Maria Dahvana Headley’s revisionist translation infuses the Old English poem with feminism and social-media slang.
A few weeks ago, during a visit to the doctor, I laughed out loud when the online check-in portal suggested Old English as my language preference, and not only because I happened to have with me Maria Dahvana Headley’s “Beowulf” (MCD), a new translation of the long poem that is one of the oldest surviving works of literature in the language. Without serious study, no speaker of contemporary English could converse in or even read Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon), a language as distinct from its modern equivalent as many foreign tongues. Of Germanic origin, it contains numerous elements that don’t appear in the modern English alphabet: the diphthong “æ” (ash), as well as two letters that represent the “th” sound, “þ” (thorn) and “ð” (eth). Its unintelligibility is evident from the first line of “Beowulf”: “Hwæt wē Gār-Dena in geārdagum.”
Even without understanding the meaning (roughly, “We of the Spear-Danes in the days of yore”), we can notice a few things about Old English poetry. Each line is broken up into two half lines, separated by a caesura; the focus is on metre and alliteration, not rhyme. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” called the structure of Old English literature “more like masonry than music.” (In addition to writing “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, both distinctly inflected by Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythology, Tolkien was a prominent scholar of Old English.) The effect, when read aloud, is something like boots marching on gravel, with Yoda-style inversions. James Joyce famously parodied it in “Ulysses”: “Before born babe bliss had.”
Headley, a novelist known primarily for her works of fantasy for young adults, is the most recent of the dozens of modern English translators who have taken on the poem, which runs three thousand one hundred and eighty-two lines long. They range from scholars like Tolkien (who spent decades revising his translation before deciding not to publish it; it appeared posthumously in a 2014 edition put together by his son Christopher) to the poets Seamus Heaney and Stephen Mitchell, both of whom have produced lyrical and critically admired versions. Very few of these translators are women, which is unsurprising. “Beowulf”—in which the eponymous hero, a man of gigantic, and perhaps supernatural, strength, defends King Hrothgar and the Danes against Grendel, a part man, part monster who is plaguing the kingdom—tends to be perceived as a masculine poem, its vocabulary and its ethics those of the battleground and the mead hall. (If I had wanted to discuss spears or honor codes with the doctor, Old English would have served just fine.) The men in “Beowulf” drink and boast and fight; the women, even the queens, exist mainly to pass around the mead cup and to mourn their fallen kinsmen.
There is one notable exception. As the warriors sleep off their drunken celebration of Grendel’s defeat at Beowulf’s hands, Grendel’s mother shows up to avenge her son’s death in a surprise attack. Headley writes that, as a child “on the hunt for any sort of woman warrior,” she came upon this character in an illustrated encyclopedia of monsters and assumed, naturally, that Grendel’s mother was the focus of the story. When Headley finally read the poem, she was dismayed that scholars had treated the character as a marginal figure, an extension of her child, or as only partially human.
In 2018, Headley published “The Mere Wife,” an astonishing novel in which she reimagines the “Beowulf” story, setting it in modern times and placing the female characters at its center. Grendel’s mother becomes an Iraq War veteran, her child likely the result of rape, while Wealhtheow, Hrothgar’s queen, is represented by Willa, a wealthy suburban housewife who posts photographs of her home-cooked meals and suppresses her fantasies of violence. The novel is both a brilliant investigation of the man-monster dichotomy—the line between them is not as clear as we might think—and a caustic sendup of contemporary family life. In their own way, the novel suggests, all women are warriors, even if their armor takes the form of a sequinned cocktail dress.
Dedicated to “Anonymous and all the stories she told,” “The Mere Wife” includes some tantalizing snippets of “Beowulf” as translated by Headley. Now we have the full version, and it is electrifying. The lack of scholarly apparatus is deceptive: Headley has studied the poem deeply and is conversant with some of the text’s most obscure details. Though she comes to “Beowulf” from a feminist perspective, her primary purpose is not polemical or political but, as she writes, to render the story “continuously and cleanly, while also creating a text that felt as bloody and juicy as I think it ought to feel.”
Headley’s version is more of a rewriting than a true translation, reënvisaging the poem for the modern reader rather than transmitting it line for line. It is brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand—Grendel is “fucked by fate,” Wealhtheow, “hashtag: blessed.” Not everyone will admire all the linguistic and stylistic choices she has made; that crunching noise in the background is the sound of her predecessors rolling in their burial ships. Hrothgar’s thanes are his “fight-family,” Wealhtheow admires Beowulf’s “brass balls,” treasure is “bling.” But the over-all effect is as if Headley, like the warrior queen she admired as a child, were storming the dusty halls of the library, upending the crowded shelf of “Beowulf” translations to make room for something completely new.
