Beowulf
by Thomas Meyer

Reviewed by Betsy Chunko

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Published: October 18, 2012

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The text of the Old English poem known as Beowulf is frustratingly ambiguous from its very first word: Hwæt, a slippery and hard-to-translate expression often employed as an interjection, a call for people to quiet down at the start of a story. It was also used as a kind of conjunctive adverb, though—like ‘thus’ or ‘however.’ That is, the poem commences mid-thought before unfolding through its ambling series of “fitts,” or piecemeal sections. In what has proven arguably the most notable ‘new’ translation of the work, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney rendered that initial word as a somewhat disappointing: “So.” Thomas Meyer, in this translation, gets it just right—striking the balance between call to attention and thoughtful pause. “Hey Now,” his text begins. This is not just an opening, though; it’s a conjuring from the past, an invocation.

Set in Scandinavia before the migration, Beowulf was nonetheless composed in England and is historical in its perspective, heavily invested in the values of what were already at the time it was transcribed ‘bygone days.’ The action takes place ca. 500 CE, and, while dating the text is notoriously tricky, it is thought to have been written down sometime between the mid-eighth and early-eleventh century. Though an old pagan story, Beowulf came to be told by a Christian poet, a writer often at pains to attribute Christian thoughts and motives to characters who frequently behave in distinctly un-Christian ways. This is because the Germanic warrior culture that it depicts operates according to a heroic code of honor. The poem seems, in the end, to promote a reflective attitude toward heroism, though: Beowulf, acting according to the dictates of his culture, brings about his own death, exposing his people to danger. Whether he dies at the hand of fate or a just God is unclear.

The text itself is a fantastic survival and comes to us via a single extant manuscript. All but forgotten for centuries, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that widespread interest in the poem emerged among scholars and translators of Old English, who viewed it as a source of information about the Anglo-Saxon era. It owes its current reputation as a work of serious literary merit to the Oxford scholar J.R.R. Tolkien, whose “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936) remains arguably the best-known essay ever published on Old English literature. Here, he sought to divorce the poem from the special interests of those who approached it, arguing that its Christian overlay is secondary to the main task: constructing the reputation of the hero who will, in the end, inevitably die.

Meyer’s division of the story into two halves, “Oversea” and “Homelands,” traces two distinct phases of the hero’s life: youth and age. In the first part, Beowulf travels to the court of King Hrothgar of Denmark, a descendant of the great king Shield Sheafson, whose reign has been interrupted by the night-stalking of the monster, Grendel. Beowulf defeats the beast but must contend with its mother in a second, more difficult battle. The latter half of the text reveals an older Beowulf, now King of the Geats. He is thrust into a third battle, this one the most arduous of all, with a dragon, disturbed from its barrow by an unscrupulous thief seeking treasure there. With the help of Wiglaf, one of his young thanes, Beowulf kills this monster too, but succumbs to wounds suffered in the process. His death exposes his tribe to attack by rival clans and the story closes with his apprehensive people watching their departed king’s body burn on its funeral pyre. An action saga throughout, it is an elegy in the end.

Sticklers might charge that Meyer has discarded part of the original in his approach to the translation, with its lyrical elision of ‘then’ and ‘now.’ But even the academic medievalist in me can’t help but admire the way he’s gotten this old man to dance. The Old English text defies the very logic behind strict translation practices. Attempting to proceed line by line, word by word, does not work. The syntax, the words themselves—they resist it. To this end, Meyer’s creativity in approaching some of the most notoriously sticky parts of the text deserves admiration. For instance, there are moments in Fitt Eleven during the showdown between Beowulf and Grendel in which it’s unclear who is being referred to in the original text—the monster or the man. Meyer solves this by running the words together, a move which suggests both the epic struggle and the monster’s panic. The passage begins when Grendel crashes into the doors to Heorot, the Danes’ great hall, snapping them in two so that “they dropped open / like a broken jaw.” His rampage is curbed the moment he meets the Geatish warrior:

footstephandclawfiendreachmanbedquicktrick beastarmpainclampnewnotknownheartrunflesho feargetawaygonowrunrun

This also exemplifies Meyer’s tendency to play with the space of the words on the page. One of the things that differentiates his translation from so many others is how he penetrates the opacity of the recto/verso layout—a quality of the original manuscript that translators often adopt automatically. Dense strips of text just sit on the page; but Meyer organizes the ‘landscape’ of the text to help tell the story, accentuating and embedding certain parts of the narrative in turn. This is, after all, what happens when a story is told orally, as Beowulf initially was—human intonation adds meaning and energy to what are otherwise ‘static’ words. Meyer’s layout gives Beowulf additional movement.

His translation continuously calls attention to the poetics of the original as well, particularly in his preservation of many of the alliterative patterns. The end of Fitt One lilts over the same crisp consonants of the original:

That grim ghostbeast called Grendel dwelled on doomed ground in demonrealms…

Also notable are the many moments here when Meyer imposes a kind of beatnik sing-song urbanity on the text. Somehow, he even pulls it off. At the start of Fit Two, we follow Grendel:

Night came. He went to check out those Danes boozing at home in their

big house & pay them a call.

 

He found

them snoozing like fat, well fed babies safe from boogies.

Past and present comingle linguistically—even the tense shifts and slides here—and the narrative voice seems to drip with derision for the very people it will save but a moment later. We’re inside the monster’s head at that moment and he thinks like a thug in a modern mobster movie. Meyer is also heavily invested in wordplay and novel ways of dealing with and describing otherwise unimportant nouns, aspects of his translation that open up the ‘storytelling’ qualities inherent in the original text. One of the best moments of lyrical reinvention comes toward the end of Fitt Seventeen, when Meyer describes a celebration scene during which “noise boys” bring out wine in “wondrous cups.”

In the interview appended at the end of this edition, Meyer calls the text of Beowulf “something of a mess [in its narrative structure]…but a real gymnasium for trying out the possibilities of a poetic language.” By playing up the poetics in his own way, Meyer has multiplied the discourses in a text that was already proliferating with a moiety of cultural concerns, corralling many voices through the ages. Not since Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Odyssey has an old text seemed so suddenly modern—so transnational, transhistorical. Meyer has added our voice, making what is old not just relevant again, but alive, breathing.

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