic tongues, who modernized medieval lyrics like _______________
_______________ and the Green Knight, Pearl, and _______________ Orfeo. Where Heaney has his ear to the ground,
trained on a nightmare’s thudding footsteps, Tolkien’s nose is in his books.
Tolkien’s assessment of the Beowulf poet is revealing: “It is a poem by a learned man writing of old times, who looking
back on the heroism and sorrow feels in them something permanent and something symbolical .” Tolkien himself was a
“learned man” who, gazing on ancient things, felt acutely, even as he brought worlds of erudition to bear on his
responses. Probably, the project of scholarship refined and deepened those responses. Nostalgia and regret, so central
to Beowulf, are presumably familiar mental states for someone who spends much of his time sifting through the past.
So the new translation seems especially attuned to transience and loss, from Beowulf’s premonitions before he fights the
dragon (“heavy was his mood, restless hastening toward death”) to a gorgeous passage about the last survivor of an
ancient civilization burying his gold. In his commentary on the scene, Tolkien remarks, with great emotional sensitivity:
The whole thing is sombre, tragic, sinister, curiously real. The “treasure” is not just some lucky wealth that will enable the
_______________ to have a good time, or marry the princess. It is laden with history, leading back into the dark heathen

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 18/24
ages beyond the memory of song, but not beyond the reach of imagination.
Actually, the commentary may be the best part of this new Beowulf. Not only does it offer context and aid (teasing apart
the webs of loyalty and conflict entwining Geats, Danes, and Swedes, for instance), but Tolkien-as-guide is delightful, an
irresistibly chatty schoolmaster in the Chaucerian mold. Also an ornery one. I got pissed when I read the famous opening
lines and saw “the sea where the whale rides” instead of the familiar “whale-road .” So I flipped, pissily, to the back,
where Tolkien explains that he derived the phrase from a _______________: one of several “pictorial descriptive
compounds” that “can be used in place of the normal plain word .” I know what a _______________ is. Where the hell
was whale-road?
Tolkien’s _______________ bent and Beowulf’s patterns of gloom and _______________ light feel intimately related.
Funny I should ask. “It is quite incorrect to translate it (as it is all too frequently translated) ‘whale road ,’ ” grouses
Tolkien. “It is incorrect stylistically since compounds of this sort sound in themselves clumsy or _______________ in
modern English … in this particular instance the unfortunate sound-association with ‘railroad’ increases the ineptitude. It
is incorrect in fact…”
The scolding goes on for, I joke not, three pages. At the end, Tolkien pronounces, Q .E .D., that the “word as
_______________ therefore means dolphin’s riding. … That is not evoked by ‘whale road’—which suggests a sort of
semi-submarine steam-engine running along submerged metal rails over the Atlantic.”
Burn! In the same way, Professor Tolkien kvetches about scribes who may have mistakenly written the name “Beowulf”
where they meant an earlier folk presence, Beow. (“One of the reddest and highest red herrings that were ever dragged
across a literary trail ,” he sniffs .) But the glossary contains more than shade. At one point, Tolkien considers Beowulf’s
ancestor Scyld Scefing, who sails into the lives of the Danes from a magical “elsewhere .” Scyld’s name means
something like Shield Sheaf-guy; he is modeled in part on pagan myths about a harvest god washed ashore in a shining,
corn-filled ship. Around J .R .R .’s commentary Christopher Tolkien has woven descriptions of “King Sheave” from a time-
travel book, The Lost Road, that his father penned but never published. (The figure turned into a minor obsession for
Tolkien, and perhaps a model for Gandalf the Grey .) As you read, these layers and echoes become seductive, sounding
the edges of a vanished continent of meaning. It’s as if, through intricate cataloguing, you might _______________ the
old things from the past—as if scholarship were chiefly memory, sent out like a flare against the dark. Desperately,
Hrothgar’s scop sings “how the Almighty wrought the earth … how triumphant He set the radiance of the sun and moon
… and adorned the regions of the world with boughs ,” while, outside, “the shapes of mantling shadow
_______________ gliding over the world.”
What I am trying to say is that Tolkien’s learning and Beowulf’s patterns of gloom and _______________ light feel
intimately related. The _______________ _______________ (as well as everything in the commentary section) follows
from a sensibility that knows too well what happens when order begins to fail. You can see the signs of social
disintegration when Tolkien evokes his hero’s pyre: “Then upon the hill warriors began the mightiest of funeral fires to
waken. Woodsmoke mounted black above the burning, a roaring flame ringed with weeping, till the swirling wind sank
quiet, and the body’s bony house was crumbled in the blazing core.”
