Newsletter #33 — Hwaet! I Read Beowulf Again
April 3, 2022
Newsletter #33 — Hwaet! I Read Beowulf Again
Reading Beowulf — Because I've been writing a series of magazine articles relating to The F Words, I've been looking at the book from different angles. Different from the many angles I've explored in my blogs. And one of the angles I decided to explore was the history of Anglo-Saxon words, which are so important to The F Words. If you've read the novel you might recall the mid-book discussion between Cole and Mr. Nachman about words of Anglo-Saxon origin.
Who knows why, but I decided that, since it has been decades since I looked at Beowulf in Old English (no, I cannot read Old English, but I did have to learn a wee bit of it in order to read the first two or three lines of Beowulf back in college), I decided that, before I wrote any articles, I would re-read this saga — the most important Anglo-Saxon manuscript in existence.
And so I read Seamus Heaney's 1999 translation (which won the Whitbread Prize) and I enjoyed it very much, admiring the way Heaney rendered the two stresses on each side of the line, each line divided by a pause called a caesura. The two stresses and caesura, as well as alliteration, were a mark of Anglo-Saxon poetry
Heaney's work is a translation, but the work of James Rumford, Beowulf: A Hero's Tale Retold (2007) is a middle grades book that is, as the title states, a retelling — not a translation.
I commend both books. Sometimes I read the first several pages of the Rumford title to students when I teach writing classes. The feat of this Beowulf is that Rumford chose to use only words which have their roots in Anglo-Saxon. This results in a very powerful work. I like to see my students raptly listening, and I can tell they are awed by the impact of the words.
Hwaet, that is what I've been doing these last few weeks, all as preparation for writing an article. Hwaet, by the way, is the very first word in Beowulf, usually translated as So or Listen Up! In the previous sentence, I was using Hwaet in the "so" sense.
But (and this is impressive) in 2013 a British professor presented a paper arguing that Hwaet has been mistranslated for 200 years (starting with Jacob Grimm, he of the fairy tales). You can read about this if you want.
And if you have a yearning to hear Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon, this very short video will impress you.
Symbols — Here's my blog on The F Words: Symbols.