Awaiting a Barbarous Burning

Preparing for the *Beowulf* Challenge

Welcome to PCF in 2024! As I announced on New Year’s Eve, it is going to be a year of reading challenges, beginning next week with Beowulf. What do you need to do to prepare? That’s what today’s post is all about.

Which Edition/Translation?

I recommend the Norton Critical Edition of Seamus Heaney’s translation of the poem, edited by Daniel Donoghue (pictured above). I think that, more than any other translation, Heaney succeeds in creating a work of art in its own right, and the Norton Critical Edition includes Tolkien’s essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” which we will be discussing, along with lots of good supplementary material. But any version of the Heaney translation will do.

I will be referring to other translations during the challenge and comparing them to Heaney, as well as to the original Old English. If (and only if) you want an edition of the original Old English (though it is not necessary for this challenge), then I recommend the fourth edition of Kleaber, edited by R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. Don’t expect to be able to read the Old English; it is like a foreign language to modern English speakers, and it requires fairly intense study to learn it. This edition has a full glossary and full scholarly apparatus.

And if you are just along for the ride and don’t plan on reading the poem, then that’s fine: the main Wednesday essays should be accessible to you whether or not you are following along with the text.

Embracing the Unknown

If you are reading the poem for the first time (or even for the fifth time), you should be prepared for some amount of confusion. This is because the poem was not written for twenty-first-century readers. The poet, from the very first lines, assumes that we know some things that we do not know. He says that “we have heard” of these so-called “Spear-Danes” and all of the great things that they have done. Well, we haven’t.

The “we” is not us.

And this is the first challenge as we read this poem: we will have a lot of unfamiliar names thrown at us, and we will find very few reference points as modern readers. But if the poem was not written for us, then it is our job to imagine an original audience, to work out what their values were, to try to empathize with them to the extent that might be possible. We must embrace the unknown and allow our imaginations to fill in the gaps.

(This, by the way, is one of the most difficult aspects of teaching this poem to college students, especially those who aren’t English majors: most of them are extremely resistant to difficulty. They want to be able to understand things clearly and don’t like it when something is unknowable. They want to know what will be on the exam. See my piece on “Negative Capability in a Culture of Mastery” for more about this attitude. Well, since there will be no exams here, you won’t have to worry about that. Find your negative capability. No need for mastery.)

That said, the poem quickly introduces us to some dynamic figures: Shield Sheafson (Scyld Scefing in the original), Hrothgar, and—terrifyingly—Grendel. After a little while, we will meet Beowulf himself. These dynamic figures are your reference points, and they will carry you through the poem. We will discuss how they relate to this tapestry of background material, which we have only in fragments.

The poem also introduces us to a remarkable place: Heorot, Hrothgar’s hall. And as soon as we hear of its building, we are told that “The hall towered, / its gables wide and high and awaiting / a barbarous burning.” The fate of the hall is stitched into the account of its building. It will burn.

This is an example of how the poem’s narrative works: we jump forward in time, and we loop back, sometimes in the same sentence. (Klaeber, the editor of the standard edition, famously referred to the poem’s “lack of steady advance” in his original introduction in the 1920s.)

Don’t be thrown by this: time in the poem works differently from what we are used to. We will discuss some possible reasons for this narrative structuring, as well how it affects our reading.

What to Expect Next Week

Next Wednesday, January 10th, I will publish an introduction to the poem: this will give you context about Old English poetry and the original manuscript, a theory about Beowulf’s approximate date of composition, and some guidance for reading the first part of the poem (through the fight with Grendel and its aftermath, around line 1061).

After the main introduction, you will find the “challenge” material, which will include some close reading and discussion of the original language, some discussion prompts (for the comments section), an invitation for Q&A, and some suggestions for further reading. For the Beowulf challenge, these extras will be included in the main post; in future challenges, this material will go out in a bonus post to paid subscribers.

So, that’s how it will work. I’m excited to have all of you along for the ride! Any questions? Let me know in the comments.

Be afraid. The mearcstapa is coming.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

I took this picture on Royal Street in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve.