I have just finished doing something I never thought I'd do... finish reading Beowulf (Heaney's translation). Thank you John Halbrooks for inspiring me to pick up a book a million miles away from my cultural interests and heritage... and loving it. And thank you for your insightful essays that inspire so much thought.
BTW... did Tolkien use the dragon thief sequence for inspiration in the Hobbit?
This makes me very happy, Victoria. Thank you. And yes, the name of the anonymous burglar is certainly Bilbo Baggins. Tolkien pillaged liberally from Beowulf and Old Icelandic text. The names of the dwarves in The Hobbit are straight out of the Icelandic Edda.
Reading over the dragon sequence has had me wondering too. The hoard-guarding dragon has become kind of the standard image of the creature, in the English-speaking world at least. Do you think that's down to Tolkien, and thus indirectly the portrayal in Beowulf? All the elements are here - the ancient pile of gold, the fire-breathing, the winged terror laying waste to the fields. It's my impression that other literary dragons don't resemble this model so much, though admittedly I haven't surveyed them recently.
Yes, I think that the modern fantasy dragon descends from Tolkien’s Smaug and, therefore, ultimately from Beowulf. As you say, there are other traditions, but this one seems to be in the ascendant at the moment.
Lines 1386-89, in particular, are not just Existentialist. They are also the moral code of the Bhagavad Gita, which espouses strict determinism: the fate of a warrior (like Arjuna, to whom the Gita is targeted, and who balks at killing his cousins in a fratricidal civil war) is “unknowable (to him), but certain,” so the only thing he can do is discharge his duty without heed for reward or consequences. कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन ।
Great insights, John. Thank you. And this, about the Bhagavad Gita is fascinating. I already thought to comment about those lines of Beowulf's that there is almost a kind of contrary "determinism" to them. "It is always better / to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning" is the foundation of whole caged world view right there. Human life couldn't advance beyond it until a Christian or Enlightened world view enabled consideration of the possibility that at least sometimes that might not be so.
I stumbled upon this study just now. Like most ppl I read Beowulf in high school but it seemed little more than gibberish. This analysis helps me parse out an understanding of this iconic work.
Like the tales of King Arthur, this poem and it’s deeper meaning are enduring ancient legends, relentlessly rehashed by scholars but for good reason. There isn’t enough real documentation of the ancient Nordic, Anglo-Saxon world.
Thanks for reading, Maureen, and I’m glad you enjoyed it. I would encourage you to go back and look at the previous pieces, along with comments from a brilliant group of fellow readers.
I’m pretty late to the party here, but it looks like I’ve got a LOT to say about the Week 3 question – inevitable, maybe, given that we’re talking about what we take from the whole poem in the end. So bear with me, please. In fact my note is too long for a single post—I'm going to have to do it in multiple parts. And maybe save some for next week.
(Sounds like @JVHalbrooks had a similar problem, since he couldn’t keep all his thoughts to a single post either!)
I also haven’t yet read John’s follow-up post—I wanted to try to answer his questions on my own. I hope what I have to say here isn’t entirely redundant at this point.
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Let’s start with the “Beowulf bids farewell” passage and the several translations John provided. It was very interesting to look at how various translators handled it, even though (to my eye) it’s one of the less-tricky parts of the final third of the poem.
All versions have a generally mournful tone—that seems unavoidable and appropriate. Even Maria Dahavana Headley’s (I’m including hers too), which characteristically ventures furthest from the source, maintains that essential mood. Beowulf is about to face the dragon, and he doesn’t really expect to return. He wishes his “hearth-knights” well, and feels fate pressing down on him; the poet lets us know that it won’t be long before the king’s soul is separated from his body. The mood is notably different from the one that held before Beowulf’s two earlier fights—back then he paid what felt a lot like lip-service to the possibility that he might not survive, but now he’s virtually certain that his death is at hand. And this fits with the mood of the poem’s whole final act. The curtain is coming down; we’re looking at the end of a heroic career and quite possibly of the Geat nation rather than the arrival of a champion at the height of his powers.
The differences among the various translations come down to points of emphasis. Liuzza and Halbrooks take a very similar tack—their versions are powerfully elegiac, with a tragic sensibility, a final farewell to friends and indeed to life itself. Beowulf is presented as a wholly successful king, the “gold-friend of the Geats.” (I’m with @LisaBeets in loving that description—how could Heaney not have stuck with it?) But he is also “ready” or “ripe” for death—it feels like he’s weary of life, not just convinced that the dragon will probably kill him.
They both stick close to the wording of the original. I like how Liuzza preserves the Old English “sundur” in his “split asunder,” and his term “battle-hardened” in the first line renders the original most literally also. (Halbrooks gives us “courageous,” much like Crossley-Holland’s “brave.”) I also like how Liuzza and Halbrooks both use the word “treasure,” given how prominent gold and rings and hoards are throughout the poem. They both call Beowulf “king” in the final line, though Liuzza adds “noble,” which contributes to the valedictory feeling of the passage as he renders it. I wonder why Halbrooks went with “grasped in flesh” rather than “wrapped” for “bewunden”?
