Beowulf

How good is this?!?!? This is me completely inhaling the book and then having to go back and reread and then going back and screenshotting to send passages to friends because the wording and the phrases and the rhythm are just so damn magical.
Headley captures the tone of an epic, bragging, rambling tangential bro-culture poem so well, but not only that: I understood it. No really. I knew what was going on the whole time. This is a miracle after years of reading "classics" and slogging my way through to only partially understand what was happening in barest details. But this? You get it. The text is understandable and therefore, enjoyable!
A taste:
"Meanwhile, Beowulf gave
zero shits.
He dressed himself in
glittering gear,
his mail-shirt show more finely forged,
links locked
and loaded. He'd meet this
murdering mother
under mere, and amend her
existence."

The modern language and lingo (#blessed and sidebar, etc.) do not in anyway detract but rather cobbled together with archaic language just heighten the strangeness and raucous nature of the tale. This is totally a story told by a drunk dude who is WAY too loud and was totally there or close there when all the things went down.
Headley's takes on characters I didn't even remember from reading other versions does what it's supposed to do: you remember them. They become part of the narrative instead of just another person who's name begins with "H".

Up next is listening to the audio version because this just BEGS to be read aloud! show less

This is the unabridged version of Beowulf, and I love it. (I just slobbered a little bit on my chin, for pure excitement, while writing this.)

The original Old English text appears alongside the Seamus Heaney translation. And this arrangement -- Old English on the left, Today's English on the right -- sets a truly old-world, Ultima Thule vibe for the reading. I could smell the woodsmoke. I could taste the mead. My inner-brain reading voice was Seamus Heaney's: gravelly, tinged with an Irish lilt. (Because I listened first to the Audio CD Seamus Heaney reading.)

I won't bother ever seeing the Beowulf movie because nothing simply audio and visual could compete with what I just experienced. Besides, the fact that Grendel's mom is some show more supposedly bawdy outcast wench whom King Hrothgar sleazily got serviced by one cold and lonely night in the past, when he was out late tramping about the peat bogs looking for a little hot bawdy wench action -- that Hollywoodish twist totally ruins the idea of Grendel and his mom as members of Cain's evil clan, Cain cast out from God, "marked because he murdered". For a true understanding of that outcast dynamic, you'll need to read John Gardner's "Grendel". That amazing little companion to Beowulf helps clarify, better than anything else I've read, why Grendel has a pouch made from dragon skins.

Beowulf is about the really big ideas: good and evil, light and darkness. The poem's vibe (as Seamus Heaney has brung it) is very pagan. It's a tale told by flickering flame light. You get the sense of this earth life as something strange and weird and best expressed only by parable. Imagine a sparrow flying into a meadhall from a cold winter night -- bright and warm and cozy, beautiful even -- and then the sparrow flies out of the hall and back into the cold winter night. That, to paraphrase a story from the venerable Bede, is our experience of life: we are the sparrow, and we come from a cold nothing into a bright warmth and then we go back to the cold nothing. That's a human life, as the Beowulf text tells it.

The Beowulf meta-story, however, is the fact that we today, one millennium later, have the story in our hands. (That, actually, is pretty amazing considering that only one solitary manuscript survived antiquity to bring Beowulf to us.) The meaning of the meta-story contradicts the textual meaning of Beowulf; i.e., there appears to be something more to life in the communal sense life (as opposed to the individual or solitary life) that is a kind of profound and tantalizing mystery. Who is the collective we? Where are we going? What is the sum of all our stories, our infinite imagination, our love, our hate?

These are important questions with dark answers.

All that, from one little pagan poem. show less

Wow. This is one delightful bit of writing! The language is playful and welcoming. Cleaver and compassionate, the emphasis is on human qualities, good and bad, in all the actors. Grendel and his mother are in some ways less monstrous than Beowulf, whose outrageous strength proves a match and more to theirs, but he is kept from monstrosity because he makes support of his lord and land his limits, his strongest desire being the lasting fame of a good name.