“Hwæt,” the first word of “Beowulf,” has no direct equivalent in modern English. Tolkien described it as “a note ‘striking up’ at the beginning of a poem,” calling the listener or reader to attention. In his translation, he rendered it as “Lo!,” following John Mitchell Kemble, whose influential 1837 translation was one of the earliest in modern English. Stephen Mitchell avoided picking any single word, apparently in response to new linguistic research arguing that “hwæt” was not an interjection but, rather, imparted an exclamatory tone to the entire sentence. Heaney went for “So,” explaining that he wanted his version of the poem to sound as if one of his Irish relatives were telling the story: “So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by / and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. / We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.” Other translators have opted for “Attend,” “Listen,” “Behold,” “Yes!” and—unfortunately—“What ho!”
Headley’s version opens:
Bro? In Headley’s vision, the “Beowulf” narrator is “an old-timer at the end of the bar, periodically pounding his glass and demanding another.” Indeed, the poetic tradition from which the poem arises is an oral one, in which poetry may have been sung by bards—called “scops”—who entertained the kings and their entourages after feasts. Headley’s intervention is not only humorous and attention-grabbing but also historically justified. The poem, she points out, was probably composed by a man for a largely male audience. But she also hears a satirical quality in the boasts and pledges that constitute much of the characters’ speech. The men of “Beowulf”—not least the protagonist—are preoccupied with definitions of masculinity: what makes a man, or how a man can make himself.
The narrator is at once looking back and looking forward; the poem may have been composed as early as the eighth century A.D., but it describes, with fantastic touches, a world that existed a couple of hundred years earlier. He interrupts himself to comment on the action, to foreshadow events to come, or to add a Christian gloss. “I mean, personally?” he says after Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel, as Hrothgar rains gifts down like “pennies from Heaven” on the hero. “I’ve never seen anything / like it, so many treasures. . . . No fighting? No fury? Nope, bro, this was / a certain type of night.” (Cue “Oh What a Night” on the jukebox.) “Anyone knows how fair it was: / bro, more than fair” is his assessment of Beowulf’s reward. (For comparison, Heaney: “A fair witness can see how well each one behaved.”)
But we get ahead of ourselves. The story opens with Hrothgar, King of the Spear-Danes (in modern-day Denmark), building a magnificent hall, Heorot, to celebrate his successes in war and to reinforce his dominance. (There are echoes here of the Tower of Babel.) Grendel, whom Headley calls a “woe-walker”—the poem doesn’t describe him physically, except to suggest his prodigious size and strength—is enraged to hear the men drinking and singing. Why? The original text doesn’t give a reason. “Grendel hurt, and so he hunted,” Headley suggests. He so terrorizes the Spear-Danes that they abandon Heorot after dark, leaving the great hall deserted.
After twelve years of this, “News went global.” Across the sea, in Geatland (modern-day Sweden), Beowulf gathers “fourteen fists for hire” and sails for Hrothgar’s kingdom. The watchman who greets them at the cliffs might be a bouncer at a bar more exclusive than the one where the narrator hangs out: “There’s a dress code! You’re denied.” “Kindly give us / directions and we’ll get gone,” Beowulf assures him.
Headley is obviously enjoying herself, and never more than when she’s speaking in the voice of her hero, “hard-core in his helmet,” who might have apprenticed with Omar from “The Wire.” His speech is ridiculous, glorious, and irresistible. Here, having come to relieve Heorot from its “early curfew,” he introduces himself to Hrothgar:
Headley’s cadences and her revisionist spirit owe a debt to Lin-Manuel Miranda. When Unferth, one of Hrothgar’s men, challenges Beowulf’s stories of a swimming contest with another warrior named Breca, their back-and-forth might be taken from the Cabinet battles in “Hamilton.” “I heard no one could convince you two of clarity, / that you dove overboard, surfing on stupidity,” Unferth sneers. “Let me drop some truth / into your tangent,” Beowulf shoots back. “Let me say it straight: / You don’t rate and neither did Breca / when it came to battle. The gulf? You’re cattle, / and I’m a wolf.” Later, the narrator tells us that Unferth “unexpectedly stanned” Beowulf by lending him a sword for the fight with Grendel’s mother.
But Headley’s “Beowulf” also has moments of more traditional poetry, as when Hrothgar’s court scop sings the song of Hildeburh, a woman who loses both her son and her brother on the battlefield and watches them burn on a single pyre: “Fire comes from the same/family as famine. It can feast, unfulfilled, forever.” Or when the narrator foreshadows the destruction of Heorot:
“Beowulf” scholars may stop us here. Wait a minute! they say. That’s not in the original: not the antler-tipped towers, not the generalization about burning castles, not the familiar mode of address (“You know how it is”). They’re right, bro. But “Beowulf” translators have always taken liberties with the poem—in part because the source text is faulty. It was originally written down on vellum about a thousand years ago by two scribes, who are believed to have been working from an even older copy. In 1731, a fire broke out in the building where it was stored; someone had the presence of mind to throw the manuscript out a window, but every page had been badly burned. Thus pieces of the “Beowulf” story have been lost, both in the fire and, as Headley puts it in her introduction, “in the gestation of the written version itself, which was at the mercy of memory and (presumably) mead.”