That makes plenty of sense. With all those other translations out there, it must be hard to avoid reproducing key phrases a lot. Nothing wrong with "grasped"!
Crossley-Holland goes in a somewhat different direction. It’s most obvious in the fourth line, where he has “angry, eager for slaughter” rather than “restless and ready for death.” That’s a pretty big change of mood. C-H’s version stresses the martial over the mournful—Beowulf is “brave” and he has “retainers” instead of “hearth-companions.” This Beowulf is closer to the one we saw in the first two sections, still spoiling for a fight even with fate hovering nearby. The outcome of the dragon fight feels least certain here; Beowulf’s death is coming soon, but there’s a bit of room left to wonder if that really means he’ll die here, rather than in a month or a year. In fact, in C-H’s version the awareness of fate is entirely between poet and reader—it’s not clear that Beowulf himself believes he won’t come back alive, nothing but the single word “mournful” to indicate any doubt on his part.
Heaney chooses still a different emphasis. In his version the scene feels a bit like a funeral at which the deceased is still present. He calls Beowulf “veteran,” which captures some of the sense of “battle-hardened” but adds a strong note of age. Beowulf is just plain “sad at heart,” and he explicitly “sens[es] his death.” There’s no indication of his former warlike eagerness as in Crossley-Holland’s translation. Heaney’s version has a more ethereal feel throughout, focusing on hovering, “unknowable” fate and a spirit spinning free of the flesh. Beowulf’s soul will be “part[ed]” from his body, which sounds almost gentle, with none of the implied violence of “sundur.” Beowulf might just as well be about to sail off to Avalon as crawl into a barrow to face a dragon.
And Headley takes that approach even further. She has Beowulf simply “old” in the first line, with no reference to battle or hardness. He doesn’t just sit down on the cliff edge, he falls “to his knees.” His thanes aren’t even hearth-companions now but “those who’d sat fireside.” This Beowulf is played out, almost doddering—“suddenly unsteady”—it wouldn’t surprise us, based on this, to find that he couldn’t lift his sword anymore. In the later lines Headley departs from the original altogether and has Beowulf overcome with the memory of his earlier fights, even feeling sympathy for or kinship with the monstrous foes he dispatched. There’s no soul sundered or parted from flesh here; instead death will “evict” Beowulf “from hall, hearth, and home.” This deviation gives the final act more continuity with the first two, with Beowulf’s memories and the image of him being evicted the way the Danes had been by Grendel (and likewise harking forward to how his people will be scattered in exile after his death). This Beowulf is much less heroic, more human, and there’s maybe a hint of critique creeping in. What is this old guy doing going to fight a dragon?
In her introduction to her translation, Headley notes, “Every English-translator’s take on how to translate this text is motivated by different ideas of how to use modern English to convey things inexpressible in it,” and that “when it comes to translating Beowulf, there is no sacred clarity.” I think that puts it admirably well. Even when a translator hews close to the original, as Liuzza and Halbrooks do among our examples, there’s no guarantee that they are conveying a truer sense of the poem as it would have been experienced by the poet or his audience. Our language has changed too much, our reconstruction of Old English vocabulary is too speculative, and the Weltanschaung of our ancestors too alien for us to ever feel fully confident that any translation captures the truth of it, whatever that might have been. Each of us will prefer some versions over others, but (aside from some clear absurdities) we can’t prove that one translation is better in this sense than another. Even more than most, Beowulf is a poem that invites many interpretations.
Nevertheless, it’s revealing to look at the original passage after considering these various renderings. Perhaps the most crucial phrase in determining the divergent emphases comes right in the middle: “wæfre ond wælfus.” As we’ve seen, the translators render this as “restless and ripe for death” (Liuzza), “angry, eager for slaughter” (Crossley-Holland), “restless and ready for death” (Halbrooks), “unsettled yet ready” (Heaney), and (more loosely) “[s]tricken, suddenly unsteady” (Headley). Crossley-Holland is the clear outlier here, but we should take a closer look at those key words before drawing any conclusions about which version comes closer to the original meaning.
As Halbrooks notes in one of his responses here, we don’t really know exactly what these words mean, particularly in this context. Philologists have developed their theories based on internal comparisons (that is, other places in the poem itself where these or related terms appear), the wider corpus of Old English texts, and linguistic analysis drawing on links to German and Scandinavian languages (ancient and modern) and tracing the development of English over the centuries. Their suggestions are informed by deep study, but they’re still speculation, and only as solid as the available evidence can make them.