In the spirit of collaborative scholarship, or maybe of genealogy, here is Heaney with the next few lines:
with hair bound up, (a Geat woman) unburdened herself of her worst fears, a wild _______________ of nightmare and
lament: her nation invaded, enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the
smoke.
In this moment Beowulf collapses all the nice distinctions scops, poets, and academics try so hard to preserve. The
bound hair seems to pour out of its _______________ along with the vocal _______________ of terror and grief. Images
bleed together as the bodies heap. Then, suddenly, the entire vision is consumed, made into “smoke ,” and absorbed by
an _______________ sky.
Meanwhile, if a group of scholars hadn’t broken into a burning building in 1731 to rescue the Beowulf _______________,
we’d know nothing of Grendel or Hrothgar. I do not _______________ Tolkien his pedantry in the face of the void.

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 19/24
“Almost fate decreed ,” he writes of the original manuscript, “that shall the blazing wood devour, the fire enfold .” Now his
noble translation joins the ranks of the narrowly saved. Hwæt!

kenning - noun conventional metaphoric name for something, grassy vegetation; usually is a transition zone between land and
used especially in Old English and Old Norse poetry water
minutia - noun a small or minor detail don - noun a Spanish courtesy title or form of address for men that
emend - verb make improvements or corrections to is prefixed to the forename; a European river in southwestern
finicky - adj. exacting especially about details Russia; flows into the Sea of Azov; Celtic goddess; mother of
alliterative - adj. having the same consonant at the beginning of Gwydion and Arianrhod; corresponds to Irish Danu; a Spanish
each stressed syllable gentleman or nobleman; the head of an organized crime family;
resonate - verb be received or understood; sound with resonance teacher at a university or college (especially at Cambridge or
submerge - verb cover completely or make imperceptible; put Oxford); verb put clothing on one's body
under water; sink below the surface; go under or as if under water; waive - verb do without or cease to hold or adhere to; lose or lose
fill or cover completely, usually with water the right to by some error, offense, or crime
trivia - noun something of small importance codex - noun an unbound manuscript of some ancient classic (as
splice - noun a junction where two things (as paper or film or distinguished from a scroll); an official list of chemicals or
magnetic tape) have been joined together; joint made by medicines etc.
overlapping two ends and joining them together; verb join by incandescent - adj. emitting light as a result of being heated;
interweaving strands; join together so as to form new genetic characterized by ardent emotion or intensity or brilliance
combinations; join the ends of; perform a marriage ceremony academic - adj. hypothetical or theoretical and not expected to
bedrock - noun solid unweathered rock lying beneath surface produce an immediate or practical result; marked by a narrow
deposits of soil; principles from which other truths can be derived focus on or display of learning especially its trivial aspects;
begrudge - verb wish ill or allow unwillingly; be envious of; set associated with academia or an academy; noun an educator who
one's heart on works at a college or university
moor - noun open land usually with peaty soil covered with lurk - verb lie in wait, lie in ambush, behave in a sneaky and
heather and bracken and moss; one of the Muslim people of north secretive manner; wait in hiding to attack; be about
Africa; of mixed Arab and Berber descent; converted to Islam in hew - verb strike with an axe; cut down, strike; make or shape as
the 8th century; conqueror of Spain in the 8th century; verb secure with an axe
with cables or ropes; come into or dock at a wharf; secure in or as impede - verb be a hindrance or obstacle to; block passage
if in a berth or dock through
litany - noun a prayer consisting of a series of invocations by the metrical - adj. the rhythmic arrangement of syllables; based on
priest with responses from the congregation; any long and tedious the meter as a standard of measurement
address or recital sheaf - noun a package of several things tied together for carrying
finder - noun optical device that helps a user to find the target of or storing
interest; someone who is the first to observe something; someone retrieve - verb run after, pick up, and bring to the master; recall
who comes upon something after searching knowledge from memory; have a recollection; get or find back;
infest - verb invade in great numbers; live on or in a host, as of recover the use of
parasites; occupy in large numbers or live on a host unified - adj. operating as a unit; formed or united into a whole
