Heaney’s mastery

Beowulf’s bane by Charles Keeping

Beowulf: A New Translation
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber & Faber, 1999.

Over the years I’ve acquired a handful of titles designed to render the language of Beowulf accessible to the modern reader, for example prose renditions by R K Gordon (1922) and by G N Garmonsway and Jacqueline Simpson (1967), and a verse presentation by Michael Alexander (1973) designed to capture the style and mannerisms of the Anglo-Saxon poem but in more contemporary English.

But of all the translations, modernised versions and other paraphrases of Beowulf I’ve looked at over several decades Heaney’s has been the most readable and, I rather think, the most enjoyable.

Enjoyable for expressing the spirit of the original in a form that’s easily comprehended – for making it a delight to revisit the familiar tale when all the component parts were finally revealed to me as hanging together in harmony – enjoyable too for allowing me to witness a modern interpreter taking care with language just as the original anonymous poet did with his epic tale.

Sutton Hoo gold belt buckle © The Trustees of the British Museum

For new readers – as it did now for me, forgetful as I can be – it may come as a surprise that we are not informed of the name of the warrior captain until more than three hundred lines of verse: but of course us moderns have recourse to a title for the epic bestowed somewhat later, after the manuscript was redicovered and published a scant three centuries ago.

The man whose name was known for courage,
the Geat leader, resolute in his helmet,
answered in return: ‘We are retainers
from Hygelac’s band. Beowulf is my name.’

Heaney 1999

At first sight there may seem little to praise this over, say Michael Alexander’s version of the same lines. Both respect the cæsurae which punctuate lines at roughly the midway point, and both imitate the alliterations Anglo-Saxon poetry revelled in either side of each cæsura:

The gallant Geat gave answer then,
valour-renowned, and vaunting spoke,
hard under helmet: ‘At Hygelac’s table
we are sharers in the banquet; Beowulf is my name.’

Alexander 1973

But it’s the totality of what Heaney accomplishes that most impressed me. He achieves the near-impossible task of delivering lines in almost conversational English while giving us the flavour of the original through his use of archaic words that have survived in dialect. Two such words that struck me I was pleased to later read he’d highlighted in his introduction, which I read afterwards. Thole, meaning ‘to endure, to suffer patiently’ was a word his older Irish relatives had used, and came via Scottish and Northern English dialect from Old English þolian; the term bawn, which Heaney used to describe Hrothgar’s hall Heorot, was another colloquial Irish term which is related to Scots Gaelic bothy and possibly Welsh bwthyn.

Now here I am pointing to vocabulary details while claiming to talk about totality, so let me revert to the whole. Heaney’s was the first version I read where I was able to mostly focus on the narrative without stumbling as much over infelicitous phrasing or copious foot- or end-notes. Here I got a sense of Beowulf’s overall career, the three principle fights – with Grendel, Grendel’s dam, and with the dragon – while being reminded of his youthful exploits fighting sea monsters and saving friends, plus all the parallels from legends linked to the Geats, Swedes, Danes and Friesians which cemented Beowulf to an ongoing tradition.

All the past scholarly controversies – the poet’s affront introducing monsters to history, the Old Testament references being bolt-ons to an oral tradition or not, the effect of the so-called digressions on the flow of the narrative – all faded to irrelevance as I became, through Heaney’s mastery, more aware of the original poet’s magisterial creation, his work of art as beautiful and awe-inspiring as any silvered or gilded treasure revealed during an archaeological excavation.

And finally I understood that the poem was an affirmation of a moral code that still holds true – the imperative to ‘do the right thing’. For Beowulf that meant helping one’s neighbour, being generous to friends, opposing malevolence with all one’s strength, behaving justly when in power, and leading by example even when death seems certain. If only all leaders could be like this; thank you, Seamus Heaney, for clarifying what the Beowulf poet’s intentions were.

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https://746books.com/2023/02/08/reading-ireland-month-is-coming-2/

Read for Cathy @746books’s Reading Ireland Month: the late Seamus Heaney, who died ten years ago this August, was one of Ireland’s foremost poets as well as a translator and playwright.