So when a glossary tells us that “wæfre” means “wavering, flickering, indistinct,” we have to remember that there’s plenty of room for interpretation. The word appears only three times in the poem. The first comes at line 1151, in the Finnsburg episode: “ne meahte wǣfre mōd / forhabban in hreðre,” which Heaney’s translation kind of skips over. Another source I’ve got translates this as “the expiring life could not hold itself back in the breast,” with “wǣfre” rendered as “expiring.” You could just as well substitute “wavering” or “flickering” or many similar words; the glossary definition works fine here. The second appearance comes at line 1331, in reference to Grendel’s mother, when Hrothgar tells Beowulf about her attack on Heorot: “Wearð him on Heorote tō hand-banan / wæl-gǣst wǣfre”. Heaney again doesn’t translate this phrase directly; his version reads “Then this roaming killer came in a fury / and slaughtered him in Heorot” (93). More literally the lines read something like (in my own clumsy version) “She came to Heorot for combat / the wǣfre slaughter-demon”—or maybe “Came to murder him in Heorot / the wǣfre slaughter-demon,” if we take “him” in the first line to refer to Æschere instead of Grendel’s mother. This context makes “wǣfre” a lot harder to make sense of. It certainly doesn’t mean what it meant in the first case—“the expiring slaughter-demon”? It’s hard to fit any of the glossary’s suggestions into place here. Maybe in this instance it’s more like “indistinct,” suggesting how hard it was to see her in the dark?
Perhaps John can shed more light—I haven’t researched the word in any further depth, and maybe he’s aware of the scholarly work on it. The point, though, is that this is a word that resists any single concrete meaning, if it can be used in these two very different contexts. There’s lots of room for interpretation. In the passage we’re looking at, Beowulf’s farewell, the word is used to say something about Beowulf’s mood. But is it more like the first case (Finnsburg), since in both instances the subject of a spirit leaving the body is being raised? Or is it more like the second case (Grendel’s mother), since in both instances the word is describing a fighter? It could go either way—and thus so do translators.
Thanks for the replies! I'm going to read your post now. Looking forward to it.
And thanks again for running this event. I have absolutely loved immersing myself in the poem again. I've been amazed at how different it feels to me all these years later.
I agree with Headley that preserving a sense of ambiguity actually reflects our relationship to the original poem. You found an example of “wǣfre” that I missed. Thanks for that!
The other word in this key phrase is “wælfus,” and thankfully its meaning is somewhat less, well, indistinct. “Wæl” means battle, slaughter, sometimes the slain or fallen or even blood and gore (as in “wæl-fāh,” slaughter-stained). So “wælfus” means something like eager or ready for battle or slaughter. So far so clear. But the ambiguity becomes evident quickly: should we take it as “ready for death”—ready to be slaughtered?—or “eager to fight” and do some slaughtering? There’s no way to decide firmly.
That’s why this phrase is so crucial in interpreting this passage. If we go with a sense like “wavering and ready for death” we get a picture of Beowulf feeling kind of shaky and convinced he’s going to be killed by the dragon, resigned to his fate. But if instead we go with something like “worked-up and eager to fight,” we have a Beowulf more like he was earlier in the poem—certainly “mournful,” as the preceding line tells us, certainly less entirely confident than he used to be, but nevertheless still the battle-hardened warrior itching to get at his enemy. Those are remarkably different moods, and depending on which one we think is intended we read the whole passage differently. Most of our examples choose the former sense, and give us a more funereal scene, but Crossley-Holland goes the other way and conjures a less fatalistic mood. Either reading can be supported by the text.
Perhaps with “wælfus” we have an example of the kind of subtlety of connotation that is exquisitely difficult for a translator to capture. Wæl refers to battle, but there are other words in the poem that do likewise; wæl is different from, say, nīð in the way it speaks of the battlefield itself and the dead lying upon it, the slaughter rather than the fight. It gestures at the aftermath more than the action. In choosing it, the poet may have taken advantage of this to evoke both eagerness for battle and an expectation of death—not one or the other but both at once.
This would accord with the warrior ethos that we find throughout the ancient literature of the north: the idea that the best death for a warrior is to fall in battle, to die with his armor on, still wielding the sword. This is how a figure like Beowulf should go out. There would be some somberness knowing companions are parting for the last time, but the martial mood would be at least as strong—and that’s what I think we see here.
The other word choices in the passage tend to confirm this interpretation. “Niðheard” is very much a war image, and “sundur” has its own edge of violence. The word “gretan” in the fifth line has a dual connotation: it’s simply “greet” or “meet” much of the time, but it’s also used as a kind of metaphor for “attack” or “come to blows with” in battle. Thus the image of fate coming to “seek the treasure” of Beowulf’s soul—the treasure that is literally called a “hord” here, like the one the dragon guards—would have a more bellicose air than might be obvious. Fate here would parallel Beowulf himself, about to “greet” the dragon and seek its hoard. There are echoes of war and battle throughout the passage.