scorch - noun a discoloration caused by heat; a plant disease that fragile - adj. vulnerably delicate; easily broken or damaged or
produces a browning or scorched appearance of plant tissues; a destroyed; lacking solidity or strength and liable to break
surface burn; verb become scorched or singed under intense heat succor - noun assistance in time of difficulty; verb help in a
or dry conditions; destroy completely by or as if by fire; become difficult situation
superficially burned; make very hot and dry; burn slightly and sniff - noun sensing an odor by inhaling through the nose; verb
superficially so as to affect color inhale audibly through the nose; perceive by inhaling through the
troll - noun angling by drawing a baited line through the water; a nose
fisherman's lure that is used in trolling; (Scandanavian folklore) a stacked - adj. arranged in a stack; well or attractively formed with
supernatural creature (either a dwarf or a giant) that is supposed to respect to physique
live in caves or in the mountains; a partsong in which voices hover - verb hang in the air; fly or be suspended above; move to
follow each other; one voice starts and others join in one after and fro; be undecided about something; waver between conflicting
another until all are singing different parts of the song at the same positions or courses of action; be suspended in the air, as if in
time; verb speak or recite rapidly or in a rolling voice; praise or defiance of gravity; hang over, as of something threatening, dark,
celebrate in song; sing loudly and without inhibition; angle with a or menacing
hook and line drawn through the water; sing the parts of (a round) cascade - noun a succession of stages or operations or processes
in succession; cause to move round and round; circulate, move or units; a small waterfall or series of small waterfalls; a sudden
around downpour (as of tears or sparks etc) likened to a rain shower; verb
colloquial - adj. characteristic of informal spoken language or arrange (open windows) on a computer desktop so that they
conversation overlap each other, with the title bars visible; rush down in big
diction - noun the manner in which something is expressed in quantities, like a cascade
words; the articulation of speech regarded from the point of view grouse - noun popular game bird having a plump body and
of its intelligibility to the audience feathered legs and feet; flesh of any of various grouse of the
fen - noun 100 fen equal 1 yuan in China; low-lying wet land with family Tetraonidae; usually roasted; flesh too dry to broil; verb

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 20/24
hunt grouse; complain stealthily; a hunt for game carried on by following it stealthily or
dolphin - noun any of various small toothed whales with a waiting in ambush; a slender or elongated structure that supports a
beaklike snout; larger than porpoises; large slender food and game plant or fungus or a plant part or plant organ; material consisting
fish widely distributed in warm seas (especially around Hawaii) of seed coverings and small pieces of stem or leaves that have
conjure - verb engage in plotting or enter into a conspiracy, swear been separated from the seeds; verb walk stiffly; go through (an
together; ask for or request earnestly; summon into action or bring area) in search of prey; follow stealthily or recur constantly and
into existence, often as if by magic spontaneously to
reverent - adj. feeling or showing profound respect or veneration; adorn - verb make more attractive by adding ornament, colour,
showing great reverence for god etc.; furnish with power or authority; of kings or emperors; be
constraint - noun the act of constraining; the threat or use of force beautiful to look at
to control the thoughts or behavior of others; the state of being decree - noun a legally binding command or decision entered on
physically constrained; a device that retards something's motion the court record (as if issued by a court or judge); verb issue a
implacable - adj. incapable of being placated decree; decide with authority
bizarre - adj. conspicuously or grossly unconventional or unusual bias - adj. slanting diagonally across the grain of a fabric; noun a
collapse - noun a mishap caused by something suddenly falling partiality that prevents objective consideration of an issue or
down or caving in; an abrupt failure of function or health; the act situation; a line or cut across a fabric that is not at right angles to a
of throwing yourself down; a sudden large decline of business or side of the fabric; verb cause to be biased; influence in an unfair
the prices of stocks (especially one that causes additional failures); way
verb lose significance, effectiveness, or value; break down, narrative - adj. consisting of or characterized by the telling of a
