New YouTuber Gavin the Medievalist breaks down what he found in Tolkien’s translation and commentary of the Old English epic Beowulf and whether you should be reading it in 2025.
Tag Archives: Beowulf
Julian Glover performs ‘Beowulf’
I was looking for a video related to the Anglo-Saxons as a follow-up to yesterday’s book review. My initial idea was to see if I could find something good where some historian walks around on the ground, showing what some battlefield – Brunanburh or Edington or Stamford Bridge or whatever – looks like today. But I couldn’t find anything that pleased me.
It seems like taking the easy way out, to return again to Beowulf, which I’ve written about extensively over the years. But the deepest mines bear the richest treasures (as some great writer – me, I think – said), and I found something very nice indeed. A bit of Julian Glover’s performance of the poem.
Julian Glover (who is still alive, I’m delighted to learn) has been a successful character actor in England for a long time. I first saw him with Patrick MacNee and Diana Rigg on the TV Avengers program back in the ‘60s. You’ve probably seen him somewhere yourself, in The Empire Strikes Back or as a Bond villain in For Your Eyes Only, or in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Never a leading man, he’s played mostly baddies, and he’s done very well at it.
Since the 1980s he’s had a very nice solo sideline doing an adaptation of Beowulf as a one-man show. His version incorporates lines in the original Anglo-Saxon language. The clip above is introduced by the late Sir John Gielgud.
I highly approve of this approach to the poem. I know a fellow who built himself a Viking farm in Missouri, and he told me years ago how a local high school teacher brought her class to spend the night in his hall, where they read Beowulf through. I’ll bet you they never forgot that experience.
‘Beowulf: A New Translation and Commentary,’ by Andrew P. Boynton
A lone Geatish widow a death-wail braided for Beowulf. Bound hard, she sang sorrowfully of how she in full dreaded the dark days that soon would come, a flock of the slain, the fear of the folk, thralldom and shame….
Andrew P. Boynton is a friend of mine on Facebook, so I may be prejudiced, but I was greatly impressed by his recently released Beowulf: A New Translation and Commentary.
Boynton, unlike some modern translators who’ve opted for rhymed verse or prose, has taken up the challenge of recreating Old English alliterative poetry (very similar to Norse). Lee Hollander took the same approach to Eddic poems. This is difficult to do in modern English, which lacks the flexibility of diction the old languages possess. One way to increase your options is to employ obscure words (something Hollander did too). However, these words are explained here in the copious notes. Tolkien fans (and Tolkien’s influence is a constant presence) will welcome the word “mathom,” though Boynton uses it to mean “treasure,” which is not quite how Tolkien used it.
I found Boynton’s Beowulf vigorous and enjoyable, though sometimes difficult to follow (the notes help). Seasoned fans of the poem will find it very satisfying. The Commentary seems to me (as an amateur) very good; the best modern scholarship is referenced, and Tolkien is there in abundance.
I will make this one recommendation – the paper version is probably better for most readers. I got the ebook, and this particular work is awkward to use in that format. It’s set up for facing pages – the translation on one side, the original Old English text on the other. That means the pages are tied to one another, so you can’t adjust typeface size as in an ordinary Kindle book. The print was quite small for me, so I had some trouble reading.
Otherwise, I recommend Beowulf: A New Translation and Commentary.
Shippey on Vikings
My friend Dale Nelson suggested I read Tom Shippey’s Laughing Shall I Die, a book on the Viking Age focusing on its warrior ethos. This isn’t a review, because I’m still reading the book. It’s quite long. But I’m finding it immensely congenial, a book that reinforces my prejudices – and who doesn’t enjoy that? Broadly speaking, it’s a sort of a backlash book against the prevailing consensus in Viking studies, the one that says, “The Vikings were really pretty much like everybody else. They just got bad press because their enemies wrote the history books.” I must admit I’ve said the same sort of thing, especially at reenactment events, but I’ve always held secret reservations.
Shippey (a Tolkien biographer and “the Professor’s” successor at Oxford) says phooey to all that. The Vikings, he says, were masters of violence and of psychological warfare. They won by intimidation, and through belief in something like a death cult. Here’s what he says about the political upheavals that wracked Scandinavia in the time of Beowulf:
Using modern terms, the story is one of centralizing power, professionalization of the military, disappearance of local groups and tribal names, and wars – so Hedeager suggests – to control strategic resources including land and access to bog iron.
The last is a modern view, by a modern scholar who characteristically prefers sensible economic motives for war. Our ancient texts, like Beowulf and Hrolf’s saga, suggest just as plausibly that the wars were undertaken for glory, for revenge, to expand power.
