Between Philolgy And Desire, Part 3
Ok, we’ve waited long enough: it’s time to dig into why I called this series Between Philology and Desire. We’ll get to that soon, I promise. If my last post was about philology—the fussy, tenacious archaeology of language—then this one very much goes into desire. Because as much as we might want to get to the “real” meaning of a text, that is a big ask. We inevitably bring our own influences, conditioned by the limits of our cultural hinterlands, or our relationship to society, or to the past. We aren’t neutral observers of language, nor can we ever hope to be. And that’s fine.
In this post, we’ll look at different translations of the great Old English epic poem Beowulf. It’s a long, strange poem in many ways but the crux of it is this: in sixth-century Denmark, King Hrothgar and his court at the hall of Heorot are beset by a monster called Grendel, who terrorises and slaughters at will. Enter Beowulf, a hero from the nation of the Geats, who turns up to Heorot, humiliates the king’s champion Unferth in a verbal battle, before killing Grendel (in the hall) and his mother (at the bottom of a mere). There is a break a little over halfway through the poem before we jump to Beowulf in his later life where, as king of the Geats, he is forced to defend his people from a fire-breathing dragon, only to die heroically in the process. His people are left bereft, leaderless, and the poem ends with them subject to an uncertain fate. This barely does the poem justice and it is dense with thematic complexity on the nature of heroism, the power of words, and human mortality. The poem is a literary monument for good reason and it has been translated many, many times in the course of the past two hundred years.
Part 1: a gleam of recognition
As one of the great Anglophone poets of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney’s version was hotly anticipated in a way that only few translations of ancient texts are. Heaney himself had been a student of English at Queen’s University, Belfast, taking all the linguistics and medieval literature classes he could, and emerging with a first class degree. It was as a direct consequence of his love of the Old English epic and medieval Icelandic sagas that he came to experiment with stylistic aspects of this poetry in his own verse, including imaginative use of compounds and dialect words, especially in his 1975 collection entitled North, in which his poem of the same title urges us to ‘lie down/in the word-hoard, burrow/ the coil and gleam/ of your furrowed brain’. While Heaney was almost uniquely attuned to the language of the poem, another factor also made his translation much anticipated, namely his own origins in an English-speaking community far removed from the conservative quads and colleges of Britain’s elite higher education institutions: Northern Irish, Catholic, republican in sympathies.
In his translator’s introduction to the poem, Heaney states that he felt robbed of his own mother tongue of Irish growing up, how he had perceived English and Irish to be, in his words, ‘adversarial tongues’, irreconcilably linked to opposing—if contingent—cultures, histories and literatures.1 This led, understandably, to a degree of anxiety on his part, an anxiety tied to a fundamental question of the relationship between language and literature. It was in a lecture on the history of the English language by Professor John Braidwood that began to help Heaney work through his conflicted relationship with native Ulster English. Braidwood, Heaney tells us, went off on one of those illuminating tangents that typify the free-form lecturing style of eminent academics: he mentioned the English word whiskey was in fact from the same root as Irish and Scots Gaelic uisce, which simply means ‘water’; if you pursued the etymology of the River Usk in South Wales, you would find it had the same source, that it was in some sense the River Whiskey. He goes on to explain the effect that this revelation had on him; as with any narrative of genesis like this, we can’t be sure that Heaney wasn’t rationalising his response after the fact, but that doesn’t make the effect or the analysis any less real, less resonant:
The Irish/English duality, the Celtic/Saxon antithesis were momentarily collapsed an in the resulting etymological eddy a gleam of recognition flashed through the synapses and I glimpsed an elsewhere of potential that seemed at the same time to be a somewhere being remembered. The place on the language map where the Usk and the uisce and the whiskey coincided was definitely a place where the spirit might find a loophole… away into some unpartitioned linguistic country, a region where one’s language would not be simply a badge of ethnicity or a matter of cultural preference or an official imposition, but an entry into further language. And I eventually came upon one of these loopholes in Beowulf itself.
