Here is another book that probably has been spoiled for a lot of readers by its inclusion on high-school reading lists. But don’t let that stop you. If you developed, around the age of 12 or 13 years, a taste for monsters, dragons, magic and swordplay—uninterrupted by mush and romance—this book is for you.
Beowulf is the grandfather of all sword-and-sorcery fantasy. If J.R.R. Tolkien is the father of the modern genre, he made no efforts to hide his debt to Beowulf. He translated it, wrote about it and drew from it. Take this incident, for example, from late in the poem: A burglar sneaks into a sleeping dragon’s lair and steals a cup from its hoard of treasure. The dragon wakes up, notices the cup is missing, and all hell breaks loose. Sound familiar?
There are no Halflings in Beowulf, but there are shieldings, warriors, Spear-Danes and Geats, mead halls and mead. And it’s a quick read; a little over 3,000 lines. So if you’re not spending all summer at the beach you can finish this off over a good weekend.
Danes and Geats
Beowulf takes place in pre-Viking, pre-Christian Scandinavia. The hero is a Geat warrior (from what is now Sweden) who proves his prowess by freeing a Danish king from the monster Grendel. Beowulf succeeds, of course, in literal hand-to-hand combat. But then there’s Grendel’s mother to deal with, and—to quote Glinda, the Good Witch of the North—I’m afraid she’s worse than the other one. And finally, there’s the dragon. Of course there is. What hero worth his salt does not slay a dragon?
Just who wrote or composed the poem is anyone’s guess. The only manuscript is written in Old English and dates from around AD 1000. The action takes place probably three or four hundred years before that. The narrator is clearly Christian but the characters and happily unburdened by Christian morality. The primary virtues are bravery, honor and generosity, and Beowulf demonstrates these in spades.
The action is exciting, but as with many stories told in verse, much of the joy of reading it comes from the language. I don’t read Old English, but here’s a heroic feel to the poetry even in translation. You know that the old Geats and Danes were guys who knew how to tell a good story while sitting around the mead hall during the long Scandinavian nights. My guess is that the stories got better as the nights got longer and the mead flowed.
Choices, choices
There is no shortage of translations of Beowulf. Howell Chickering, professor of language and literature at Amherst College and himself a translator of Beowulf (1977), says that since 1900 there has been on average one new translation every two years. The one that has gotten the most attention in recent years is that of Irish poet Seamus Heaney, published in 1999.
This is the only version I am familiar with, so I am unable to compare it with others. Although well-accepted, it has been criticized by some academics as more Heaney and Beowulf. Despite some criticism, Chickering calls Heaney’s translation “a resounding but mixed success,” which “certainly stands up as one of the better poetic paraphrases of the original.”
Fortunately, I am not an academic and my only criteria for Worth Reading are whether the book is entertaining and tells a good story well. Heaney’s version is and does. The American edition, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is bilingual, with the Old English text on the even-numbered pages facing the translated text. This is of no practical value for me, but it’s fun to have the original handy to puzzle over and compare while reading.
Even if Heaney turns out not to be your cup of tea, there are plenty of other translations for you to choose from. And if you can’t find one you like now at your library or bookstore, there will probably be a new one out soon.