I always enjoy the translator's notes in these, what makes you go and be the umpteenth person to translate a classic, what makes you think you can bring something new to the party? I think this works and the translator does bring something different to this work.
I didn't get Beowulf forced on me at school - I didn't go to that sort of school. I came to Beowulf as an adult, by choice and through the Seamus Heaney translation. I loved it from the first word, as I, too, have a habit of starting a conversation with "So". More at work than at home, but I recognised something in it. It opened up the world of alliterative poetry, which I have thoroughly enjoyed exploring with the likes of Simon Armitage. In this, the translator starts with show more "Bro". I get what she is trying to do, this is a bar room and the story teller is trying to quieten the room, to take the floor, to grab the attention. I reckon someone, somewhere could write an essay on the choice of translation for "Hwaet".
This feels to be a more robust translation than the Heaney (which I am going to have to read again very soon). It uses modern language, there's a couple of gimme and gonna in here as well as shit and fuck used more than I would, but I'm not the subject of this. This is all about a male environment and the men in it. And they almost certainly would use that language. That's not to say that it is dumbed down, or simplified, there are plenty of allusions and illusions at work in here. The whale road being the Old English equivalent of the wine dark sea. It feels immediate and earthy, it doesn't feel distant and ethereal in the way that the tranbslation of an ancient classic could do. There is relevance in here and the language used is of its time. That may mean it will date, but that doesn;t make it any less good in the here and now.
I liked the way that the voice changed as the different people take up the tale, there is a change in language and word usage here that is sophisticated without feeling to be artificial.
The story hasn't changed, it remains the same 3 act play with 50 years vanishing in the middle. And yet it isn't tired and predictable, I still felt the tears pricking as Wiglaf berates his fellow warriors for not coming to Beowulf's aid. If there's any lesson in here that the modern world need to hear it is that doing the right thing is always worth it, no matter how hard or painful. He's the hero for the modern age.
This is well worth adding to your reading list, regardless of if you're familiar with the work or not. show less

This was soooooooo much better than The Iliad and The Odyssey.

First of all, this edition of the book is lovely. It included many photos and illustrations of artifacts and the general places involved in this story. That was a nice edition.

Second, I did not read it in the Old English. I would have liked to, but without reading this as part of a class - reading this just for my own edification - there was no percentage in it at this point.

That being said, reading this was a pleasure. This translation portrayed the action, the atmosphere, and the characters. Perhaps it was the accompanying photos of artifacts, but I had so much more sense of place and feel for this story than The Iliad & The Odyssey.

Two interesting things come to the fore show more for me:
1. There is a real sense of responsibility of the leaders for their followers/thanes. Writing this on the eve of a mid-term election, I wonder how we've gotten so far away from that. We give power to those who do nothing to earn it, and in turn they do not hold that power in sacred trust. Perhaps these ancient leaders did not live up to this, but the poet who tells the tale makes a point of emphasizing that heroes did.
2. The poet is telling a pagan tale. Yet he infuses this tale with Christian values and sentiments. It's a bit of a loss to not hear how exactly Hrothgar, Beowulf, the Danes, and the Geats related their actions to their gods and their understanding of the afterlife.

All in all, a worthwhile read of the Western Canon. I'm glad I picked it up. show less

I've read Beowulf twice before: once in high school (no idea what translation) and once in grad school (Seamus Heaney). Maria Dahvana Headley's new translation (in?)famously updates the language, using constructions like "Hashtag: blessed" (l. 622) and "Previously prone to calling bullshit" (l. 980) and rendering the opening hwæt as "Bro!" (l. 1) It's that latter choice that I think is the most interesting; Headley plays up the boasting. This is a story of men telling stories about the prowess of men, both their own and that of others. I read a review by a medievalist that said Headley "insists on its emptiness and bullying element" but though that might be true in the paratext, I don't think it comes across in the actual text. Beowulf show more is a braggart, but Beowulf can do what he says he can do-- and more!