I glimpsed an elsewhere of potential that seemed at the same time to be a somewhere being remembered. This is where the particular creative energy, the particular translational energy, of Heaney’s own method comes to the fore: of spaces distant and foreign, mediated by a language, a dialect, that is simultaneously deeply personal and philologically expansive. The act of translation is here an act of remembering, rather than straightforward linguistic transferral, an associative act with all the half-recalled relations, gaps and instabilities, that characterise memory. It is little wonder, I think, that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the greats of postcolonial literature and theory, has called translation ‘the most intimate act of reading’.2 Heaney goes on to tell us about the intimacy he felt in picking his way through Beowulf, and the particular moment at which a thousand years fell away precipitously: he came across the word þolian, which is one of Old English’s verbs meaning ‘to suffer’ or ‘to endure’, and, once he had digested that unusual spelling, he ‘gradually realised that it was not strange at all, for it was the word that older and less educated people would have used in the country where I grew up. “They’ll just have to learn to thole”, my aunt would say about some family who had suffered an unforeseen bereavement’. This reminded him that his language was, in his words, a historical heritage, or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it beautifully, fossil poetry. Heaney again:
What I was experiencing as I kept meeting up with thole on its multicultural odyssey was the feeling that Osip Mandelstam once defined as a “nostalgia for world culture”. And this was a nostalgia I didn’t even know I suffered until I experienced its fulfilment in this little epiphany. It was as if, on the analogy of baptism by desire, I had undergone something like illumination by philology.
I wanted to dwell on Heaney’s story of translation because it speaks to the way in which teasing at a word, that favourite pastime of philologists, unlocks chains of meaning that quickly spin out in an eddying spiral of connections and instincts, some personal, some universal. In the last post, I discussed this in terms of the problems inherent in translating a word like ānhaga, our ‘solitary one’, largely from the perspective of Old English audiences, insofar as that is possible. I tried to figure out what might be lost any modern translation, what associations your average Old English speaker might have been attuned to that we can’t hope to adequately communicate or represent, and what inadvertent semantic signals Modern English glosses might omit.
Part 2: The past made present
I want to shift the perspective the other way, toward thinking about what Beowulf has meant for the numerous people who have turned their hand towards translating the poem in the past couple of centuries, and in doing so invariably—inevitably— accommodated it, to some extent, to modern tastes and cultural anxieties. For Heaney, the happy convergence of past and present helped to bridge the gap between Standard English and Ulster English, to reassure him that a non-standard dialect was a legitimate vehicle for translation, and he used this to his advantage to lend a fresh aspect to this poem, as well as to give him creative flexibility. Thole of course makes it into the poem, namely at the beginning when it is recounted that ‘God knows that the Danes had tholed, the long times and troubles’, translating lines 14a-15’s ‘þæt hie ær drugon aldorlease lange hwile’. Hugh Magennis has done a good job of surveying the other words that appear, including stook at line 329, meaning ‘an upright bundle of sheaves’ and referring to a stack of spears; hirpling at line 978, meaning ‘walking with difficulty, limping’, and used in reference to Grendel’s injuries after his battle with Beowulf in an alliterating tour de force (‘He is hasped and hooped and hirpling with pain, limping and looped in it)’; wean, meaning ‘a young child’, which is used by Beowulf at line 2433 to refer to himself during his fosterage under King Hrethel.3 Other dialect words include blather, meaning ‘idle chatter’, hoke, meaning ‘to dig’, kesh, meaning a ‘makeshift road across a peat bog’, and bawn, meaning ‘a walled enclosure’, often applied to the settlements of British settlers in Ireland. I’ll get to the particular ideological implications of the use of these non-standard words in translation later, but first I want to focus in on a couple of examples to see how Heaney uses dialect for stylistic effect, as well as to get a sense how he actually goes about the task of translation.
Early on in the poem, Beowulf gets into a verbal battle (or flyting) with Unferth, a Danish champion, who questions whether he had really beat another man called Breca in a swimming contest. In the course of this rebuttal, Beowulf suggests that Grendel:
hafað onfunden þæt he þa fæhðe ne þearf,
atole ecg-þræce eower leode
swiðe onsittan, Sige Scyldinga…
Grendel has found that he needn’t fear a feud, terrible sword-violence, from your people, the Victory-Shieldings (my translation)
In Heaney’s version, these lines became:
But he [Grendel] knows he need never be in dread
of your blade making a mizzle of his blood
or of vengeance arriving ever from this quarter
—from the Victory-Shieldings, the shoulderers of the spear.
