Beowulf - A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney - Bilingual Edn (2001).pdf - Beowulf - morefaya2006

ALSO BY SEAMUS HEANEY

POETRY

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Death of a Naturalist

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Door into the Dark

Wintering Out

North

Field Work

NEW VERSE

TRANSLATION

Poems 1965-1975

Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish

Station Island

The Haw Lantern

SEAMUS

HEANEY

Selected Poems 1966-1987

Seeing Things

Sweeney's Flight (with photographs by Rachel Giese)

The Spirit Level

Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996

CRITICISM

Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978

The Government of the Tongue

The Redress of Poetry

PLAYS

The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

New York

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London

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HugkeS

Printed in the United States of America

First bilingual edition 2000 published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First published as a Norton paperback 2001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beowulf. English & English (Old English)

Beowulf I [translated by] Seamus Heaney. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Text in English and Old English.

1. Heroes—Scandinavia—Poetry. 2. Epic poetry, English (Old).

3. Monsters—Poetry. 4. Dragons—Poetry. I. Heaney, Seamus.

PE1383.H43 1999

829^.3—dC2i

99-23209

ISBN 0-393-32097-9 pbk.

W. W. Norton ir Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton ir Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T3QT

The Old English text of the poem is based on Beowulf, with the

Finnesburg Fragment, edited by C. L. Wrenn and W. F. Bolton

(University of Exeter Press, 1988), and is printed here by kind

permission ofW. F. Bolton and the University of Exeter Press.

Contents

Introduction

page ix

A Note on Names by Alfred David

page xxxi

BEOWULF

page 2

Family Trees

page 217

Acknowledgements

page 219

Introduction

And now this is 'an inheritance'—

Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked

In the long ago, yet willable forward

Again and again and again.

BEOWULF: THE POEM

The poem called Beowulf was composed sometime between the

middle of the seventh and the end of the tenth century of the first

millennium, in the language that is to-day 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 it was written (as Osip Mandelstam 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 elab-

orate 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 his-

torical. Its hero, Beowulf, is the biggest presence among the war-

riors 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 clear their country of a man-

eating monster called Grendel. From this expedition (which in-

extent (if at all) the newly Christian understanding of the world

volves him in a second contest with Grendel's mother) he returns

which operates in the poet's designing mind displaces him from

in triumph and eventually rules for fifty years as king of his

his imaginative at-homeness in the world of his poem—a pagan

homeland. Then a dragon begins to terrorize the countryside and

Germanic society governed by a heroic code of honour, one

Beowulf must confront it. In a final climactic encounter, he does

where the attainment of a name for warrior-prowess among the

manage to slay the dragon, but he also meets his own death and

living overwhelms any concern about the soul's destiny in the

enters the legends of his people as a warrior of high renown.

afterlife.

We know about the poem more or less by chance because it ex-

However, when it comes to considering Beowulf as a work of

ists in one manuscript only. This unique copy (now in the British

literature, there is one publication that stands out. In 1936, the

Library) barely survived a fire in the eighteenth century and was

Oxford scholar and teacher J.R.R. Tolkien published an epoch-

then transcribed and titled, retranscribed and edited, translated

making paper entitled "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"

and adapted, interpreted and reinterpreted, until it has become

which took for granted the poem's integrity and distinction as a

canonical. For decades it has been a set book on English sylla-

work of art and proceeded to show in what this integrity and dis-

buses at university level all over the world. The fact that many

tinction inhered. He assumed that the poet had felt his way

English departments require it to be studied in the original con-

through the inherited material—the fabulous elements and the

tinues to generate resistance, most notably at Oxford University,

traditional accounts of an heroic past—and by a combination of

where the pros and cons of the inclusion of part of it as a com-

creative intuition and conscious structuring had arrived at a

pulsory element in the English course have been debated regu-

unity of effect and a balanced order. He assumed, in other words,

larly in recent years.

that the Beowulf poet was an imaginative writer rather than some

For generations of undergraduates, academic study of the

kind of back-formation derived from nineteenth-century folklore

poem was often just a matter of construing the meaning, getting

and philology. Tolkien's brilliant literary treatment changed the

a grip on the grammar and vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon, and be-

way the poem was valued and initiated a new era—and new

ing able to recognize, translate, and comment upon random ex-

terms—of appreciation.

tracts which were presented in the examinations. For generations

It is impossible to attain a full understanding and estimate of

of scholars too the interest had been textual and philological;

Beowulf without recourse to this immense body of commentary

then there developed a body of research into analogues and

and elucidation. Nevertheless, readers coming to the poem for

sources, a quest for stories and episodes in the folklore and leg-

the first time are likely to be as delighted as they are discomfited

ends of the Nordic peoples which would parallel or foreshadow

by the strangeness of the names and the immediate lack of

episodes in Beowulf Scholars were also preoccupied with fixing

known reference points. An English speaker new to The Iliad or

the exact time and place of the poem's composition, paying

The Odyssey or The Aeneid will probably at least have heard of

minute attention to linguistic, stylistic, and scribal details. More

Troy and Helen, or of Penelope and the Cyclops, or of Dido and

generally, they tried to establish the history and genealogy of the

the golden bough. These epics may be in Greek and Latin, yet the

dynasties of Swedes and Geats and Danes to which the poet

classical heritage has entered the cultural memory enshrined in

makes constant allusion; and they devoted themselves to a con-

English so thoroughly that their worlds are more familiar than

sideration of the world-view behind the poem, asking to what

that of the first native epic, even though it was composed cen-

x I Introduction

Introduction

\ xi

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