Revenant Resoluteness

Beowulf Challenge, Week Four

Photo by Jade Lee on Unsplash

Dear reader,

This has been the most difficult of the four weeks in terms of drafting the Wednesday essay. The last third of Beowulf—like the end of the Iliad—reaches such a level of profound power that any commentary seems to be either too much or not enough. What I realized as I began sketching out this piece is that I have too much to say, and it will have to continue next week so that this post does not turn into a small book. Consider it a bonus challenge week—lagniappe.

Yours,

John

---

“A revenant quality to his resoluteness”

Last week, we ended with four translations of the passage that describes Beowulf’s state of mind as ponders the dragon hoard, immediately before the speech that recounts his youth and King Hrethel’s sorrow over the death of his eldest son. It is a crucial moment, and the four renderings show us what a difficult process it is to translate this poem, as each decision affects how we understand the end of this notoriously ambiguous narrative. (See last week’s piece for the four translations in full.) Here is the Old English:

Gesæt ða on næsse niðheard cyning;
þenden hælo abead heorðgeneatum,
goldwine Geata. Him wæs geomor sefa,
wæfre ond wælfus, wyrd ungemete neah,
se ðone gomelan gretan sceolde,
secean sawle hord, sundur gedælan
lif wið lice; no þon lange wæs
feorh æþelingas flæsce bewunden. (Lines 2417-2424)

There is a lot to say about every line here, but we will focus on the key differences between our translations. In Seamus Heaney’s essay about the poem, he suggests that in this moment as the poem moves toward its conclusion there is “a revenant quality to [Beowulf’s] resoluteness.” His translation reflects this reading. Compare his version of lines 2419b-2420a to Kevin Crossley-Holland’s, whose rendering is “His mind was most mournful, / angry, eager for slaughter.” Heaney gives us: “He was sad at heart, / unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.”

Either of these is a legitimate choice, considering the problematic OE diction here. Wæfre occurs only three times in the entire preserved corpus of the language. We find it twice in this poem. The first instance occurs in the context of Hrothgar’s description of Grendel’s mother: she is a “wælgæst wæfre” (line 1331), which Heaney translates as “roaming killer.” (I translate it as “restless death-ghost,” because I think it sounds cool.) The other instance is the poem Daniel, which tells the Old Testament story and uses the word to describe the flickering nature of the flames in the furnace. So it could mean “angry” or “restless” or “agitated” or “unsettled.” Wælfus is a compound, which occurs only here. Wæl can mean “battle” or “slaughter” or “death.” Fus can mean “ready” or “anxious for” or “waiting for.”

You see the problem. Our understanding of these individual words makes a big difference here. A Beowulf is who is “angry and eager for slaughter” at this moment is quite different from a Beowulf who is “restless and ready for death” (my translation). For me, the previous half-line favors the latter interpretation: “him wæs geomor sefa.” This clause appears earlier in the poem, in the context of Shield’s funeral (line 49), and so this would seem to support a reading that posits Beowulf’s foreknowledge of death.

Also at issue is the proximity of fate, or wyrd, which all of our translators agree is very close. What they do not agree on, however, is whether or not Beowulf knows that it is there, hovering over him. The text in question is the OE clause: “wyrd ungemete neah, / se ðone gomelan gretan sceolde.” Here, Roy Liuzza translates most literally: “the doom was immeasurably near / that was coming to meet that old man.” And Heaney makes the boldest interpretive choice; he actually moves “fate” or wyrd to the following line to make room to expand “wæfre ond wælfus” in a way that will include the added connotation “sensing his death.” His next line then becomes: “His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain.” Here, then, is Beowulf’s revenant quality, and while this is the least literal of the four translations, to me it best captures the mood of the poem at this point, especially considering the dark speech that is to follow this passage. Beowulf is already marked: this is his death-day, and he knows it.

Finally there is the gorgeous final clause of the passage, in which the Old English to me sounds like the beginning of a dirge: “no þon lange wæs / feorh æþelingas flæsce bewunden.” This is difficult to render word-for-word, because the syntax is a bit scrambled to a modern English speaker. Roughly, it would be something like: “not then for long was / the spirit of the prince to be in flesh wound up.” Here, once again, our Nobel laureate provides the most inspired translation. He reverses bewunden, taking that which is “wound up” and unwinding it, choosing his words to convey a dazzling alliterative effect: “Before long / the prince's spirit would spin free from his body.” As Tolkien wrote of the original, “there is not much poetry in the world like this.” And the same is true for the speech that follows.

“Watching the raven / gloat where he hangs.” Photo by Cristina Glebova on Unsplash

---

Hrethel’s sorrow

Beowulf’s speeches in the Danish part of the poem, while acknowledging mortality and the possibility of defeat, are rousing, uplifting: let’s give it the old college try. The speech before the dragon fight is of another order entirely. It begins with an account of Hrethel, his foster father and king of the Geats, who raised him as an equal to his princely sons, one of whom (Heathcyn) killed the eldest (Herebeald). It is unclear whether or not the killing was intentional, since Beowulf says simply that he “shot wide.” Was this a hunting accident? A case of friendly fire? Or was it an assassination? We do not know. It echoes the fratricidal actions of Cain recounted at the beginning of the poem and, once again, seems to acknowledge the monstrousness that humanity contains.

