Remembering being asked to make a new translation of Beowulf, Seamus Heaney said, “While I had no great expertise in Old English, I had a strong desire to get back to the first stratum of the language and to ‘assay the hoard.'” He had gained a feel for the sound of Anglo-Saxon and wanted his translation to sound as authentic as he could make it. He remembered a way of speaking from his relatives. “I called them ‘big-voiced’ because when the men of the family spoke, the words they uttered came across with a weighty distinctness, phonetic units as separate and defined as delph platters displayed on a dresser shelf. A simple sentence such as ‘We cut the corn to-day’ took on immense dignity when one of the Scullions spoke it.”

So he brought out this sound in England’s oldest epic poem. Now, researchers are saying their accepted opinion on the poem’s first word may have been skewed. The word translated as “hark”, “lo”, “behold”, and similar words (“Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!”) probably isn’t so boldly declarative. And Heaney may have thought so as well, long before the researchers caught up to him.