The sense of the lines is mostly kept, and Heaney doesn’t tamper with the syntax too much. However, he amplifies the personal attack on Unferth, carrying it over from the immediately preceding lines in the Old English, linking the Danish hero’s cowardice with that of his people. He forgoes translating the compound ecg-þræce, meaning something like ‘sword violence’, directly, writing instead ‘your blade making a mizzle of his blood’.
Even in these few lines, there is quite a lot to consider about his translation choices: most immediately there is of course that dialect word mizzle, which the OED defines as ‘very fine mist or rain’. While not derived from the original text, Heaney still shows his characteristic stylistic eye for detail: quite apart from its aural usefulness, it is not uncommon for blood to be represented by another word for liquid in Old English: we find compounds such as heaþoswate (war-sweat) elsewhere in Beowulf, and it would be a short leap to ‘blade-mizzle’ as a kenning for blood or gore. So while ecg-þræcu isn’t translated directly, Heaney stays true to the creative spirit of the compound, the word mizzle foregrounding the phrase and giving Beowulf’s language a distinctive colloquial edge that perhaps shows him as an outsider, maybe even a little rustic amid the riches of Heorot and the preening Unferth. There are other things to say about Heaney’s rendering of this line that I won’t dwell upon too long, but I do want to note the difference in emphasis between the Old English and his version: I’ve already mentioned how the attack on Unferth is emphasised further, but so too is the criticism of the Danes in general, with an additional noun phrase in apposition to Victory-Shieldings: ‘the shoulderers of the spear’, alluding to the poem’s opening invocation of the Gar-Dena, the ‘spear Danes’. By extending this line and increasing the alliterative emphasis on the Danes themselves, Beowulf’s criticism of his hosts becomes more pointed than in the original, especially given that Heaney has him single out the warlike aspects of their identity.
Part 4: Knees up in Heorot
Heaney’s use of dialect is only one part of the story, then, and it has to be considered in light of the wider translation choices that he makes. Towards the end of Beowulf’s fight with Grendel at lines 767 to 769a, the narrator recounts how the entire hall resounds at the noise of the combat between man and monster:
Dryht-sele dynede; Denum eallum wearð,
ceaster-buendum, cenra gehwylcum,
eorlum ealuscearwen.
The princely hall resounded; there was for all the Danes, the hall-dwellers, each of the brave ones, the noblemen, terror (my translation)
This is Old English poetic syntax at its most troublesome and staccato, with an abundance of variation, that peculiar poetic habit of repeating the same thing in a slightly different way (i.e. ‘all the Danes, the hall-dwellers, each of the brave ones, the noblemen’ etc).4 In other words, the people of Heorot, apparently packed to the rafters, were in terror at the sound of the battle unfolding in the main hall. My own translation, along with any number of translations, creative or otherwise, disguises the fact that these two and a half lines contain one of the most debated words in the poem: ealuscerwen (this is a hapax legomenon, a Greek term for a word that is only recorded once in a language). Indeed, if you look at this passage in the popular, student-friendly A Guide to Old English, the editors at this point provide a footnote to ealuscerwen that simply says ‘?terror?. A mysterious word, recorded only here’. However, the standard scholarly edition of the poem, known as Klaeber’s Beowulf, devotes a full three-and-a-half(!) page commentry on possible interpretations.
The word seems to be a combination of the noun ealu, meaning ‘ale’, and an unattested word *scerwen, which is probably means something along the lines of ‘to grant or to allot’, and thus something like ‘allocation or portion of ale’. However, most argue that ealuscerwen must have a negative connotation in this context. Right? After all, the related word bescerwen means ‘to deprive’. From this, a meaning of terror or dismay is usually suggested, with the logic being that it is a terrible thing to be deprived of one’s booze. So, instead of there being a sharing of ale for the cowering Danes, we instead end up with a deprivation of ale, or, metaphorically: terror. With me?