Epic theology
Today is my birthday. I got more than 100 birthday greetings on Facebook, which is gratifying. At the restaurant where I eat most Tuesday evenings, I got a free hot fudge sundae. Now, of course, I’m exhausted by all the excess.
How did I spend my weekend?
Following up my radio triumph on Saturday afternoon, I decided to go to Wisconsin on Sunday – in spite of the ever present threat of Packers fans.
The town of Glenwood City, about an hour and a half northeast of here, hosts a small Renaissance Festival, “Ren in the Glen,” a little ahead of the Official, Authorized Minnesota Renaissance Festival starting later this month. Glenwood City’s is a smaller operation which (according to the old hands) resembles what our festival used to be like at the beginning, before it became Disneyland North.
A Facebook friend who’s a member of Folkvangr, a Viking reenactment group, invited me to visit their encampment there. And, contrary to my basic nature – perhaps suffering the lingering disorienting effects of four days in Iowa – I decided that wasn’t a bad way to spend the final day of my vacation.
It was a nice time, and the Folkvangr folks seemed to suffer from the delusion that I possessed a measure of prestige. One subject we discussed is a common one among reenactors – “What are the best and worst Viking movies?” This gave me the opportunity to trot out my old lecture on the differences between two Beowulf movies that came out around the same time, an Icelandic one starring Gerard Butler (which I loathed), and the animated one written by Neil Gaiman and starring Roy Winstone. I’ve written about it on this blog before. My view is that the problem with the Gaiman script is that it tries to transform a Germanic saga into a Greek tragedy. Greek tragic heroes die because of their tragic flaws, as Beowulf does in this film. But Germanic heroes don’t have tragic flaws. They’re always exemplary. They die just because they’re doomed. The point of a saga is not a moral one, but an existential one – we’re all doomed to die; our only control is over the courage with which we face it.
It occurred to me, thinking about it later, that there are theological implications. For a long time Christians have enjoyed Greek tragedies, understanding the idea of the tragic hero as a kind of metaphor for original sin. We die because we deserve to die; we chose badly. Whatever our other virtues, we’ve earned death.
But it seems to me a similar argument can be made for the saga. The saga hero is simply doomed from birth; a kind of original sin. The Norns spin out the thread of his life and cut it off arbitrarily. The hero’s virtues are also not enough to save him – not because of his choices, but because he has inherited the general doom of mankind.
In other words, the Greek tragedy is sort of Arminian. The saga is arguably Calvinist.
Now where else can you go to get that kind of insight?
Mistranslating Beowulf
Then it became clear,
obvious to everyone once the fight was over,
that an avenger lurked and was still alive,
grimly biding time. Grendel’s mother,
monstrous hell-bride, brooded on her wrongs.
That’s how Seamus Heaney translated the lines that begin Grendel’s mother’s part of the Beowulf. It contains the word one novelist says has been translated with bias many times over. Maria Dahvana Headley says a particular word is translated “monstrous” here and “hero” when related to Beowulf. She thinks that depiction runs over the nobility of a woman described as a bride of Cain, “because that’s not as good a story for our culture.”
“Many of these canonical texts have been kind of misinterpreted as just exclusively masculine when really many of them are about love.”
Or maybe these old texts are about whatever you want them to be about. As Jean de La Fontaine reportedly said, “Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.”
Blogging through LOTR: Anglo-Saxon echoes
‘Halflings! But they are only a little people in old songs and children’s tales out of the North. Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?’
‘A man may do both,’ said Aragorn. ‘For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!’
I’ve been looking for Norse elements in The Two Towers. Of all the LOTR books, I think this one is richest in Scandinavian echoes – or at least Anglo-Saxon, which is as close as makes almost no difference, when you’re thinking of the Age of Beowulf (who lived in what is now Sweden, after all). Because the Rohirrim are plainly modeled on the Anglo-Saxons (though I suspect a tribe of horsemen would have developed the kite-shaped shield by this point, as the Normans did when they took to fighting on horseback).
There’s the boat-burial of Boromir, similar to the classic (mythical) Viking burial. Although most people think of ship burials at sea as a Viking custom, it’s actually undocumented in history or archaeology. Where it comes from is a passage in Beowulf (fully legendary), and the funeral of Baldur in Norse mythology (fully mythical). But it works well for the kind of high fantasy we’re involved with here. Continue reading Blogging through LOTR: Anglo-Saxon echoes
Jack the Beowulf Singer
Jason Craig and Dave Malloy have written a rock opera based on Beowulf, just what you didn’t know you never wanted. A. M. Juster describes it.
