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bloodygranuaile) wrote2024-01-17 09:40 am
bloodygranuaile) wrote2024-01-17 09:40 am
Hwaet and hirpling and heroics from Heaney
This summer, at a used bookstore in Maine, for the low low price of four dollars I picked up a copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf–the one with the Old English text on the verso-side pages and the modern English translation on the recto sides–and for six months or so have been nurturing cozy visions of reading it in January, the traditional time of year when I get obsessed with medieval and ancient world literature of the frigid North, ensconced in blankets while January happens outside. I kind of originally envisioned doing this as soon as the new year kicked off but I got delayed by the enormous tome that was Menewood, but I am pleased to say that I still got this poem in in two sittings in January. I read Heaney’s magnificent introduction and the first few pages of the poem’s text itself in the bath, which was lovely, and then zipped through most of the poem on Sunday, despite several attempts to slow down and puzzle out what was going on on the left-hand pages.
The very basic storyline of Beowulf is, as many have pointed out, mainly a bonkers action movie. Works like Beowulf have a long legacy in popular culture even if it’s mostly students and scholars that read the poem itself anymore. The poem follows a big damn hero with the strength of thirty men, as he single-handedly arm-wrestles the monster Grendel to death, then fights Grendel’s mom in an epic underwater hand-to-hand combat (he uses weapons this time but he has to find an epic sword in Grendel’s mom’s lair because his regular epic sword wasn’t epic enough), and then at the end of his life he heroically battles a dragon, slightly less single-handedly this time because he needs a young sidekick to witness his epic passing and the sidekick has to do something useful in order to be worthy of being Beowulf’s sidekick. The sidekick’s name is Wiglaf, and he is not a comic relief character like “a sidekick named Wiglaf” would be these days.
The basic storyline is only sort of the point. The point is the atmosphere, and the wild world of mead-halls and war, and the heroic warrior code that makes such great songs even though it seems like such a truly awful way to live it’s amazing that so many human societies stuck with it for so long. Genealogies and gold are apparently also the point; there are a lot of both. Heaney’s somber (mostly), stately (again, mostly), Ulster-inflected translation really brings a certain weight and tone, even if I did have to look up some of the more obscure Hiberno-English and other niche English terms he uses (I had a good giggle at “hirpling,” and then looked it up; it’s a Scottish term for limping). Heaney’s introduction, which I probably didn’t give quite the studious attention I should have given that I was reading it bath (mostly for the sake of not bringing a library book into the bath; I still wasn’t done with Menewood), is tailor-made to be Relevant To My Interests, starting off with some praising of Professor Tolkien for his critical treatment of i>Beowulf as a work of art and not just a historic artifact, and working its way through Heaney’s feelings about the cultural politics of the English and Irish languages.
A notable thing about Beowulf is that although it is a Foundational Work of English Literature, and written from a Christian perspective, the story it tells takes place in the pagan long-ago over in Scandinavia. This is because “the English” didn’t really start to begin to exist as a people until about the seventh century or so when the Angles from Scandinavia and the Saxons from also Scandinavia started to blob together into the Anglo-Saxons of Angle-land, so it’s not like they popped out of nowhere. But this lack of an early English mythology, instead making do with bits and pieces of mythology from elsewhere in Europe because the ancient mythology of the British Isles was all Celtic, saddened the deeply English (and Catholic) Professor Tolkien so much that he wrote all the Lord of the Rings books about it, thus changing the face of fantastic writing forever.
Anyway, as much as I want to check out both Tolkien’s older translation and the slangy new Maria Davana Headley one, the Heaney seems to now be the definitive, “classroom standard” translation and it’s likely to stay that way for a while. The “classroom standard” bit is helped along by not only being a very good translation, but also by having little guidepost notes in the margins, and having the two languages side by side so you can pretend to be studious by gawping at them. If you can do a little actual studiousness about Old English pronunciations then this edition also allows you to put on your most stentorian Gandalf impression type of voice and read it out loud, which I certainly have not done and therefore cannot vouch if it’s nearly as fun as it sounds, it’s just an idea.
The very basic storyline of Beowulf is, as many have pointed out, mainly a bonkers action movie. Works like Beowulf have a long legacy in popular culture even if it’s mostly students and scholars that read the poem itself anymore. The poem follows a big damn hero with the strength of thirty men, as he single-handedly arm-wrestles the monster Grendel to death, then fights Grendel’s mom in an epic underwater hand-to-hand combat (he uses weapons this time but he has to find an epic sword in Grendel’s mom’s lair because his regular epic sword wasn’t epic enough), and then at the end of his life he heroically battles a dragon, slightly less single-handedly this time because he needs a young sidekick to witness his epic passing and the sidekick has to do something useful in order to be worthy of being Beowulf’s sidekick. The sidekick’s name is Wiglaf, and he is not a comic relief character like “a sidekick named Wiglaf” would be these days.
The basic storyline is only sort of the point. The point is the atmosphere, and the wild world of mead-halls and war, and the heroic warrior code that makes such great songs even though it seems like such a truly awful way to live it’s amazing that so many human societies stuck with it for so long. Genealogies and gold are apparently also the point; there are a lot of both. Heaney’s somber (mostly), stately (again, mostly), Ulster-inflected translation really brings a certain weight and tone, even if I did have to look up some of the more obscure Hiberno-English and other niche English terms he uses (I had a good giggle at “hirpling,” and then looked it up; it’s a Scottish term for limping). Heaney’s introduction, which I probably didn’t give quite the studious attention I should have given that I was reading it bath (mostly for the sake of not bringing a library book into the bath; I still wasn’t done with Menewood), is tailor-made to be Relevant To My Interests, starting off with some praising of Professor Tolkien for his critical treatment of i>Beowulf as a work of art and not just a historic artifact, and working its way through Heaney’s feelings about the cultural politics of the English and Irish languages.
A notable thing about Beowulf is that although it is a Foundational Work of English Literature, and written from a Christian perspective, the story it tells takes place in the pagan long-ago over in Scandinavia. This is because “the English” didn’t really start to begin to exist as a people until about the seventh century or so when the Angles from Scandinavia and the Saxons from also Scandinavia started to blob together into the Anglo-Saxons of Angle-land, so it’s not like they popped out of nowhere. But this lack of an early English mythology, instead making do with bits and pieces of mythology from elsewhere in Europe because the ancient mythology of the British Isles was all Celtic, saddened the deeply English (and Catholic) Professor Tolkien so much that he wrote all the Lord of the Rings books about it, thus changing the face of fantastic writing forever.
Anyway, as much as I want to check out both Tolkien’s older translation and the slangy new Maria Davana Headley one, the Heaney seems to now be the definitive, “classroom standard” translation and it’s likely to stay that way for a while. The “classroom standard” bit is helped along by not only being a very good translation, but also by having little guidepost notes in the margins, and having the two languages side by side so you can pretend to be studious by gawping at them. If you can do a little actual studiousness about Old English pronunciations then this edition also allows you to put on your most stentorian Gandalf impression type of voice and read it out loud, which I certainly have not done and therefore cannot vouch if it’s nearly as fun as it sounds, it’s just an idea.