Course:LIBR548F/Beowulf

Original Manuscript and origins

Beowulf is an epic poem, over 3,000 lines long and written in Old English about a hero from the land of the Geats (southern Sweden) who saves the Danes from Grendel, a terrible monster. Our hero, Beowulf, also defeats Grendel’s mother and returns to the Geats to become their king. He rules for fifty years before dying from a fatal wound sustained whilst slaying a dragon that has been terrorising his people.

Beowulf exists only as a single manuscript created sometime around the year 1,000 AD. Scholars disagree as to when the work was originally composed and if the manuscript is a later compilation of oral traditions or a contemporary recording of the work of a single poet. However it originally came about it has reached us today as part of the Nowell Codex, a collection of Anglo Saxon literature that also includes descriptions of the lives of various saints. Named for its first known owner Laurence Nowell, a 16th Century scholar, it then passed into the hands of Sir Robert Cotton who bound it with another later manuscript and it became known as Cotton Vitellius A xv, after Cotton’s shelving system. Cotton’s library was donated to the British Library in 1700. A fire in 1731 damaged the manuscript and its edges became brittle. In an attempt to reinforce the pages in 1853 they were mounted in paper frames. This has meant some of the writing has been obscured, but using modern photographic methods some of these lost letters have been re-discovered. The British Library have released a CD-Rom containing these enhanced images called the Electronic Beowulf.

First Translations

After languishing in Cotton’s library for many years it took an Icelandic scholar, working for the Danish Royal Archives in the late 18th Century, to bring this piece of English Literature back from obscurity. Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin began work on transcribing the poem in 1786 and published his translation in 1815, claiming it as a Danish epic written by a poet who attended Beowulf’s funeral. Other scholars then began to realise the importance of Beowulf and since then it has been “transcribed and titled, retranscribed and edited, translated and adapted, interpreted and reinterpreted until it has become canonical.”

Historic Document or Great Literary Work?

There is no doubt to the importance of Beowulf as an early example of English poetry, but as a literary work it took longer to gain recognition. The first scholars to study it were interested primarily from a philological standpoint and indeed it is still used in many English syllabuses as a dry translation exercise. It was not until 1936 when Tolkien delivered a lecture to the British Academy on the subject that interest in Beowulf as a piece of literature was re-kindled. Tolkien was disdainful of those who studied the work in summary only, to compare what folk-lore and customs could be gleaned from the story, and he encouraged his audience to see it primarily as a poem to be enjoyed and celebrated:

"Beowulf is in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite overshadows the historical content."

Heaney claims it was this ”brilliant literary treatment [that] changed the way the poem was valued and initiated a new era – and new terms - of appreciation”

Modern Translations

Tolkien may have considered studying the original poem as a worthy exercise, but the evolution of the English language means that in this form Beowulf is inaccessible to most people today. The vocabulary and grammatical structure of Old English, and the use of compound words make it a very different to that currently used. Fortunately for us many translations exist, some of them more sympathetic to the poetic nature of the work.

Prose or Poetry?

Despite the debate about its origins most scholars are in agreement that as a poem Beowulf was written to be read aloud. It follows the Old English convention of using four stresses in a line and relies heavily on alliteration, where words start with the same sounds. Over all, the poem has a “slow sonorous metre” and a “hand-built, rock solid feel.” Tolkien even goes as far to say that translating it into prose is “an abuse” , unless you are only wanting to compare customs and names with other poems that are contemporary to it. In his introduction Heaney says that he struggled to make a start on translation until he realised that his own poetry often followed a similar metre and use of alliteration to Old English. He also recognised the poet’s voice as similar to those he listened to as he grew up – “big voiced Scullions” and could then imagine how the poem should sound.

Linguistic style

No translation can ever be completely accurate and still make sense; it is the nature of translation. The use of compound words in Old English also complicates matters, as we may have lost the full significance of these compounds. Tolkien argues for the translator to use lofty poetic language, not modern colloquial terms, as the original poet would have been writing poetically and not using the everyday language of his time. Heaney differs slightly in that he uses some terms of dialect that while not considered lofty, do, to any one from outside Ulster, sound other worldly and reflective of the poem. Poulakis describes earlier translators as erring to archaic vocabulary and word order, with translations from the 1950’s onwards leaning more towards modern or contemporary styles. She points out that a middle ground may be most effective – the reader needs to understand the language, but to make it too modern loses some of the cultural effectiveness.

Other formats

As well as literal translations that stick to the original closely there have been plenty of re-workings of the story. These include children’s stories, graphic novels, feature films and stories written from other characters’ points of view.

References

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