It may also be significant that both elements of the key phrase “wæfre ond wælfus” also appear in that passage about Grendel’s mother mentioned above. Here Beowulf is “wæfre ond wælfus,” and there Grendel’s mother is “wæl-gǣst wǣfre.” This could be coincidence, simply a case of the necessary alliteration leading to the repeated pairing of both terms, but there are a lot of words beginning with w, so it’s fair to wonder if there’s more than accident at work here. Throughout the poem we encounter word pairings in phrases like this which seem to be common or familiar combinations rather than the poet’s own inventions—formulas, as they’re known. Sometimes formulas recur in identical shape, such as “folces hyrde” (“protector of the people”), which appears four times, but more often they show up as variations on the theme. Sometimes this is simply due to case inflection, as in “worda ond worca” (line 289) and “wordum and worcum” (line 1834). More often though the variation is bigger, changing word order or even swapping in other words. So we get “wēox under wolcnum” (line 8), “wan under wolcnum” (line 650), “wōd under wolcnum” (line 715), “won tō wolcnum” (line 1375), and several others on the same pattern. The use of such shifting formulas appears to have been a traditional feature of Old English poetics; many of the formulas used in Beowulf show up in other Old English poems, so we know at least some of these phrases weren’t unique to the Beowulf poet.
I don’t know if “wæl” and “wæfre” appear in formulas outside of Beowulf, but they certainly have the feel of this kind of pairing, and if we regard them in that light then it may be meaningful that the phrase in our passage is echoed most closely by the phrase referring to Grendel’s mother. It would suggest a reading of “wæfre” here that would characterize Beowulf’s mood in a way similar to that of Grendel’s mother in her raid on Heorot. If that’s correct, then Crossley-Holland may be closer to the original sense with his “angry, eager for slaughter” than any of the others. And this interpretation would fit with the tenor of the other words discussed above, which together reinforce the martial spirit of the passage. It would yield a battle-hardened Beowulf who’s been roused to violent revenge like Grendel’s mother, who is also about to come to grips with fate and have his soul sundered from his flesh, ending his days the way a hero should.
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Yikes—all that and I haven’t even said anything about what we take away from the poem at the end, or how this passage frames Beowulf’s long speech that follows right afterward. Guess I’ll do that in another note, if anyone can stand it.
And I’m not aware of any other pairings of these two words, though there is an echo in the earlier passage in which Hrothgar describes Grendel’s mother, which uses a “wæl” compound along with “wæfre.”
I focused on that pairing in my analysis here. I think it might indicate that "wæl" and "wæfre" were linked in a characteristic Anglo-Saxon poetic "formula" -- and, if so, that might mean that we should read the phrase in the Beowulf's farewell passage as reflecting a sensibility like that in Grendel's mother's raid.
In that earlier case the words are used to describe a warrior-ish figure entering the lair of her enemy to seek vengeance. Beowulf is about to do something very similar. So maybe the "wæl"/"wæfre" combination was used for situations like that, a single warrior (or very small group) making a perilous incursion into the heart of enemy territory. In such a situation they might well be feeling both "wrathful and eager for battle" and "unsettled and ready for death," since they'd be running long odds of getting out alive. That dual sense might be what that formula captured.
I’ve actually seen “wælfus” rendered as “waiting for death.” I sort of wish that I had been bold enough to choose that reading in my translation. Maybe I will if I ever publish it :)
LOL. And here I am writing three thousand words based on not much more!
I guess this encapsulates my view on "the experts" - their deep study makes their opinions worthy of respect and consideration, but it doesn't make them infallible. The responses of readers fresh to the text, unburdened by all that scholarly weight, might reveal things that the experts can't see.
And unscholarly reactions are valuable in their own right. Literature isn't only for those who have prepared themselves via years of academic preparation. It's for anyone, or it's dead.
... scribbling notes furiously in my copy of Beowulf. I'm in starry-eyed awe of all of you, and reveling in the depth your contributions are adding to my third tango with this book. Thank you everyone!
Lots to say here, and I save most of it for next Wednesday, but a couple of things: yes, waefre and waelfus are problematic to translate, because we really don’t know what they mean. I have my own theories. And yes, the word translated as fate or doom is “wyrd,” which has that connotative range. And I, too, love that “spin free from his body” bit: Heaney is taking the Old English “bewunden” (wound up) and “unwinding” it. It’s very elegant.
@Beetsie, Thank you for the comparison, which increases my enjoyment of the poem all the more. But to me there is only one way I will forever remember this passage, and that is Heaney: "His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain" is absolutely haunting! I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since reading it.
No, my translation isn’t published. I translated it way back in the 90s in grad school. I pull bits and pieces out and polish them for handouts to my students.
Yes, there seems to be a suggestion of “strength of mind” or “resolution” in the name. It’s hard to say how much weight proper names carried in terms of their implied meanings, but that meaning resonates in interesting ways with her story as conveyed in the poem.
I didn’t have Headley’s translation at hand when I was writing this piece, but here are the lines, courtesy of Jenn Zuko:
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The old king fell to his knees on the cliff point
and willed good fortune on the Geats he’d ruled,
those who’d sat fireside, warmed by his gold.
Stricken, suddenly unsteady, he foresaw his fate
in the fog, shrouded but certain. For a moment,
he felt for his old foes, fen-bound, embarking alone.
Soon, soon, his own lease would expire,
evicting him from hall, hearth, and home.
I have just finished doing something I never thought I'd do... finish reading Beowulf (Heaney's translation). Thank you John Halbrooks for inspiring me to pick up a book a million miles away from my cultural interests and heritage... and loving it. And thank you for your insightful essays that inspire so much thought.