literally or metaphorically; cause to burst; fold or close up; story; noun a message that tells the particulars of an act or
collapse due to fatigue, an illness, or a sudden attack; suffer a occurrence or course of events; presented in writing or drama or
nervous breakdown; fall apart cinema or as a radio or television program
transform - verb change in outward structure or looks; increase orbard - noun an ornamental caparison for a horse; a lyric poet;
decrease (an alternating current or voltage); change (a bacterial verb put a caparison on
cell) into a genetically distinct cell by the introduction of DNA latent - adj. not presently active; potentially existing but not
from another cell of the same or closely related species; convert presently evident or realized
(one form of energy) to another; change or alter in form, dissolve - noun (film) a gradual transition from one scene to the
appearance, or nature; subject to a mathematical transformation; next; the next scene is gradually superimposed as the former scene
change from one form or medium into another fades out; verb declare void; come to an end; bring the association
sprinkle - noun the act of sprinkling or splashing water; a light of to an end or cause to break up; become or cause to become soft
shower that falls in some locations and not others nearby; verb or liquid; pass into a solution; cause to go into a solution; become
scatter with liquid; wet lightly; cause (a liquid) to spatter about, weaker; cause to fade away; lose control emotionally; cause to
especially with force; rain gently; distribute loosely lose control emotionally; stop functioning or cohering as a unit
transient - adj. of a mental act; causing effects outside the mind; bough - noun any of the larger branches of a tree
lasting a very short time; noun (physics) a short-lived oscillation accord - noun sympathetic compatibility; concurrence of opinion;
in a system caused by a sudden change of voltage or current or a written agreement between two states or sovereigns; harmony of
load; one who stays for only a short time people's opinions or actions or characters; verb allow to have; go
offset - noun a plate makes an inked impression on a rubber- together
blanketed cylinder, which in turn transfers it to the paper; structure
where a wall or building narrows abruptly; a natural consequence Full list : kenning, minutia, emend, finicky, alliterative,
of development; a horizontal branch from the base of plant that resonate, submerge, triviasplice, bedrock, begrudge, moor,
produces new plants from buds at its tips; a compensating litany, finder, infest, scorch, troll, colloquial, diction, fen, don,
equivalent; the time at which something is supposed to begin; waive, codex, incandescent, academic, lurk, hew, impede,
verb produce by offset printing; create an offset in; cause (printed metrical, sheaf, retrieve, unified, fragile, succor, sniff, stacked,
matter) to transfer or smear onto another surface; compensate for hover, cascade, grouse, dolphin, conjure, reverent, constraint,
or counterbalance; make up for implacable, bizarre, collapse, transform, sprinkle, transient,
compound - adj. of leaf shapes; of leaves composed of several offset, compound, invade, inhabit, lung, stalk, adorn, decree,
similar parts or lobes; consisting of two or more substances or bias, narrative, bard, latent, dissolve, bough, accord
ingredients or elements or parts; composed of many distinct
individuals united to form a whole or colony; noun an enclosure
of residences and other building (especially in the Orient); a whole
formed by a union of two or more elements or parts; (chemistry) a
substance formed by chemical union of two or more elements or
ingredients in definite proportion by weight; verb put or add
together; combine so as to form a whole; mix; create by mixing or
combining; calculate principal and interest; make more intense,
stronger, or more marked
invade - verb march aggressively into another's territory by
military force for the purposes of conquest and occupation;
penetrate or assault, in a harmful or injurious way; occupy in large
numbers or live on a host; to intrude upon, infringe, encroach on,
violate
inhabit - verb be present in; be inside of; inhabit or live in
lung - noun either of two saclike respiratory organs in the chest of
vertebrates; serves to remove carbon dioxide and provide oxygen
to the blood
stalk - noun a stiff or threatening gait; the act of following prey

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 21/24
ANSWERS TO Definitions Multiple runs unmetered, in sentences, without the characteristic
Anglo-Saxon thumping beats. Tolkien once wrote that Old
Choice Worksheet English poetry was “more masonry than music ,” and his
prose translation largely reflects that architectural bias .
