This flower of manhood

Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf (1999) brought the old poem to more readers than any other version published over the centuries. One measure of its success is that it outsold each of Heaney’s individual collections of poems, which of course had robust sales of their own. There was something unusually compelling about this poet’s translation of this medieval epic. Some of the appeal must lie with Heaney’s poetic transformations. The verse moves with varying rhythms and subtle alliteration. His linguistic inventiveness allows him to compress an old king’s violent career into a “feud-calloused hand”, or to convey the despair implicit in “a spear, dawn-cold to the touch”. And the sprinkling of Hibernicisms such as “thole”, “kesh” and “graith” keeps readers gently off-balance, never letting them forget the original’s historical distance. Still, even in Heaney’s translation, Beowulf can be a difficult text for newcomers to appreciate. The Grendelkin and the dragon can seem like tired narrative devices from young adult fantasy fiction. Beowulf’s heroic exploits may bring to mind comic-book action sequences with outsized swords and biceps. And the abrupt narrative shifts will, for some, recall those of simple folk tales. It would be an unusual reader who, new to the poem, was attentive to the layers of sophistication in the original Old English.

Heather O’Donoghue draws on her decades of familiarity with Beowulf and the literary culture of medieval Scandinavia to guide new audiences through the poem’s complexities. There is something refreshing about an experienced scholar’s decision to push aside peer-reviewed articles, commentaries and editions in order to speak frankly about what she finds so rewarding in the text. Her zeal is palpable. The book begins by calling Beowulf “a literary masterpiece” and closes with the verdict that “it is a magnificent literary achievement”. The pages in between are full of detailed discussions that take up the poem’s formal features, the (unknown) identity of its author, its various characters and the extent to which it is informed by Old Norse literature.

Although O’Donoghue eschews footnotes, the arguments are informed by longstanding scholarly discussions, which she distils for her readers. Some parts have the feel of lecture notes repurposed for the occasion (“This seems to be a good moment to discuss the interface between …”), and others labour under scholarly circumspection (“So, to conclude this section … we can say that viewed from a distance, in terms of either in historical time or geographical space …”), but much of the prose has an enlivening freshness. The discussion of the poem’s material world is particularly astute, especially regarding the narrative role of swords, which may carry names such as “Hrunting” or “Nægling” and be described in greater detail than the humans who wield them. Some also assume character-like features. When Beowulf emerges from Grendel’s watery home, he carries the monster’s severed head along with the hilt of a huge sword, “an ancient heirloom / from the days of the giants”, the blade of which has melted “into gory icicles” from Grendel’s corrosive blood. The body part and weapon part are different, of course, but functionally and symbolically similar.

Elsewhere O’Donoghue outlines Beowulf’s deft presentation of religion. The poem, written by a Christian author but set in a pre-Christian past, directs its religious sympathies to a vaguely monotheistic deity: “the poem is suffused with a powerful, all-purpose piety, an unswerving recognition of a higher being watching over the affairs of mankind”. The pagan Danish king Hrothgar functions like a magnetic field in attracting Christian virtues without any anachronistic narrative fumbling, and Beowulf too is virtuous in ways compatible with Christianity. Yet the words used to refer to the deity, although at times drawn from a Christian lexicon (such as ealdmetod, “ancient creator”), avoid explicitly New Testament names such as “Saviour” or “Redeemer”. The result of this balancing act is that “the ethical world of Beowulf is immensely accommodating, embracing religious and secular virtues, Christian values and heroic ethics”. It points to a capacious, humane world-view created by an artist in absolute control of everything from specific words to ultimate questions of a culture’s fate.