BTW... did Tolkien use the dragon thief sequence for inspiration in the Hobbit?
This makes me very happy, Victoria. Thank you. And yes, the name of the anonymous burglar is certainly Bilbo Baggins. Tolkien pillaged liberally from Beowulf and Old Icelandic text. The names of the dwarves in The Hobbit are straight out of the Icelandic Edda.
Reading over the dragon sequence has had me wondering too. The hoard-guarding dragon has become kind of the standard image of the creature, in the English-speaking world at least. Do you think that's down to Tolkien, and thus indirectly the portrayal in Beowulf? All the elements are here - the ancient pile of gold, the fire-breathing, the winged terror laying waste to the fields. It's my impression that other literary dragons don't resemble this model so much, though admittedly I haven't surveyed them recently.
Yes, I think that the modern fantasy dragon descends from Tolkien’s Smaug and, therefore, ultimately from Beowulf. As you say, there are other traditions, but this one seems to be in the ascendant at the moment.
Lines 1386-89, in particular, are not just Existentialist. They are also the moral code of the Bhagavad Gita, which espouses strict determinism: the fate of a warrior (like Arjuna, to whom the Gita is targeted, and who balks at killing his cousins in a fratricidal civil war) is “unknowable (to him), but certain,” so the only thing he can do is discharge his duty without heed for reward or consequences. कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन ।
Amazing--these ancient texts really speak to each other. Thank you for sharing that.
Great insights, John. Thank you. And this, about the Bhagavad Gita is fascinating. I already thought to comment about those lines of Beowulf's that there is almost a kind of contrary "determinism" to them. "It is always better / to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning" is the foundation of whole caged world view right there. Human life couldn't advance beyond it until a Christian or Enlightened world view enabled consideration of the possibility that at least sometimes that might not be so.
Yes, and of course, it’s the cycle of revenge that leads to disaster after disaster in the poem.
I stumbled upon this study just now. Like most ppl I read Beowulf in high school but it seemed little more than gibberish. This analysis helps me parse out an understanding of this iconic work.
Like the tales of King Arthur, this poem and it’s deeper meaning are enduring ancient legends, relentlessly rehashed by scholars but for good reason. There isn’t enough real documentation of the ancient Nordic, Anglo-Saxon world.
Thank you for this.
Thanks for reading, Maureen, and I’m glad you enjoyed it. I would encourage you to go back and look at the previous pieces, along with comments from a brilliant group of fellow readers.
I will.
I’m pretty late to the party here, but it looks like I’ve got a LOT to say about the Week 3 question – inevitable, maybe, given that we’re talking about what we take from the whole poem in the end. So bear with me, please. In fact my note is too long for a single post—I'm going to have to do it in multiple parts. And maybe save some for next week.
(Sounds like @JVHalbrooks had a similar problem, since he couldn’t keep all his thoughts to a single post either!)
I also haven’t yet read John’s follow-up post—I wanted to try to answer his questions on my own. I hope what I have to say here isn’t entirely redundant at this point.
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Let’s start with the “Beowulf bids farewell” passage and the several translations John provided. It was very interesting to look at how various translators handled it, even though (to my eye) it’s one of the less-tricky parts of the final third of the poem.
All versions have a generally mournful tone—that seems unavoidable and appropriate. Even Maria Dahavana Headley’s (I’m including hers too), which characteristically ventures furthest from the source, maintains that essential mood. Beowulf is about to face the dragon, and he doesn’t really expect to return. He wishes his “hearth-knights” well, and feels fate pressing down on him; the poet lets us know that it won’t be long before the king’s soul is separated from his body. The mood is notably different from the one that held before Beowulf’s two earlier fights—back then he paid what felt a lot like lip-service to the possibility that he might not survive, but now he’s virtually certain that his death is at hand. And this fits with the mood of the poem’s whole final act. The curtain is coming down; we’re looking at the end of a heroic career and quite possibly of the Geat nation rather than the arrival of a champion at the height of his powers.
The differences among the various translations come down to points of emphasis. Liuzza and Halbrooks take a very similar tack—their versions are powerfully elegiac, with a tragic sensibility, a final farewell to friends and indeed to life itself. Beowulf is presented as a wholly successful king, the “gold-friend of the Geats.” (I’m with @LisaBeets in loving that description—how could Heaney not have stuck with it?) But he is also “ready” or “ripe” for death—it feels like he’s weary of life, not just convinced that the dragon will probably kill him.
They both stick close to the wording of the original. I like how Liuzza preserves the Old English “sundur” in his “split asunder,” and his term “battle-hardened” in the first line renders the original most literally also. (Halbrooks gives us “courageous,” much like Crossley-Holland’s “brave.”) I also like how Liuzza and Halbrooks both use the word “treasure,” given how prominent gold and rings and hoards are throughout the poem. They both call Beowulf “king” in the final line, though Liuzza adds “noble,” which contributes to the valedictory feeling of the passage as he renders it. I wonder why Halbrooks went with “grasped in flesh” rather than “wrapped” for “bewunden”?