We meet the dimwitted hipster Beowulf and the snarkier Hrothgar, who are backed up by a chorus of four female “warriors” who resemble strapping Cyndi Laupers in football pads and Goth makeup. We hear pulsing but mediocre rock, which at least drowns out such dull refrains as “Hey, it’s that guy,” “It’s my body,” and “That was death and then they died.”
It has a few perks, but Juster was not thrilled by the whole.
On another horrific, somewhat more gruesome, note, Otto Penzler has compiled The Big Book of Jack the Ripper. Steve Donoghue says it’s very good. “This editor is an old, practiced hand at picking these kinds of stories; his anthologies are always masterworks of combining old favorites with carefully chosen new surprises.”
The real payoff of Penzler’s book is its opening section, “The True Story,” and the main reason is clear: the raw events of the true story are more bizarre, more sordid, and more horrifying than any concoction a writer could dream up.
(via Prufrock News)
‘Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary,’ by J. R. R. Tolkien
First of all, it should be made clear – and I wonder how anyone could be in doubt on this, but it’s possible – that J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary is not a work of imagination meant for popular entertainment. It’s a translation of an already much-translated work, intended as a teaching aid, by a major scholar in the field. If you’re unfamiliar with Beowulf, you might want to try one of the modern verse translations, like Heaney’s, but I liked this version very much.
Personally, I prefer a prose translation. Tolkien probably knew Old English poetry better than any modern man, and here he attempts to provide some sense of the original metrical form, but he is not forced to alter the text in order to make the verse scan. Any translation is always a trade-off, especially in poetry, and for my own part I prefer some approximation of the original text.
Tolkien’s translation is a lively one. I can imagine him reading it to Lewis (and we’re told Lewis did advise him on bits of it) and then ignoring, as he always did, Lewis’ suggestions.
There are many notes. Some are by Christopher Tolkien, the author’s son, who is editor. Others are drawn directly from Tolkien’s own notes. Some of this material fascinated me, some seemed to me (approaching more from the historian’s than the language scholar’s perspective) pretty tall grass. It was interesting to read, for instance, that Tolkien thinks the Beowulf poem correct in crediting (in passing) the slaying of the dragon to Sigfried’s father Sigmund, rather than to Sigfried himself. The dragon-slaying fits in with Sigmund’s story, he thinks, and seems like an interpolation in the Sigfried-Brunhilde narrative.
Also in this book is a work called “The Sellic Spell,” which is Tolkien’s attempt to reconstruct how the Beowulf story might have been passed down as a folk tale, rather than as a heroic poem. He sees a separation between the “fairy tale” Beowulf and the “historical” (by which he does not mean to suggest he thinks Beowulf a real historical character) tale. Here Tolkien may be observed “reverse engineering” an imagined lost legend, something he later did in a larger, more powerful way with The Lord of the Rings.
Also appended to this book is “The Lay of Beowulf,” an attempt to reimagine story as a sort of ballad. That was pleasant to read, but the editor gives us two earlier drafts to read as well, at which point I’m afraid I lost interest in it.
I recommend Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary for people interested in the Old English poem itself. Less so for readers whose main interest is Middle Earth. I’m glad this work has come out in print, and I’m happy I read it.
‘A Companion to Beowulf,’ by Ruth A. Johnston
A few days back I posted a review of a book on the Viking Age which had disappointed me. Author Ruth A. Johnston, who happens to be a Facebook friend, then mentioned her own book on Beowulf, which I’d already read. I hadn’t noticed that it came from the same publisher.
Ruth’s book, A Companion to Beowulf, is much, much better.
A Companion to Beowulf is, as you would expect, an introduction to the poem, useful for students or history buffs or Tolkien fans. It’s well written and comprehensive, and includes a list of modern adaptations, a glossary of names, a list of works cited, and even a chapter on Tolkien.
For some reason, she fails to note my theory, mentioned on this blog, that Beowulf is “refugee literature.” I’ve also been inclined to give credence to theories that Beowulf’s “Geatish” tribe may have been someone other than the Gotlanders. Johnston states flatly that they were Goths. But that may be because she knows more about the subject than I do, hard as that may be to believe.
I did catch what I think are couple small errors. She says the spear was the symbol of a free man — I’m pretty sure it was the seax. A spear is what a slave would be most likely to carry. She also speaks of Vikings wielding “two-headed fighting axes.” That should be “two-handed fighting axes.” They never fought with double-bitted axes.
But those are the sort of small mistakes you’ll find in any book — even mine. All things considered, this is an excellent introduction to a wonderfully alien work of literature. I recommend it.