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329 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1000
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1,000 year old manuscript of Beowulf.
No sword blade sent him to his death,
My bare hands stilled his heartbeats
And wrecked the bone-house. Now blade and hand,
Sword and sword-stroke, will assay the hoard.”
hē hafað onfunden, þæt hē þā fǣhðe ne þearf,
atole ecg-þræce ēower lēode
swīðe onsittan
[‘he'd found that there was no need to fear any enmity here, or any terrible sword-storm from your people’]
“Grendel was aware he had nothing to fear here.
Your sword's soft, son.”
Ðū þē lǣr be þon,
gum-cyste ongit! Ic þis gid be þē
āwræc wintrum frōd.
[‘Learn from this, understand manly virtues. I who recite you this song am many winters old.’]
Listen to me, boy. Keep your shit straight.
I've been fostered by frost-seasons, fathered by time,
and I'm dropping knowledge now.
They had seen me boltered in the blood of enemies
when I battled and bound five beasts,
raided a troll-nest and in the night-sea
slaughtered sea-brutes. I have suffered extremes
and avenged the Geats (their enemies brought it
upon themselves, I devastated them).
Yes: I mean—I may have bathed in the blood of beasts,
netted five foul ogres at once, smashed my way into a troll den
and come out swinging, gone skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
and made sashimi of some sea monsters.
Anyone who fucks with the Geats? Bro, they have to fuck with me.
They're asking for it, and I deal them death.
You're famous here, and long after your lifetime,
you'll be known, your story sweeping as the sea,
shores borne into being by waves of words.
A simple sentence such as "We cut the corn to-day" took on immense dignity when one of [my father's relatives] spoke it. They had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of those relatives.Anyway, all this is to explain why, after years of blissfully ignoring Beowulf, I felt compelled to buy this book and give it another try. Did it hold up to my hopes? Well, not quite. I still appreciate Beowulf more than I love it. But I heard the solemn, deliberate voice that Heaney was seeking to use, and I thought he did a great job of translating it as well as possible into modern English while preserving the original feel and intent of the poem. I love the liberal use of alliteration and the compound words (whale-road = sea; ring-giver = king) that are found in the original version of the poem as well as this translation. I felt the side-by-side nobility and brutality of these characters from (it's surmised) 6th century Scandinavia. And I was getting some serious Tolkien vibes from the ending, which is not at all a bad thing.