There are endless more complexities to the debate over the meaning of this word, including other suggested reconstructions like *ealuscearpen, meaning ‘indigestion’, but I won’t bore you with them, much as I might like to. What is important is that the word has been ascribed contested, often actively contradictory meanings at various points in the scholarly history of the poem, with most favouring the negative for rather obvious reasons. Heaney, however, cuts through the problem at a stroke:
And now the timbers trembled and sang, a hall-session that harrowed every Dane inside the stockade.
As is typical of Heaney’s determinedly narrative-driven translation, he trims away the excess of repetition that characterises these lines in the Old English, maintaining only every Dane, translating denum eallum. Ealuscerwen itself is given the gloss ‘hall-session’, a compound word that features a commonplace noun alongside the Hiberno-English ‘session’, which, in a footnote, Heaney himself explains can mean ‘a gathering where musicians and singers perform for their own enjoyment’; but, for many English speakers around the world, the word also retains a sense of an extended bout of drinking. Rather than simply using the preferred, somewhat less evocative, definition of dictionaries and grammars, Heaney instead uses this as an opportunity to give the description the inflection of dialect, as well as make the ongoing fight part of a rowdy knees-up of a musical performance, with the verb dynian, ‘to resound’, becoming ‘trembled and sang’. The people of Heorot aren’t alarmed by being deprived of ale, but instead by the monstrous parody of a good old festive knees up taking place in the main hall, the combatants becoming two drunks at the end of the night having sunk too deeply into their cups. Heaney doesn’t just conjure this imagery from nowhere and his translation is informed by a keen knowledge of the text and an understanding of what effect the original poet was trying to create at this crucial point in the narrative.
The Beowulf-poet describes how Grendel approaches the hall with wistfylle wen, that is ‘the expectation of the fill of feasting’; what follows is a grim pervasion of the indulgence and revelry of the hall as Grendel devours an unlucky member of Hrothgar’s retinue. The racket caused by their hall-session also calls back to the opening of the poem and Grendel’s distress at having to listen to the dream… hlude in healle ‘joys… loud in the hall’ at lines 88b-89a, or in Heaney’s words, ‘it harrowed him to hear the din of the loud banquet in the hall’. And, as Beowulf takes Grendel firmly within his fearful grip, the Old English poem tells us at lines 782-788a that:
Sweg up astag
niwe geneahhe; Norð-Denum stod
atelic egesa, anra gehwylcum
þara þe of welle wop gehyrdon,
gryre leoð galan Godes andsacan
sige-leasne sang, sar wanigean
helle hæfton.
In Heaney, this becomes:
Then an extraordinary wail arose, and bewildering fear came over the Danes. Everyone felt it who heard that cry as it echoed of the wall, a God-cursed scream and strain of catastrophe, the howl of the loser, the lament of the hell-serf, keening his wound.
Scream and song combine, with Grendel lamenting his defeat, rounding off the hideous, thundering hall-session with a grisly dirge. Heaney’s version takes the philological crux of ealuscerwen and uses it as a way to tease out and give emphasis to aspects of the original that were already there, like a portrait restorer freshening up highlights and colour on an old painting, but maintaining the essence of the artwork. Crucially, it is the dialect-inflected hall-session that opens up this creative space.
Part 5: “Heaneywulf”
Heaney’s version attracted some controversy when it was finally published. A number of scholars condemned the poet for his postcolonial interests, perhaps most famously in Howell Chickering’s review “Heaneywulf“. It was as if Heaney was free to simply detach himself from his own upbringing and lifetime of accumulated cultural and literary knowledge and present a pristinely ‘neutral’, non-political Beowulf—whatever the hell that might mean in the context of a poem that deals with political struggle and the problems inherent in a society where violence is so central to lived experience. As John D. Niles has eloquently put it:
Just as the Beowulf poet offered members of his audience a meditation on the problem of violence in civil society through a narrative fiction set in the remote past, so does Heaney in his own way, in his own time.5
The idea that a non-ideological translation of any text is possible, even desirable, is a comforting fiction. And regardless, Heaney’s use of dialect, in particular, is actually rather modest overall, and his reliance on Hiberno-English is minimal. And, as the example of mizzle shows, many of the lexical choices that he makes are not limited purely to Northern Irish dialects of the language. Mizzle does have a non-standard ring, it’s true, but as the Oxford English Dictionary points out its distribution includes Britain and North America in addition to Ireland; wean, on the other hand, is a word that can be found in various forms in Scotland and north-east England.