In addition to such confusions, there’s a surprising lack of agreement among scholars about the literal meaning of many lines. When Beowulf dives into the sea in search of Grendel’s mother, who lives in a kind of underwater castle, does the poet say that he swims for most of the day before reaching the bottom or that he gets there while it is still daylight? What should be done with the combat scene between the two of them, in which Grendel’s mother seems to sit unceremoniously on Beowulf—a verb that “will simply not do,” as one translator complains? Heaney renders it as “pounced upon him.” Headley, concerned with neither fidelity nor heroic style, says that she “turned on him, gripping/and flipping him.” (Heaney’s Beowulf, suiting up for battle, is “indifferent to death”; Headley’s “gave zero shits.”)
More important, it’s unclear from the description of Grendel’s mother whether she’s meant to be understood as a monster or as a human woman. As Headley notes, the Old English word “fingrum” is often translated as “claws,” but Grendel’s mother uses a knife during her fight with Beowulf, and “wielding a knife while also possessing long nails is—as anyone who’s ever had a manicure knows—a near impossibility.” The character is called “aglaec-wif,” which others have translated as “wretch,” “ogress,” “hell-bride,” and even “ugly troll lady.” But Headley asserts that it is a female equivalent of the noun “aglaeca,” which means awe-inspiring. Many versions also call Grendel’s mother a “sea-wolf,” but the Old English equivalent for this is “brimwylf”—and the manuscript itself reads “brimwyl,” which, Headley points out, could easily be a scribal error for “brimwif,” “sea-woman.” (Not one of six translations by men which I consulted noted this possibility.) By contrast, Headley’s translation allows for the monstrous element but also emphasizes the character’s recognizably human emotions:
Those scribes who recorded “Beowulf” did make mistakes. The manuscript shows that they sometimes crossed out and emended each other’s work. A tantalizing example of these emendations has to do with Grendel’s genealogy. In one of the many ways in which the text retroactively applies a Christian slant to pagan mythology, Grendel is said to be a descendant of Cain, who begat “ogres and elves and evil phantoms” (Heaney), cursed to wander the earth as penalty for their ancestor’s fratricide. But Headley believes that Grendel is neither a wanderer nor a fugitive; he lives in a hall with his mother. What if the standard interpretation is wrong? In the original text, the first scribe wrote that Grendel was descended from “Ham’s kin,” which the second scribe emended to “Cain’s kin.” (In Old English, the spellings of “Ham” and “Cain” are similar.) The curse of Ham—punishment for seeing his father, Noah, naked—was that the descendants of one of his sons would be slaves, which has been interpreted as a Biblical justification for slavery.
Toni Morrison, in an essay called “Grendel and His Mother,” published last year in the posthumous collection “The Source of Self-Regard,” examines the way both figures are presented as “beyond comprehension . . . mindless without intelligible speech.” Neither has or requires a motive; evil “is preternatural and exists without explanation.” Morrison lingers on the moment in which Beowulf vanquishes Grendel’s mother. After Unferth’s sword fails Beowulf, he tries unsuccessfully to attack her with his bare hands. Suddenly, a ray of light—the narrator implies that this is God’s doing—shines upon a nearby sword, part of Grendel’s mother’s armory. Beowulf grabs it and beheads her, then beheads her son’s corpse. The sword melts away, leaving him holding only the hilt. Morrison is unconvinced by the usual interpretation: that the steel was melted by the monsters’ foul blood. “The image of Beowulf standing there with a mother’s head in one hand and a useless hilt in the other encourages more layered interpretations,” she writes. “One being that perhaps violence against violence—regardless of good and evil, right and wrong—is itself so foul the sword of vengeance collapses in exhaustion or shame.”
Morrison’s and Headley’s revisionist readings highlight some of the challenges “Beowulf” presents to the modern reader. But both also demonstrate the richness with which the oldest texts still speak to us. They may be “only stories now.” Nevertheless, they are stories in which readers—perhaps especially those who come from outside the mainstream of those texts’ traditions and approach them without preconceptions—can continue to find meaning. With a “Beowulf” defiantly of and for this historical moment, Headley reclaims the poem for her audience as well as for herself.
Published in the print edition of the August 31, 2020, issue, with the headline “Mothering the Monster.”
Ruth Franklin is the author of “Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography in 2016.
(Sources: The New Yorker)
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