1. E 2. D 3. E 4. E 5. A 6. E 7. E Stacked clauses and other syntactical pileups impede the
8. B 9. B 10. D 11. D 12. C 13. E tune, though you can sometimes hear a latent rhythm:
“Eagerly the warriors mounted the prow, and the streaming
14. B 15. C 16. C 17. B 18. C 19. E 20. D seas swirled upon the sand.”
21. B 22. D 23. C 24. B 25. C 26. D Luckily, the plot and mood elements of Beowulf survive the
27. E 28. C 29. B 30. B 31. D 32. A 33. C form-switch. This is still the story of a Geatish warrior who
34. B 35. B 36. A 37. B 38. E 39. D crosses the sea to succor the people of Denmark and their
40. A once-glorious king. For 12 years a monster called Grendel
has haunted Hrothgar’s meadhall, gobbling up his men,
upsetting its order of wealth and song. Beowulf defeats
ANSWERS TO J .R .R. Tolkien’s Grendel by tearing off his arm, and then dives into a
Beowulf translation, reviewed. demonic mere to finish off his mother. He returns in victory
to Geatland, weighed down with Hrothgar’s gifts of
treasure, and rules for 50 years—“aged guardian of his
KatyWaldman rightful land .” And then a dragon wakes in a deep, gold-
A new Beowulf translation has come flowing out of the glittering barrow and begins to fill the sky with fire.
fiend-infested mist: The author is J .R .R. Tolkien, who Beowulf must kill the worm in a final act of bravery, which
upon his death in 1973 left behind reams of lecture notes he carries out at the cost of his own life. Menaced by
about the poem, as well as a typescript. According to his political enemies, kingless, his people conduct his funeral
son Christopher, the typescript, “on very thin paper ,” is in and wait for the end.
poor condition, the “right-hand edges being darkly Womp. Of course, Beowulf is more than that suddenly
discoloured and in some cases badly broken or torn away .” collapsed lung of narrative . It’s a rising and a setting,
In this it bears “an odd resemblance to remote, strange, and sad, and it contains some of literature’s
the Beowulf manuscript itself ,” almost consumed in an brightest illuminations and deepest, least knowable darks.
18th-century fire, “the edges of the leaves … scorched and In his 1936 essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the
subsequently crumbled.” Critics ,” Tolkien made an argument for the poem not just
Katy Waldman is a Slate staff writer. as a historical or cultural document but as a work of art. His
The sense of precariousness and melancholy in that shared theory—that behind the text hovers a unified and
detail is reflected in the poem as a whole . (Tolkien, with masterfully potent creative imagination—transformed the
his love of scholarly trivia , would have loved the way the world read Beowulf. People began to see the
coincidence of two texts dissolving at the margins .) loveliness in it (the lamplight, the hearth heat, the bonds of
Beowulf begins when a mysterious foundling arrives at kinship) offset by the elegy (“resting places swept by the
Denmark from shores unknown and ends with a gray-haired wind robbed of laughter .”) Novels could explore its
king on a pyre, his spirit passing into the beyond. The philosophical root system. Seamus Heaney could write in
bright tale in between is transient—already disintegrating at the 2000 introduction to his own translation: “This is not
the edges long before it was even written down—and past just metrical narrative full of anthropological interest and
those borders stalk the monsters, incomprehensible, laden typical heroic-age motifs; it is poetry of a high order, in
with our oldest fears. which passages of great lyric intensity … rise like
Tolkien was 34 when he finished the translation, one year emanations from some fissure in the bedrock of the human
into his post as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. capacity to endure.”