[end of Part 1]
To be honest, I have no memory of why I chose “grasped” at that point—probably because other translations hadn’t already used it—ha!
That makes plenty of sense. With all those other translations out there, it must be hard to avoid reproducing key phrases a lot. Nothing wrong with "grasped"!
[Note, Part 2]
Crossley-Holland goes in a somewhat different direction. It’s most obvious in the fourth line, where he has “angry, eager for slaughter” rather than “restless and ready for death.” That’s a pretty big change of mood. C-H’s version stresses the martial over the mournful—Beowulf is “brave” and he has “retainers” instead of “hearth-companions.” This Beowulf is closer to the one we saw in the first two sections, still spoiling for a fight even with fate hovering nearby. The outcome of the dragon fight feels least certain here; Beowulf’s death is coming soon, but there’s a bit of room left to wonder if that really means he’ll die here, rather than in a month or a year. In fact, in C-H’s version the awareness of fate is entirely between poet and reader—it’s not clear that Beowulf himself believes he won’t come back alive, nothing but the single word “mournful” to indicate any doubt on his part.
Heaney chooses still a different emphasis. In his version the scene feels a bit like a funeral at which the deceased is still present. He calls Beowulf “veteran,” which captures some of the sense of “battle-hardened” but adds a strong note of age. Beowulf is just plain “sad at heart,” and he explicitly “sens[es] his death.” There’s no indication of his former warlike eagerness as in Crossley-Holland’s translation. Heaney’s version has a more ethereal feel throughout, focusing on hovering, “unknowable” fate and a spirit spinning free of the flesh. Beowulf’s soul will be “part[ed]” from his body, which sounds almost gentle, with none of the implied violence of “sundur.” Beowulf might just as well be about to sail off to Avalon as crawl into a barrow to face a dragon.
And Headley takes that approach even further. She has Beowulf simply “old” in the first line, with no reference to battle or hardness. He doesn’t just sit down on the cliff edge, he falls “to his knees.” His thanes aren’t even hearth-companions now but “those who’d sat fireside.” This Beowulf is played out, almost doddering—“suddenly unsteady”—it wouldn’t surprise us, based on this, to find that he couldn’t lift his sword anymore. In the later lines Headley departs from the original altogether and has Beowulf overcome with the memory of his earlier fights, even feeling sympathy for or kinship with the monstrous foes he dispatched. There’s no soul sundered or parted from flesh here; instead death will “evict” Beowulf “from hall, hearth, and home.” This deviation gives the final act more continuity with the first two, with Beowulf’s memories and the image of him being evicted the way the Danes had been by Grendel (and likewise harking forward to how his people will be scattered in exile after his death). This Beowulf is much less heroic, more human, and there’s maybe a hint of critique creeping in. What is this old guy doing going to fight a dragon?
[end of Part 2]
[Note Part 3]
In her introduction to her translation, Headley notes, “Every English-translator’s take on how to translate this text is motivated by different ideas of how to use modern English to convey things inexpressible in it,” and that “when it comes to translating Beowulf, there is no sacred clarity.” I think that puts it admirably well. Even when a translator hews close to the original, as Liuzza and Halbrooks do among our examples, there’s no guarantee that they are conveying a truer sense of the poem as it would have been experienced by the poet or his audience. Our language has changed too much, our reconstruction of Old English vocabulary is too speculative, and the Weltanschaung of our ancestors too alien for us to ever feel fully confident that any translation captures the truth of it, whatever that might have been. Each of us will prefer some versions over others, but (aside from some clear absurdities) we can’t prove that one translation is better in this sense than another. Even more than most, Beowulf is a poem that invites many interpretations.
Nevertheless, it’s revealing to look at the original passage after considering these various renderings. Perhaps the most crucial phrase in determining the divergent emphases comes right in the middle: “wæfre ond wælfus.” As we’ve seen, the translators render this as “restless and ripe for death” (Liuzza), “angry, eager for slaughter” (Crossley-Holland), “restless and ready for death” (Halbrooks), “unsettled yet ready” (Heaney), and (more loosely) “[s]tricken, suddenly unsteady” (Headley). Crossley-Holland is the clear outlier here, but we should take a closer look at those key words before drawing any conclusions about which version comes closer to the original meaning.
As Halbrooks notes in one of his responses here, we don’t really know exactly what these words mean, particularly in this context. Philologists have developed their theories based on internal comparisons (that is, other places in the poem itself where these or related terms appear), the wider corpus of Old English texts, and linguistic analysis drawing on links to German and Scandinavian languages (ancient and modern) and tracing the development of English over the centuries. Their suggestions are informed by deep study, but they’re still speculation, and only as solid as the available evidence can make them.