Hrethel is disconsolate, and Beowulf compares his sorrow to

. . . the misery endured by an old man
who has lived to see his son’s body
swing on the gallows. He begins to keen
and weep for his boy, watching the raven
gloat where he hangs: he can be of no help.
The wisdom of old age is worthless to him. (Lines 2444-2449)

Like Hildeburh after the deaths of her son and brother, Hrethel sees no recourse: he cannot take revenge or demand recompense (wergild), because this is his own family. Instead, he falls into despair and dies—“chose God’s light” (godes leoht geceas, line 2479). Some scholars have considered this particular turn of phrase to be a problematic anachronism. After all, a pagan king cannot “choose God’s light.” I think that this is a misreading, and that this is a euphemism for death (think of “bought the farm”), which looks both backwards to a pagan sensibility and forward to a Christian one. My evidence for this reading comes from an analogous moment Egil’s Saga, a thirteenth-century Icelandic text that preserves poetry from a much earlier period (though how much earlier is a matter of debate). The title character, Egil, composes a poem about the death of his sons, and he describes his bereft state after the drowning of his eldest in a shipwreck (translated here by Bernard Scudder):

The sea has robbed
me of much,
my kinsmen’s deaths
are harsh to tell,
after the shield
of my family
retreated down
the god’s joyful road.

The “god” here is clearly not the Christian God, but, rather, Odin—though the stanza may remind the thirteenth-century reader of the saga of Christian heavenly rewards. It is a poetic way in which Egil chooses to signify death. As is the case for Hrethel, it is a death without the possibility of revenge or of recompense: one cannot expect payment from the sea. It is one of those points at which, as Tolkien wrote of Beowulf, “new Scripture and old tradition touched and ignited.”¹

But the question remains: what is this speech doing here, at this point in the poem when Beowulf should be giving a rousing speech to excite himself for the battle, to come to that moment of “berserker rage” that will enable him to challenge the monstrous enemy? Instead, we get this gloomy, depressing bit of family history.

But the speech isn’t over yet. After Hrethel’s demise, war breaks out with the Swedes, who are always waiting for the Geats to show the smallest sign of weakness. Heathcyn dies in battle, and then Hygelac, who inherits the throne, avenges his brother and, with the help of a certain Eofor, kills the Swedish king. After this, Beowulf emerges and becomes Hygelac’s champion, defeating another great enemy, Dayraven the Frank, with his customary battle-rage: “my bare hands stilled his heartbeats / and wrecked the bone-house” (2507-2508).

While the speech remains ambiguous, my reading is this: Hrethel, the foster-father whom Beowulf dearly loves, falls into despair after the death of Herebeald. Despair, according to medieval thought, is a sin, because it assumes a knowledge of providence: if you are in despair, you believe that you know, beyond doubt, what the future holds. Hrethel falls into despair because he believes that the Geats are doomed after the death of his finest son, but it turns out that he is wrong. He does not foresee the rise of Hygelac and of Beowulf, who will protect his people for fifty years. Beowulf, in this moment, while he sees his death coming, refuses to succumb to despair, because he does not know the future. He is granted foresight of his own death but not of the fate of the Geats. His people may be doomed, but they may not be. Wyrd has not necessarily already marked them, despite the forebodings that dominate the poem’s denouement.

There is, after all, a young man named Wiglaf.

---

Indomitable will or inescapable destiny

Some readers tend to reduce the conclusion of the poem to what I think is a reductive ethical question: is it right for Beowulf to face the dragon alone? And a corollary question: is Beowulf motivated to challenge the dragon by his desire for treasure?

Such questions may be worth asking, but they also underestimate the extent to which wyrd is looming over the poem at this point. Wiglaf’s speech after Beowulf’s death seems to admonish the hero’s decision: “Often when one man follows his own will / many are hurt. This happened to us” (lines 3077-3078). However, he also acknowledges its inevitability: “He held to his high destiny” (line 3084).

According to the poem’s own ontology, if fate has marked Beowulf to die on this day, then nothing can change this. While Beowulf himself has suggested that one’s actions in the world define one’s character and reputation, he also has claimed that courage and indomitable will can help a man only if his fate is not “already marked” (573). As Linda Georgianna has argued in an influential article, there are limits to the efficacy of heroic action in the poem, despite its heroic code.²

Concerning the treasure’s appeal, the narrative voice states the case quite clearly: despite the cursed nature of the hoard, Beowulf meant well: “Yet Beowulf’s gaze at the gold treasure / when he first saw it had not been selfish” (lines 3074-3075). If we recall the king’s role as a provider for his people, then his desire for treasure despite foreknowledge of his death makes more sense. He tells Wiglaf that it comforts him to leave his people “so well endowed on the day I die” (line 2798).

And yet, after Beowulf’s death, the Geats “let the ground keep” the treasure, “as useless to men now as it ever was” (lines 3166, 3168).

So, with all of this ambiguity, where are we left on the questions of Beowulf’s action and the nature of the treasure? Where does the poem leave us?

For that, we will have to address the elephant in the room, or, rather, the dragon in the room.

Next time: the dragon, the funeral, and the future. Once again, please consider the comment section your open thread for discussion this week. Some topics for discussion:

• Wiglaf and his response to Beowulf’s death.

• The dragon in comparison to our other monsters.

• The nature of treasure and the poem’s ambivalence toward it.

• The superlatives that the Geats use to describe Beowulf in the poem’s final lines.

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

Photo by Cliff Johnson on Unsplash

1. For more on this analogous connection between Beowulf and Egil’s Saga, see John Halbrooks, "P. D. James Reads Beowulf." In Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination. Ed. David Clark and Nicholas Perkins. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010, pages 183-199.

2. “King Hrethel’s Sorrow and the Limits of Heroic Action in Beowulf.” Speculum 62 (4): pages 829-850.