Ahead of him lay decades of Old English scholarship and Shoot. Oh shoot. I shouldn’t have mentioned Heaney. I’m
study, as well as The Hobbit, The Silmarillion , and sorry. Now I feel like I need to compare the two Beowulfs,
the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for which he’s best known. “I and though I can’t speak to their relative scholarship, in
have all Beowulf translated, but in much hardly to my terms of pure, thane-devouring pleasure, there’s no real
liking ,” he wrote to a friend in 1926. He would later go contest. “It is a composition not a tune ,” wrote Tolkien of
back and emend the manuscript as his thoughts on the poem the Anglo-Saxon original. Yet the Irish bard Heaney made it
evolved; the edition coming out this month splices the both. His Beowulf, at once airier and rougher, feels more
heroic narrative with extras and deleted scenes—notes, contemporary, less bogged down in academic minutiae.
commentary, a poetic condensation of his prose translation Grendel equals “reaver from hell ,” “dark death-shadow
(the Lay of Beowulf), and a colloquial retelling, the Sellic who lurked and swooped in the long nights on the misty
Spell, that reads a lot like fan fiction. moors .” By contrast, here is Tolkien: “Grendel was that
Tolkien’s aim, according to his son’s introduction, was to grim creature called, the ill-famed haunter of the marches
hew “as close as he could to the exact meaning in detail of of the land, who kept the moors, the fastness of the fens,
the Old English poem, far closer than could ever be attained and unhappy one, inhabited long while the troll-kind’s
by translation into ‘alliterative verse .’ ” So this Beowulf home.”

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 22/24
I understand how some might prefer Tolkien’s version. The whale rides” instead of the familiar “whale-road .” So I
description, stately and involved, seems sprinkled with an flipped, pissily, to the back, where Tolkien explains that he
Arthurian grandeur; readers who love the Lord of the Rings derived the phrase from a kenning : one of several
may resonate to that high diction and steady, exact pacing. “pictorial descriptive compounds” that “can be used in
And it’s not that Tolkien can’t do immediacy. When he first place of the normal plain word .” I know what a kenning is.
conjured the dragon—“Now it came blazing, gliding in Where the hell was whale-road?
looped curves, hastening to its fate”—I was breathless (and Tolkien’s academic bent and Beowulf’s patterns of gloom
very reminded of Smaug). But he just as often loses the and fragile light feel intimately related.
story’s thread in a kind of reverent hairsplitting. After that Funny I should ask. “It is quite incorrect to translate it (as it
incandescent dragon sentence, we get: “The shield well is all too frequently translated) ‘whale road ,’ ” grouses
protected the life and limbs of the king renowned a lesser Tolkien. “It is incorrect stylistically since compounds of
while than his desire had asked, if he were permitted to this sort sound in themselves clumsy or bizarre in modern
possess victory in battle, as that time, on that first occasion English … in this particular instance the unfortunate sound-
of his life, for him fate decreed it not .” I think that means association with ‘railroad’ increases the ineptitude. It is
that Beowulf’s arms buckled in the flames, but the incorrect in fact…”
translator’s admirable fidelity to—and, likely, his matchless The scolding goes on for, I joke not, three pages. At the
handle on—the precise turnings of the Old English fogged end, Tolkien pronounces, Q .E .D., that the “word as
up the action. kenning therefore means dolphin’s riding. … That is not
But maybe you waive your right to those sorts of evoked by ‘whale road’—which suggests a sort of semi-
complaints when you open a Tolkien rendering of Beowulf. submarine steam-engine running along submerged metal
(And it’s important to remember that Tolkien never rails over the Atlantic.”
intended this manuscript for publication .) The fantasy- Burn! In the same way, Professor Tolkien kvetches about
shaper of Middle Earth was also a “don’s don ,” a leading scribes who may have mistakenly written the name
scholar more or less fluent in Greek, Latin, Old English, “Beowulf” where they meant an earlier folk presence,
Welsh, Finnish, and a handful of Germanic Gothic tongues, Beow. (“One of the reddest and highest red herrings that
who modernized medieval lyrics like Sir Gawain and the were ever dragged across a literary trail ,” he sniffs .) But
Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. Where Heaney has his the glossary contains more than shade. At one point,
ear to the ground, trained on a nightmare’s thudding Tolkien considers Beowulf’s ancestor Scyld Scefing, who
footsteps, Tolkien’s nose is in his books. sails into the lives of the Danes from a magical
Tolkien’s assessment of the Beowulf poet is revealing: “It is “elsewhere .” Scyld’s name means something like Shield
a poem by a learned man writing of old times, who looking Sheaf-guy; he is modeled in part on pagan myths about a
back on the heroism and sorrow feels in them something harvest god washed ashore in a shining, corn-filled ship.