Here's a sample passage of bragging (I basically opened the book at random and hit one), from when Beowulf is introducing himself to King Hrothgar:

"Every elder knew I was the man for you, and blessed
my quest, King Hrothgar, because where I'm from?
I'm the strongest and the boldest, and the bravest and the best
Yes: I mean—I may have bathed in the blood of beasts,
netted five foul ogres at once, smashed my way into a troll den
and come out swinging, gone skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
and made sashimi of some sea monsters.
Anyone who fucks with the Geats? Bro, they have to fuck with me.
They're asking for it, and I deal them death." (ll. 414-22)

These were the passages that sung the most for me, and are incredibly fun to read aloud. I'm no poet or even an analyst of poetry, so I can't tell you much about why it works for me, but I think Headley captures the way men talk about their accomplishments. There's some excellent alliteration, and also I like the way the register changes. Lines 417-20 may use some modern language, but they have a poetic, slightly archaic feeling (it's the long sentence, I think), and then you're suddenly thrown into the very unpoetic boast of line 421, which could come straight out of, I dunno, hip-hop lyrics.

Another review I read talks about how the last third of the poem (where Beowulf fights the dragon) has much less modernized language. I don't know if that's right per se, but it does have a lot less boasting. But I think that's on purpose: Beowulf is an old man now, and an old king. All his friends and enemies are dead; his renown was such that there hasn't even been a war for him to fight because everyone is afraid to attack the Geats while he rules. So who does he have left to boast to or boast of? He goes out killing a dragon, but it's almost tragic, in the sense that one feels like Beowulf deserved better! He comes across as a tired old man grateful for a fight that will kill him, so he doesn't have to die in his sleep, but it's not a fight that would have rated had it happened when he was in the prime of life. As he embarks to kill the dragon, the narrator portrays him as missing old friends and enemies:

The old king fell to his knees on the cliff point
[...].
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. (ll. 2418, 2421-25)

That said, I agree, it's much less fun to read that part of the poem, even if there's good reason for the shift in tone.

There's a lot you can talk about here; (as the review I quoted above says) Headley's lasting influence will probably be her insistence that most of the language that is usually translated as indicating Grendel's mother is a monster is, when used to describe men, not translated in such a way; the phrase others have translated as "inhuman troll-wife" or "monstrous hell-bride," she renders as "formidable noblewoman"! (pp. xxiii-xxv) I really enjoyed reading it, and it makes me want to dig into Beowulf again, and makes me miss hanging out with medievalists as I did in grad school.

Speaking of which, I read this because it is a finalist for the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Related Work, and this is surely the first Hugo finalist to thank someone I went to grad school with in the Acknowledgements! show less

In her acknowledgments at the end of the book the author states: “The notion of Beowulf as a bro-story had been rattling around in my head for a decade.” And what a story Headley’s free verse translation is!

It's interesting to me that some of the audio publisher’s advertisement call it a “feminist” translation. This is as soaked in testosterone as one of Robert B. Parker’s westerns. Bro, it’s so butch that it makes other translations, as fine as they, are seem nelly in comparison. “Bro” is the first word in the translation and appears many times thereafter. The source, according to the author speaking of her word choice is this:

"I come equipped with my own memories of sitting at the bar’s end listening to men show more navigate darts, trivia, and women, and so, in this book I translate it [the old English, i.e., Anglo-Saxon, word hwæt] as “Bro.” The entire poem especially the monologues of the men in it, feel to me like the sort of competitive conversations I’ve heard between men, one insisting on his right to the floor while simultaneously insisting that he’s friendly."

Using contemporary and often rude English slang coupled with the time honored techniques of medieval Skaldic poetry alliteration and imagery that often borders on riddling, for example using whale road instead of sea or ocean. Headley has composed a work that a skald would be proud of. show less