Other words used by Heaney that are arguably archaic rather than straightforwardly regional, let alone Hiberno-English, include howe, meaning a ‘hollow’ or ‘barrow’, reaver, meaning ‘one who carries out raids’, and boltered, meaning ‘matted’. As Hugh Magennis has shown, what makes much of Heaney’s translation Heaney’s is in fact the incorporation of decidedly everyday language and conversational register into his verse: he uses ‘well-worn idioms and sayings, thereby calculatedly incorporating the prosaic into his poetry’, including things like ‘hold the line’, ‘killer instinct’, ‘unless I am mistaken’, ‘anyone with gumption’, ‘bad blood’ and so on. Magennis goes on to suggest that this all helps to contribute towards a ‘texture of the vernacular in which traditional forms of speech reflect a traditional outlook on life’, though this is a rather deterministic view of the relationship between language and identity. Regardless, by relying on such colloquial language, Heaney also manages to reflect the very combination of the creative and formulaic linguistic energies the the Beowulf-poet themself was working in: Old English poetry is full of popular aphorisms and stylistic repetitions that are often difficult to adequately translate in modern English without feeling overly arch, even bombastic. Relying on everyday language is a neatly counterintuitive way of rendering these characteristics so that they are digestible for a general reading public.
Heaney’s version, then, is an interesting one in terms of the division between the domesticating and foreignising energies that are thought to animate most translations of foreign-language literature, regardless of the cultural context or time. On the one hand, Heaney’s self-conscious incorporation of Hiberno-English and colloquialism disturbs our notion that any good translation has to be in the standard language. Heaney’s version of the poem is fundamentally readable, and transforms it into the sort of ripping yarn that we might hope to hear from Hrothgar’s own scop if we were overwintering in Heorot.
Heaney’s translation ultimately scrambles the theoretical notion that every translation is either domesticating or foreignising. The former is a translation that does its utmost to bring the original into familiar language, while the latter might deliberately try to be alienating, perhaps by very closely imitating aspects of the original, even it seems awkward or opaque to mdoern tastes. However, the translation scholar Laurence Venuti has suggested:
All translation, regardless of genre or text type, including translation that seeks to register linguistic and cultural differences, is an interpretation that fundamentally domesticates the source text.6
And, as he goes on to say, any attempt to make a text sound deliberately foreign is ultimately only ever going to do it according to the recipient language’s own terms. Heaney, despite being the product of a working class Catholic community in Northern Ireland, was still highly educated and immersed in Standard English. By projecting what he perceived as the characteristic language and register of the community of his youth onto the distant past of England’s early history, he made a quietly radical claim to the Anglophone canon and what it means to translate this material for a modern audience.
Part 6: Medieval meaning, Victorian tastes
For most of its history, in the period after the Norman Conquest, Beowulf remained unread and unrecognised. It wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that it came to the attention of Icelandic scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín, who was attracted to the Scandinavian background of the story, and went about making an edition of the text with a facing Latin translation. Hugh Magennis shows how, even in the nineteenth century, both his text and translation of the poem were received poorly, but points out that he did it at a time when the understanding of Old English poetry was poor and appreciation of it as literature virtually non-existent. Thorkelín’s efforts still represent a milestone, then, and it is in large part because of his efforts that the poem began to attract attention from poets, even if they didn’t always find what they expected from it. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century perceptions of medieval literature and culture were primarily rooted in knowledge of chivalric romance, especially as filtered through Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’arthur, which meant that many ended up having quite a dim view of Old English poetry’s artistic worth.
While academic John Mitchell Kemble had provided a solid, scholarly gloss to the poem in 1833 and John Joseph Conybeare had translated a few choice extracts in 1826, it wasn’t until Athanasius Diedrich Wackerbarth’s 1849 translation that a truly popular full version was attempted, one akin to Heaney’s efforts 150 years later. I’m going to let Wackerbarth’s translation speak for itself—here are the famous opening lines:
Lo! We have heard learn’d in lofty Lays
The Gar-Danes Deeds in ancient Days
And ages past away,
The Glories of the Theod-Kings,
And how the valiant Æthelings,
Bare them in Battle’s Day.