A key ambition of this book is to reorient the reception of Beowulf: it is not an insular English poem, but extends over a more expansive cultural terrain that includes Scandinavia. There are good reasons for doing this. The main plot is entirely taken up with events in what is now Denmark and southern Sweden, with England nowhere in sight, and a number of characters and episodes find parallels in Old Norse literature. O’Donoghue draws out these parallels in a series of short sections. A relatively long one is given over to an interesting comparison between Beowulf and two heroes from the Norse canon: the god Thor, and Grettir, the roguish protagonist of the Icelandic Grettis saga. It highlights the imaginative and tolerant syncretism of the Beowulf poet. Like Thor, Beowulf dies fighting a dragon, and both deaths are framed, at least superficially, as Christ-like sacrifices marking the end of an epoch. But salvation, for either Thor or Beowulf, is absent. The Beowulf poet’s handling of the pre-Christian material is carefully modulated not to elevate a pagan conception of the afterlife, leaving instead a lingering mood of hopeless resignation.

The book’s larger discussion conceives of the Beowulf poet as an “Old Norse scholar”, as one section heading puts it, “who knew so much about Old Norse myth and legend that he could not only allude to it and echo it, but also manipulate it for his own ends”. Old Norse myth, in this model, was a repository from which the Beowulf poet picked elements to include and modify. This doesn’t explain all of the poem’s allusions. The tragic story of Hildeburh and Finn, for instance, in which the son, brother and husband of the Frisian queen Hildeburh are killed in a senseless outbreak of violence, doesn’t appear in the surviving Old Norse canon. Yet the tale features in Beowulf in such an oblique manner that the early medieval audience must have known it well. Perhaps the Beowulf poet had access to an Old Norse version of the story that is now lost. The other possibility, which has been recognized for a long time, is that stories resembling one another in Old Norse and Old English literature go back to a common early Germanic source that no longer exists. These tales were passed down and available in English to the Beowulf poet, who skilfully incorporated them into the poem.

O’Donoghue also considers the contentious question of the poem’s composition date, estimates for which have ranged from the seventh century to the eleventh. She argues that the Beowulf poet’s familiarity with Old Norse myth could point to a composition at the latest end of this range. She notes that the Danish ruling class, especially under Cnut, who came to the English throne in 1016, provided “a perfect fit of poem and audience … [accounting] very well for the poem’s range and perspective”. Aside from the date of the manuscript, which is probably earlier than 1016, some loose ends hinder this hypothesis. First, the logic of appealing to the tastes of the new Danish court would account just as well for producing a new copy of an existing English poem. Second, to say that an old story about a Geatish hero had a particular appeal for Cnut’s Danish court runs the risk of circular reasoning, especially when the very existence of the poem presupposes an English audience. You didn’t need to be Scandinavian to appreciate Beowulf’s brilliance. Finally, the hypothesis assumes that eleventh-century Danes reading a complex Old English poem would catch subtle allusions such as the echoes of the Norse god Baldr in the death of Herebeald, who, like Baldr, dies after being shot by a (half-)brother. That’s a lot to ask.

This last point, however, raises a broader question about the audience of Beowulf. The more we learn about the poem, including the expertly manipulated allusions to Old Norse myth that O’Donoghue detects, the clearer it becomes that the poem has a Shakespearean richness that allows it to be understood and enjoyed on different levels. Those familiar with the Gospels, for example, might catch the faint allusion to Luke 11:27, “Blessed is the womb that bore thee”, in Hrothgar’s praise for Beowulf: “Whoever she was / who brought forth this flower of manhood, / if she is still alive, that woman can say / that in her labor the Lord of Ages / bestowed a grace on her” (Heaney’s translation, lines 941-945). Hearing the biblical echoes reinforces Beowulf’s salvific role, but Hrothgar’s words remain resoundingly clear either way.

In the book’s last section Heather O’Donoghue dips into translations and adaptations such as John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) and Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead (1976). These adaptations, she reminds us, can “be regarded as a sort of commentary on the original text”. The inverse is also true. Her book-length commentary, freed from scholarly apparatus, is itself a sort of translation of Beowulf, which will lead readers to a deeper understanding of this “magnificent literary achievement”.

Daniel Donoghue is John P. Marquand Professor of English at Harvard University

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