permanent and something symbolical .” Tolkien himself Around J .R .R .’s commentary Christopher Tolkien has
was a “learned man” who, gazing on ancient things, felt woven descriptions of “King Sheave” from a time-travel
acutely, even as he brought worlds of erudition to bear on book, The Lost Road, that his father penned but never
his responses. Probably, the project of scholarship refined published. (The figure turned into a minor obsession for
and deepened those responses. Nostalgia and regret, so Tolkien, and perhaps a model for Gandalf the Grey .) As
central to Beowulf, are presumably familiar mental states you read, these layers and echoes become seductive,
for someone who spends much of his time sifting through sounding the edges of a vanished continent of meaning. It’s
the past. as if, through intricate cataloguing, you might retrieve the
So the new translation seems especially attuned to old things from the past—as if scholarship were chiefly
transience and loss, from Beowulf’s premonitions before he memory, sent out like a flare against the dark. Desperately,
fights the dragon (“heavy was his mood, restless hastening Hrothgar’s scop sings “how the Almighty wrought the earth
toward death”) to a gorgeous passage about the last … how triumphant He set the radiance of the sun and moon
survivor of an ancient civilization burying his gold. In his … and adorned the regions of the world with boughs ,”
commentary on the scene, Tolkien remarks, with great while, outside, “the shapes of mantling shadow come
emotional sensitivity: gliding over the world.”
The whole thing is sombre, tragic, sinister, curiously real. What I am trying to say is that Tolkien’s learning and
The “treasure” is not just some lucky wealth that will Beowulf’s patterns of gloom and fragile light feel
enable the finder to have a good time, or marry the princess.intimately related. The finicky diction (as well as
It is laden with history, leading back into the dark heathen everything in the commentary section) follows from a
ages beyond the memory of song, but not beyond the reach sensibility that knows too well what happens when order
of imagination. begins to fail. You can see the signs of social disintegration
Actually, the commentary may be the best part of this new when Tolkien evokes his hero’s pyre: “Then upon the hill
Beowulf. Not only does it offer context and aid (teasing warriors began the mightiest of funeral fires to waken.
apart the webs of loyalty and conflict entwining Geats, Woodsmoke mounted black above the burning, a roaring
Danes, and Swedes, for instance), but Tolkien-as-guide is flame ringed with weeping, till the swirling wind sank
delightful, an irresistibly chatty schoolmaster in the quiet, and the body’s bony house was crumbled in the
Chaucerian mold. Also an ornery one. I got pissed when I blazing core.”
read the famous opening lines and saw “the sea where the In the spirit of collaborative scholarship, or maybe of

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 23/24
genealogy, here is Heaney with the next few lines:
with hair bound up, (a Geat woman) 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.
In this moment Beowulf collapses all the nice distinctions
scops, poets, and academics try so hard to preserve. The
bound hair seems to pour out of its constraint along with the
vocal cascade of terror and grief. Images bleed together as
the bodies heap. Then, suddenly, the entire vision is
consumed, made into “smoke ,” and absorbed by an
implacable sky.
Meanwhile, if a group of scholars hadn’t broken into a
burning building in 1731 to rescue the Beowulf codex ,
we’d know nothing of Grendel or Hrothgar. I do not
begrudge Tolkien his pedantry in the face of the void.
“Almost fate decreed ,” he writes of the original
manuscript, “that shall the blazing wood devour, the fire
enfold .” Now his noble translation joins the ranks of the
narrowly saved. Hwæt!
Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary by J .R .R.
Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt.

G. Destot – Lycée Henri IV - Beowulf & the Origins of Literature in English - 24/24