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In Beowulf warriors must back up their mead-hall boasts
with instant action, monsters abound, and fights are always
to the death. The Anglo-Saxon epic, composed between the
7th and 10th centuries, has long been accorded its place
in literature, though its hold on our imagination has been
less secure. In the introduction to his translation, Seamus
Heaney argues that Beowulf's role as a required text for
many English students obscured its mysteries and "mythic
potency." Now, thanks to the Irish poet's marvelous recreation
(in both senses of the word) under Alfred David's watch,
this dark, doom-ridden work gets its day in the sun.
There are endless pleasures in Heaney's analysis, but readers
should head straight for the poem and then to the prose.
(Some will also take advantage of the dual-language edition
and do some linguistic teasing out of their own.) The epic's
outlines seem simple, depicting Beowulf's three key battles
with the scaliest brutes in all of art: Grendel, Grendel's
mother (who's in a suitably monstrous snit after her son's
dismemberment and death), and then, 50 years later, a gold-hoarding
dragon "threatening the night sky / with streamers of fire."
Along the way, however, we are treated to flashes back and
forward and to a world view in which a thane's allegiance
to his lord and to God is absolute. In the first fight,
the man from Geatland must travel to Denmark to take on
the "shadow-stalker" terrorizing Heorot Hall. Here Beowulf
and company set sail:
Men
climbed eagerly up the gangplank, sand churned in the
surf, warriors loaded a cargo of weapons, shining war-gear
in the vessel's hold, then heaved out, away with a will
in their wood-wreathed ship. Over the waves, with the
wind behind her and foam at her neck, she flew like a
bird...
After
a fearsome night victory over march-haunting and heath-marauding
Grendel, our high-born hero is suitably strewn with gold
and praise, the queen declaring: "Your sway is wide as the
wind's home, / as the sea around cliffs." Few will disagree.
And remember, Beowulf has two more trials to undergo. Heaney
claims that when he began his translation it all too often
seemed "like trying to bring down a megalith with a toy
hammer." The poem's challenges are many: its strong four-stress
line, heavy alliteration, and profusion of kennings could
have been daunting. (The sea is, among other things, "the
whale-road," the sun is "the world's candle," and Beowulf's
third opponent is a "vile sky-winger." When it came to over-the-top
compound phrases, the temptations must have been endless,
but for the most part, Heaney smiles, he "called a sword
a sword.") Yet there are few signs of effort in the poet's
Englishing. Heaney varies his lines with ease, offering
up stirring dialogue, action, and description while not
stinting on the epic's mix of fate and fear. After Grendel's
misbegotten mother comes to call, the king's evocation of
her haunted home may strike dread into the hearts of men
and beasts, but it's a gift to the reader:
A
few miles from here a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps
watch above a mere; the overhanging bank is a maze of
tree-roots mirrored in its surface. At night there, something
uncanny happens: the water burns. And the mere bottom
has never been sounded by the sons of men. On its bank,
the heather-stepper halts: the hart in flight from pursuing
hounds will turn to face them with firm-set horns and
die in the wood rather than dive beneath its surface.
That is no good place.
In Heaney's
hands, the poem's apparent archaisms and Anglo-Saxon attitudes--its
formality, blood-feuds, and insane courage--turn the art
of an ancient island nation into world literature. --Kerry
Fried
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