So when a glossary tells us that “wæfre” means “wavering, flickering, indistinct,” we have to remember that there’s plenty of room for interpretation. The word appears only three times in the poem. The first comes at line 1151, in the Finnsburg episode: “ne meahte wǣfre mōd / forhabban in hreðre,” which Heaney’s translation kind of skips over. Another source I’ve got translates this as “the expiring life could not hold itself back in the breast,” with “wǣfre” rendered as “expiring.” You could just as well substitute “wavering” or “flickering” or many similar words; the glossary definition works fine here. The second appearance comes at line 1331, in reference to Grendel’s mother, when Hrothgar tells Beowulf about her attack on Heorot: “Wearð him on Heorote tō hand-banan / wæl-gǣst wǣfre”. Heaney again doesn’t translate this phrase directly; his version reads “Then this roaming killer came in a fury / and slaughtered him in Heorot” (93). More literally the lines read something like (in my own clumsy version) “She came to Heorot for combat / the wǣfre slaughter-demon”—or maybe “Came to murder him in Heorot / the wǣfre slaughter-demon,” if we take “him” in the first line to refer to Æschere instead of Grendel’s mother. This context makes “wǣfre” a lot harder to make sense of. It certainly doesn’t mean what it meant in the first case—“the expiring slaughter-demon”? It’s hard to fit any of the glossary’s suggestions into place here. Maybe in this instance it’s more like “indistinct,” suggesting how hard it was to see her in the dark?
Perhaps John can shed more light—I haven’t researched the word in any further depth, and maybe he’s aware of the scholarly work on it. The point, though, is that this is a word that resists any single concrete meaning, if it can be used in these two very different contexts. There’s lots of room for interpretation. In the passage we’re looking at, Beowulf’s farewell, the word is used to say something about Beowulf’s mood. But is it more like the first case (Finnsburg), since in both instances the subject of a spirit leaving the body is being raised? Or is it more like the second case (Grendel’s mother), since in both instances the word is describing a fighter? It could go either way—and thus so do translators.
[end of Part 3]
(By the way, I do address that word in the next post. So let me know what you think of my reading.)
Thanks for the replies! I'm going to read your post now. Looking forward to it.
And thanks again for running this event. I have absolutely loved immersing myself in the poem again. I've been amazed at how different it feels to me all these years later.
I agree with Headley that preserving a sense of ambiguity actually reflects our relationship to the original poem. You found an example of “wǣfre” that I missed. Thanks for that!
Yeah, there's really no way around ambiguity in translating a work like this. Best to highlight it!
[Note, Part 4]
The other word in this key phrase is “wælfus,” and thankfully its meaning is somewhat less, well, indistinct. “Wæl” means battle, slaughter, sometimes the slain or fallen or even blood and gore (as in “wæl-fāh,” slaughter-stained). So “wælfus” means something like eager or ready for battle or slaughter. So far so clear. But the ambiguity becomes evident quickly: should we take it as “ready for death”—ready to be slaughtered?—or “eager to fight” and do some slaughtering? There’s no way to decide firmly.
That’s why this phrase is so crucial in interpreting this passage. If we go with a sense like “wavering and ready for death” we get a picture of Beowulf feeling kind of shaky and convinced he’s going to be killed by the dragon, resigned to his fate. But if instead we go with something like “worked-up and eager to fight,” we have a Beowulf more like he was earlier in the poem—certainly “mournful,” as the preceding line tells us, certainly less entirely confident than he used to be, but nevertheless still the battle-hardened warrior itching to get at his enemy. Those are remarkably different moods, and depending on which one we think is intended we read the whole passage differently. Most of our examples choose the former sense, and give us a more funereal scene, but Crossley-Holland goes the other way and conjures a less fatalistic mood. Either reading can be supported by the text.
Perhaps with “wælfus” we have an example of the kind of subtlety of connotation that is exquisitely difficult for a translator to capture. Wæl refers to battle, but there are other words in the poem that do likewise; wæl is different from, say, nīð in the way it speaks of the battlefield itself and the dead lying upon it, the slaughter rather than the fight. It gestures at the aftermath more than the action. In choosing it, the poet may have taken advantage of this to evoke both eagerness for battle and an expectation of death—not one or the other but both at once.
This would accord with the warrior ethos that we find throughout the ancient literature of the north: the idea that the best death for a warrior is to fall in battle, to die with his armor on, still wielding the sword. This is how a figure like Beowulf should go out. There would be some somberness knowing companions are parting for the last time, but the martial mood would be at least as strong—and that’s what I think we see here.
The other word choices in the passage tend to confirm this interpretation. “Niðheard” is very much a war image, and “sundur” has its own edge of violence. The word “gretan” in the fifth line has a dual connotation: it’s simply “greet” or “meet” much of the time, but it’s also used as a kind of metaphor for “attack” or “come to blows with” in battle. Thus the image of fate coming to “seek the treasure” of Beowulf’s soul—the treasure that is literally called a “hord” here, like the one the dragon guards—would have a more bellicose air than might be obvious. Fate here would parallel Beowulf himself, about to “greet” the dragon and seek its hoard. There are echoes of war and battle throughout the passage.