Oft Scyld, the son of Scef, from Bands
Of Foemen, drawn from numerous Lands,
The Mead-thrones tare away;
For Dread he cast on all around
Sith he was first an out-cast found,
Thus he abode in easy State,
And ‘neath the Welkin waxèd great,
And in his Glories thrave,
Till circling Nations far and wide
Over the Path the Whale doth ride
Obeyed and Tribute gave.
This was a Monarch good.7
There is a peculiar shock at hearing and reading Beowulf presented to us like this, in a rhyming syllabic metre, unmoored from most stylistic features that we think of as being particularly characteristic of Old English. Wackerbarth uses a modified ballad form, giving an impression of the relentless progress of Middle English popular romance rather than the steadier, surging rhythms and cadences of Old English poetry. In his introduction to the translation, Wackerberth says that he avoided trying to emulate the stress-based alliterative metre as he didn’t think ‘the taste of the English People would at present bear it’, going on to say that he:
…..endeavoured, as far as within reasonable Limits I might, to render the Perusal of the Poetry easy and pleasant to the Reader, and if by awakening these Echoes of the long lost Melody of Times gone by, I shall have induced any one to give a Moment’s serious Thought to the mighty Changes wrought by Time in its ever-rolling-onward career.
Wackerbarth, then, wished to awaken the pastness of this poem, its difference, even as he wrenches it into a form comforting to Victorian tastes and their idea of what medieval literature “should” look like.
By its very nature, using a ballad metre and rhyme distorts the syntax of the poem entirely, and any sense Old English’s inventive wordplay and preference for apposition is largely lost—the compact and evocative hronrade, ‘whale road’, becoming the laborious ‘over the path the whale doth ride’—though some degree of alliteration is retained, especially in the initial invocation. The dominant domesticating instinct of the translation is in some ways undermined by his haphazard insertion of archaisms, an attempt, no doubt, to give a sense of some of that ‘Melody of Times gone by’ Wackerberth discusses in his introduction: we find lofty, sith, wax and welkin, with the latter three of these showing some of the poet’s command of Old English, using the etymological descendants of the original’s siððan, weaxan and wolcen. He also uses the unusual past tenses thrave for thrived and bare for bore, forms that were found in some northern English dialects, as well as in and Scots. The result is a rendering that feels incredibly dated by modern standards, and goes to show how quickly literary tastes change, and by extension how short a shelf many have for the general reader.
I don’t wish to pick on Wackerbarth, however, and I could select any number of translations, Victorian or Modern, that make use of similar anachronistic devices; no doubt the glut of free verse translations that have dominated in recent years will soon look hopelessly quaint too. Indeed, Wackerberth and others were clearly working in a translation tradition that thought you had to meet Beowulf’s antiquity with a modern conception of antiquity. This was later succinctly formulated by J.R.R. Tolkien, whose own prose version of the poem was posthumously published last decade:
If you wish to translate, not rewrite Beowulf, your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day the poem was made.8
Little wonder, then, that both Tolkien and Wackerberth translate Old English poetic words for man or warrior as knight. Tolkien justifies this decision on the basis that the word, along with the likes of esquire, court and prince, was rooted in the fact that the figures of Old English legend were, and I quote again:
…..conceived as kings of chivalrous courts, and members of societies of knights, real Round Tables. If there be any danger of calling up inappropriate pictures of the Arthurian world, it is a less one than the danger of too many warriors and chiefs begetting far more inept pictures of Zulus or Red Indians.
This is a revealing quote in ways I don’t have to spell out, and shows how anachronism is itself entirely selective, and in this instance based on imperial prejudice. Tolkien’s position is every bit as ideological as Heaney’s, though I doubt you’ll hear many of those who critiqued the latter poet rushing to speak out against the former Oxford don’s position. Regardless, Tolkien’s view of translation leads to a natural shift of meaning despite what he may have protested, with the poem never quite sitting comfortably, split between cod-archaising diction and a form that is fundamentally in tune with contemporary tastes.
