Rating: 4 out of 5 Grendel arms
My only interaction with Beowulf prior to reading this book was seeing Beowulf 3D stoned at Universal City Walk in 2007. Given my ignorance, I found the introduction to this new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley fascinating. She gives a brief primer on the history of the epic poem and it is mysterious and complicated. It’s a thousand years old, no one knows who wrote it, and there’s an outside chance it’s actually about a talking bear.
Beowulf likely had a long oral tradition before being transcribed into what would become known as the Nowell Codex. The poem is about killing monsters and slaying dragons; an oral tradition feels true to the genre. I bet bards went from town to town blowing people’s minds with this story, excited they had a hit on their hands before repeating it so often they got sick of it, townsfolk shouting “Beowulf!” from the back row while they’re trying to tell a new story.
Two different scribes wrote the Nowell Codex sometime between 1000 and 1010. The first scribe begins the Codex and stops at line 1939 of Beowulf where the second scribe takes over. A guy is having his skin peeled off for looking at a beautiful woman on line 1939 so I like to think Scribe A was so scandalized he couldn’t continue. Although, house elf and scholar of Anglo Saxon literature Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie thinks Scribe B seemed “to belong to an older school of insular writing than its companion hand.” So it sounds like the first guy probably got fired for using that newfangled, sexy handwriting.
A fire badly damaged the Codex in 1731, and, here’s the best part, no one cared! Per Wikipedia, “no serious attempt at restoration was made until the 19th century, by which time the margins had crumbled irreparably, and the edges of many pages are now illegible.” I supposed it’s also possible they didn’t know how to restore it back then, but either way, some pages of Beowulf are wide open to interpretation because they are burned.
Maria Dahvana Headley does an excellent job updating the text. I believe her use of modern parlance and wordplay would have met with the approval of Anglo-Saxon poets. She explains her use of the word “bro” as a translation of “hwæt.”
“The entire poem, and especially the monologues of the men in it, feels to me like the sort of competitive conversations I’ve often heard between men, one insisting on his right to the floor while simultaneously insisting that he’s friendly. “Bro” is, to my ear, a means of commanding attention while shuffling focus calculatedly away from hierarchy.”
I like this interpretation even as I found it jarring. It’s off-putting to read a few lines of more traditional verse and then run smack into a “bro.” It pulls you out of the story a bit, but plants you firmly back onto a barstool, and that I do not mind. It serves the reader well to be reminded that Beowulf, at its core, should be heard as a drunken war story. Beowulf? Son of Ecgtheow? Kinsman of Hygelac? Fuck yeah I know him he’s my cousin, man. Listen to this shit. Just because something is 1000 years old doesn’t mean it can’t be vulgar and saucy.
So what of the poem itself? It’s cool, I guess. Most of it is about swords and treasure. Everyone should experience it at least once. I think getting into Beowulf would be a fun hobby. Reading a bunch of different translations, seeing how they differ, like trying to collect every single cover of Eleanor Rigby. It’s only 3,182 lines so can be done in an afternoon, but if even that is too much, the movie isn’t bad. Robert Zemeckis directed and Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary wrote the screenplay. Maria Dahvana Headley and Neil Gaiman coedited the anthology Unnatural Creatures, so there’s a weird, six degrees of Beowulf thing going on here. Headley also wrote a separate novel based on Grendel’s mother called The Mere Wife so it’s safe to say she’s a fan, and if someone is going to tell me a story, bro I want them to be a fanatic.
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