It may also be significant that both elements of the key phrase “wæfre ond wælfus” also appear in that passage about Grendel’s mother mentioned above. Here Beowulf is “wæfre ond wælfus,” and there Grendel’s mother is “wæl-gǣst wǣfre.” This could be coincidence, simply a case of the necessary alliteration leading to the repeated pairing of both terms, but there are a lot of words beginning with w, so it’s fair to wonder if there’s more than accident at work here. Throughout the poem we encounter word pairings in phrases like this which seem to be common or familiar combinations rather than the poet’s own inventions—formulas, as they’re known. Sometimes formulas recur in identical shape, such as “folces hyrde” (“protector of the people”), which appears four times, but more often they show up as variations on the theme. Sometimes this is simply due to case inflection, as in “worda ond worca” (line 289) and “wordum and worcum” (line 1834). More often though the variation is bigger, changing word order or even swapping in other words. So we get “wēox under wolcnum” (line 8), “wan under wolcnum” (line 650), “wōd under wolcnum” (line 715), “won tō wolcnum” (line 1375), and several others on the same pattern. The use of such shifting formulas appears to have been a traditional feature of Old English poetics; many of the formulas used in Beowulf show up in other Old English poems, so we know at least some of these phrases weren’t unique to the Beowulf poet.
I don’t know if “wæl” and “wæfre” appear in formulas outside of Beowulf, but they certainly have the feel of this kind of pairing, and if we regard them in that light then it may be meaningful that the phrase in our passage is echoed most closely by the phrase referring to Grendel’s mother. It would suggest a reading of “wæfre” here that would characterize Beowulf’s mood in a way similar to that of Grendel’s mother in her raid on Heorot. If that’s correct, then Crossley-Holland may be closer to the original sense with his “angry, eager for slaughter” than any of the others. And this interpretation would fit with the tenor of the other words discussed above, which together reinforce the martial spirit of the passage. It would yield a battle-hardened Beowulf who’s been roused to violent revenge like Grendel’s mother, who is also about to come to grips with fate and have his soul sundered from his flesh, ending his days the way a hero should.
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Yikes—all that and I haven’t even said anything about what we take away from the poem at the end, or how this passage frames Beowulf’s long speech that follows right afterward. Guess I’ll do that in another note, if anyone can stand it.
[End]
And I’m not aware of any other pairings of these two words, though there is an echo in the earlier passage in which Hrothgar describes Grendel’s mother, which uses a “wæl” compound along with “wæfre.”
I focused on that pairing in my analysis here. I think it might indicate that "wæl" and "wæfre" were linked in a characteristic Anglo-Saxon poetic "formula" -- and, if so, that might mean that we should read the phrase in the Beowulf's farewell passage as reflecting a sensibility like that in Grendel's mother's raid.
In that earlier case the words are used to describe a warrior-ish figure entering the lair of her enemy to seek vengeance. Beowulf is about to do something very similar. So maybe the "wæl"/"wæfre" combination was used for situations like that, a single warrior (or very small group) making a perilous incursion into the heart of enemy territory. In such a situation they might well be feeling both "wrathful and eager for battle" and "unsettled and ready for death," since they'd be running long odds of getting out alive. That dual sense might be what that formula captured.
What do you think?
I’ve actually seen “wælfus” rendered as “waiting for death.” I sort of wish that I had been bold enough to choose that reading in my translation. Maybe I will if I ever publish it :)
I like that version, the way it preserves the "w" sound.
LOL. And here I am writing three thousand words based on not much more!
I guess this encapsulates my view on "the experts" - their deep study makes their opinions worthy of respect and consideration, but it doesn't make them infallible. The responses of readers fresh to the text, unburdened by all that scholarly weight, might reveal things that the experts can't see.
And unscholarly reactions are valuable in their own right. Literature isn't only for those who have prepared themselves via years of academic preparation. It's for anyone, or it's dead.
So keep giving us your preferred takes!
Don't know how I missed this. Excellent work.
... scribbling notes furiously in my copy of Beowulf. I'm in starry-eyed awe of all of you, and reveling in the depth your contributions are adding to my third tango with this book. Thank you everyone!
Lots to say here, and I save most of it for next Wednesday, but a couple of things: yes, waefre and waelfus are problematic to translate, because we really don’t know what they mean. I have my own theories. And yes, the word translated as fate or doom is “wyrd,” which has that connotative range. And I, too, love that “spin free from his body” bit: Heaney is taking the Old English “bewunden” (wound up) and “unwinding” it. It’s very elegant.
I see graduate work in your future!
@Beetsie, Thank you for the comparison, which increases my enjoyment of the poem all the more. But to me there is only one way I will forever remember this passage, and that is Heaney: "His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain" is absolutely haunting! I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since reading it.
No, my translation isn’t published. I translated it way back in the 90s in grad school. I pull bits and pieces out and polish them for handouts to my students.
Yes, there seems to be a suggestion of “strength of mind” or “resolution” in the name. It’s hard to say how much weight proper names carried in terms of their implied meanings, but that meaning resonates in interesting ways with her story as conveyed in the poem.