Part 7: The Arts and Crafts of Beowulf
The number of authors who have attempted a genuinely foreignising take on the poem are relatively few, though the one stand-out is William Morris translation from 1895, toward the end of his life and career. Morris is likely familiar to most people as a textile designer and founding figure of the arts and crafts movement, but he was also a prolific writer, medievalist and socialist. He translated several Icelandic sagas with the scholar Eiríkur Magnússon into contemporary English prose and wrote a number of romances that were inflected with a keen medievalism. His translation of Beowulf was done with the aid of the academic A.J. Wyatt, who provided consultation on linguistic matters, including providing a ‘literal’ translation, but it is clear that Morris’s grasp of Old English was in fact pretty good, and almost certainly better than most other poets who had turned their hand to the language up to that point. You can see here that the edition Morris produced was lavishly done, with sumptuous illumination in keeping with the Arts and Crafts movement’s emphasis on making even the simplest objects beautiful. Below I provide Morris’s rendering of Grendel’s approach to Heorot and his fight with Beowulf, one of the most famous passages from the poem:
Now by wan night there came,
There strode in the shade-goer; slept there the shooters,
They who that horn-house should be a-holding,
All men but one man; to men was that known,
That them indeed might not, since will’d not the Maker,
The scather unceasing drag off ‘neath the shadow;
But he ever watching in wrath ‘gainst the wroth one
Mood-swollen abided the battle-mote ever.
Came then from the moor-land, under the mist-bents,
Grendel a-going there, bearing God’s anger.
The scather the ill one was minded of mankind
To have one in his toils from the high hall aloft.
‘Neath the welkin he waded, to the place whence the wine-house,
The gold-hall of men, most yarely he wist
With gold-plates fair colour’d; nor was it the first time
That he unto Hrothgar’s high home had betook him.
Came then to the house the wight on his ways,
Of all joys bereft; and soon sprang the door open,
With fire-bands made fast, when with hand he had touch’d it;
Brake the bale-heady, he with wrath bollen,
The mouth of the house there, and early thereafter
On the shiny-fleck’d floor thereof trod forth the fiend;
On went he then mood-wroth, and out from his eyes stood
Likest to fire-flame light full unfair.9
Morris’s translation is something different, that much is evident, and it has come in for a fair amount of opprobrium, with Edwin Morgan, a mid-twentieth century translator of the poem, having called it: ‘disastrously bad, uncouth to the point of weirdness, unfairly inaccurate, and often more obscure than the original’.10 I think Morgan is a little unfair, but he is certainly right to call Morris’s version weird, though I’d be tempted to call it weird and wonderful, following the OED’s rather lovely definition of ‘marvellous in a strange or eccentric way; both remarkable and peculiar or unfathomable; exotic, outlandish’. Morris makes no allowances to popular taste, transforming modern English into a strange shadow of the original, following the syntax relatively closely, making only some few allowances with regard to word order, and attempting to give an impression of the alliterative contours of the Old English verse form.
Much of Morris’s inventiveness rests in his treatment of vocabulary, achieving an archaising effect without recourse to Tolkien’s rather flat-footed idea of what it means to be traditional in verse. As Roy Liuzza has argued, Morris was ‘trying to make distance itself into an aesthetic category’. There are some of the familiar attempts at using etymology, such as the use of welkin for Old English wolcen, which Wackerbarth also took advantage of, but it is taken much further. This particular half-line in the original reads wod under wolcnum, ‘he walked under the skies or clouds’, which in Morris is ‘neath the welkin he waded’, translating the Old English word wadan, meaning simply ‘to go, travel’, with its modern descendent wade, which by his own day meant ‘to walk through water’. Morris in effect uses etymological fallacy (the idea that a contemporary word should be similar meaning to its ancestral source) to disturb the reader’s sense of time and place, bridging the gap between past and present much in the way that Heaney did with his careful use of dialect. But while Heaney was sparing, Morris consistently defers to etymology in his rendering: I won’t go through every correspondence in this passage, but some of the more interesting ones we find include: wan for wan (in Old English meaning ‘black’, but in modern ‘pale’ or ‘white’), ‘horn-house’ for horn-reced (with an imitative architectural sense for horn), ‘mood-swollen’ for bolgen-mōd (taking a rather loose rendering of ‘mood’), ‘home’ for hām (the latter really meaning simply ‘dwelling place’), the very archaic ‘bollen’ for bolgen (meaning ‘swollen’), and ‘mood-wroth’ for yrre-mod. He also uses the coinage scather for Grendel himself, analogous to the Old English scaða in manscaða, perhaps hoping the reader will make a natural connection with the adjective scathe, or the archaic noun of the same form meaning ‘hurt, harm damage’. Elsewhere we find ‘mote’, a word referring to a settlement on a hill and related to modern English ‘moat’; ‘bents’, a word of uncertain etymology, referring to a place covered with grass; ‘yarely’, meaning ‘quickly’; and the archaic betake, ‘to commit oneself to an action’.
