(If I had wanted to discuss spears or honor codes with the doctor, Old English would have served just fine.) The men in “Beowulf” drink and boast and fight the women, even the queens, exist mainly to pass around the mead cup and to mourn their fallen kinsmen. “Beowulf”-in which the eponymous hero, a man of gigantic, and perhaps supernatural, strength, defends King Hrothgar and the Danes against Grendel, a part man, part monster who is plaguing the kingdom-tends to be perceived as a masculine poem, its vocabulary and its ethics those of the battleground and the mead hall.
Very few of these translators are women, which is unsurprising. They range from scholars like Tolkien (who spent decades revising his translation before deciding not to publish it it appeared posthumously in a 2014 edition put together by his son Christopher) to the poets Seamus Heaney and Stephen Mitchell, both of whom have produced lyrical and critically admired versions. Headley, a novelist known primarily for her works of fantasy for young adults, is the most recent of the dozens of modern English translators who have taken on the poem, which runs three thousand one hundred and eighty-two lines long. James Joyce famously parodied it in “ Ulysses”: “Before born babe bliss had.” J. R. R. Tolkien, in his lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” called the structure of Old English literature “more like masonry than music.” (In addition to writing “ The Hobbit” and the “ Lord of the Rings” trilogy, both distinctly inflected by Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythology, Tolkien was a prominent scholar of Old English.) The effect, when read aloud, is something like boots marching on gravel, with Yoda-style inversions. Each line is broken up into two half lines, separated by a caesura the focus is on metre and alliteration, not rhyme. Its unintelligibility is evident from the first line of “Beowulf”: “Hwæt wē Gār-Dena in geārdagum.”Įven without understanding the meaning (roughly, “We of the Spear-Danes in the days of yore”), we can notice a few things about Old English poetry. Of Germanic origin, it contains numerous elements that don’t appear in the modern English alphabet: the diphthong “æ” (ash), as well as two letters that represent the “th” sound, “þ” (thorn) and “ð” (eth). Without serious study, no speaker of contemporary English could converse in or even read Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon), a language as distinct from its modern equivalent as many foreign tongues. Afew weeks ago, during a visit to the doctor, I laughed out loud when the online check-in portal suggested Old English as my language preference, and not only because I happened to have with me Maria Dahvana Headley’s “ Beowulf” (MCD), a new translation of the long poem that is one of the oldest surviving works of literature in the language.
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