The cumulative effect of this is as alienating as it is compelling, almost every other line functioning as an etymological riddle, and Chris Jones has suggested that this in some way remains true to the original poem, which was doubtless puzzling in many aspects of word choice and syntax even to Old English speakers.11 It is about as far away as possible from Heaney’s ethos of translation in terms of readability, though it is similarly rooted in a very deep understanding of the contours and rhythms of the original text. Ian Felce has written compellingly on Morris’s translation strategy for the Icelandic sagas, suggesting that in pursuing etymological correspondence so doggedly, by plumbing the historical depths of the English and encouraging the reader to work hard to unpick the roots of their own language, the translator was in many ways completely wedded to the principle of literal translation.12 Felce concludes by saying that, in pursuit of linguistic fidelity (or at least Morris’s eccentric idea of fidelity) his domesticating instincts led instead to an actively foreignising text. In many ways Morris’s acutely self-conscious use of language forces the reader to actually treat the translation as just that: there is no veneer of so-called fluency, of that overvalued quality of clarity. In Laurence Venuti’s words, the translation becomes ‘an interpretative act [which] readers must also learn how to interpret, as texts in their own right, in order to perceive the ethical effects of translated texts’.
As Walter Benjamin once argued, every translation of a text brings something new, sustaining and extending the life of the original text. In each case, a fresh translation of a medieval work finds itself caught between the pull of philology and desire: on the one hand a keen love of the original language, its subtleties of meaning and style, and on the other a want to draw out the thematic consonances, the things that make the text meaningful for a new audience. In the next post I am going to look at Maria Dahvana Headley’s startling 2020 translation of Beowulf, starting as it does with an invocatory “Bro!”.
- I quote from the second edition of Beowulf: A Verse Translation (2019)throughout. ↩︎
- From ‘The politics of translation’, reproduced in Lawrence Venuti’s The Translation Studies Reader (2012). ↩︎
- All Magennis quotes are drawn from his book Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse (2015). ↩︎
- Variation might be used for emphasis or stylistic effect, but it may well be a hangover from when Old English poetry was primarily oral. Basically, if you need to fill out the metre, then repeating the same thing in a slightly different way can help with that. ↩︎
- From ‘Heaney’s Beowulf six years later’, found in Old English Poems and the Social Life of Texts. ↩︎
- From The Translator’s Invisibility (2018). ↩︎
- You can read Wackerbarth’s version on Internet Archive. ↩︎
- FromThe Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Tolkien in my head always channels equal parts arch-conservative G. K. Chesterton and radical socialist William Morris in equal measure; needless to say, here he is at his most Chestertonian. ↩︎
- I quote from an reprint of Elibron Press’s The Collected Works of William Morris, Volume X: Three Northern Love Stories, The Tale of Beowulf.
. ↩︎ - From Roy Liuzza’s ‘Lost in translation: Some versions of Beowulf in the nineteenth century’, English Studies 4 (2002). ↩︎
- From ‘The Reception of William Morris’s Beowulf‘ in Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris (2007). ↩︎
- From ‘The Old Norse Sagas and William Morris’s Ideal of Literal Translation’,
Review of English Studies 67 (2016). ↩︎
Dr Nik Gunn 
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