Click here for Full Issue of Fidelio Volume 9, Number 2-3, Summer-Fall 2000

COMMENTARY A Window into the Anglo-Saxon Renaissance

eamus Heaney’s new translation of trast to the Romantic, Nineteenth-cen- SBeowulf—an Irish poet (and Nobel tury “revivalism” associated with Laureate) translating the Anglo-Saxon Richard Wagner and the like, the sup- epic—has gone through six printings so posed “return” to Germanic antiquities far this year in the United States, and in the form of the Nibelungenlied and a more in Britain (where it came out last nostalgia for the gods of Valhalla. In year), and has been on the bestseller list fact, those revivals, or, rather, modern for weeks, an astonishing feat for a verse constructs only tangentially related to translation of a heroic poem of 3,200 the actual pre-Christian myth and folk- lines written in Anglo-Saxon England lore of the Norse peoples, are artificial in sometime between the Seventh and the extreme: The truth of the matter Ninth centuries A.D. is, that the oldest epic poem we have in Although it is unclear why so many any Germanic language—namely, people are buying this apparently rather —is Christian, and the literary Beowulf: A New Verse esoteric work—as media coverage keeps products of the first literate Germanic Translation reminding us, Beowulf is rarely read language—namely, Gothic—are trans- by Seamus Heaney outside college courses in English litera- lations of the Bible. New York, Farrar, Straus and ture—what is certain, is that this is a Giroux, 2000 wonderful translation of a wonderful The Translation 213 pages, hardcover, $25.00 poem, the masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon Heaney’s verse gives us both the direct- high culture and earliest surviving epic ness and the loftiness of the poem’s poem in any Germanic language. heroic language, sometimes with gor- in His splendour He set the sun and Beowulf is, in brief, a tale written geous adjectives piled high; sometimes the moon down in English, in England, but set short, sharp, alliterative. to be the earth’s lamplight, lanterns among the Danes, Swedes, and Consider the following passages. for men, —the Anglo-’ homeland First, we are near the opening of the and filled the broad lap of the world before they migrated, during the great poem (lines 81-98), reading the descrip- with branches and leaves; and Völkerwanderung of the Germanic peo- tion of the great hall Heorot, hall of the quickened life ples, into Britain. Beowulf tells of war- Danes’ king Hrothgar: in every other that moved. rior-heroes fighting evil, of loyalty and Now, another passage from the courage, of betrayal and doom—and, of . . . The hall towered, Heaney translation, toward the end of a Christian sense of self and others. For, its gables wide and high and awaiting the poem (lines 2417-2421). Here, the far from being a barbarian saga, or cele- a barbarous burning. That doom old king Beowulf readies himself for his bration of pagan Norse mythology, as abided, fateful, fatal final battle. This is a pas- one might suppose, Beowulf was written but in time it would come; the killer sage Heaney himself quotes in his intro- by a Christian poet, sometime in the first instinct duction, comparing Beowulf’s mood to two centuries after the evangelization of unleashed among in-laws, the blood- that “of other tragic heroes: Oedipus at the Anglo-Saxons. lust rampant. Colonnus, Lear at his ‘ripeness is all’ It is for this reason, therefore, that Then a powerful demon, a prowler extremity, Hamlet in the last illumina- Beowulf can truly be called an epic, in through the dark, tions of his ‘prophetic soul’”: the best sense of the word: Because it nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed created a people, using the already him The veteran king sat down on the ancient “Beowulf matter” of oral poetic to hear the din of the loud banquet cliff-top. tradition, which celebrated the deeds of every day in the hall, the harp being He wished good luck to the Geats pagan ancestors, to transform the pagan struck who had shared tribal society the Anglo-Saxons brought and the clear song of a skilled poet his hearth and his gold. He was sad with them to Britain, into what would telling with mastery of man’s at heart, become the Christian civilization of beginnings, unsettled yet ready, sensing his death. Anglo-Saxon England. how the Almighty had made the earth, His fate hovered near, unknowable Hence, Beowulf stands in utter con- a gleaming plain girdled with waters; but certain.

119

© 2000 Schiller Institute, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited. Anglo-Saxon, or , deploys a marvelously powerful musi- Bottom left: Oldest extant Beowulf manuscript, cality dominated by alliteration, rather written on vellum c. A.D. 1000. Left: 10th century than rhyme. Alliteration in Anglo- Viking ceremonial axe-head. Below: Dragon- Saxon poetry is, as Anglo-Saxon scholar head of the wooden stem-post of a Viking ship, Robert Diamond puts it, not an embell- c. A.D. 700. ishment, but a structural necessity; one The Granger Collection in which verses are arranged in alliterat- ing pairs, with the first half of a line (the “on-verse”) having two alliterating pairs of syllables, and the second half (“off- verse”) only one. To translate this directly, or literally, into modern English poetry, is impossi- ble. The effect would be something like the spoof “Witan’s Wail” in the comic

history 1066 and All That. Heaney solves The Granger Collection the problem beautifully, not (necessarily) adhering to the alliteration scheme the characteristic of ancient epic poetry Beowulf poet uses, but evoking it in (readers of Homer will recall some richly intricate patterns which echo, of his fixed phrases: the wine-dark rather than mimic, the Anglo-Saxon. sea, rosy-fingered dawn, grey-eyed Here is an example from the very Athena, Zeus Cloud-Gatherer). outset of the poem; the poet is telling the The recurring fixed phrase points story of Scyld Scefing (pronounced back to an oral tradition, in which Shield Sheafing, translated by Heaney as repetition, and the use of fixed mat- Shield Sheafson). Scyld is described as ter to fill out a poetic line, enable flourishing: the minstrel or singer reciting the we¯ox under wolcnum, weorD- poem to remember it more easily. myndum ah. Heaney handles this material é deftly, using these images where or, transliterated and slightly modernized: they will be compelling and excit-

wax under wolcnum, worth-myndum The Granger Collection ing, or evocative, but not enslaved thah. to them, able to abandon them if cases by italic) is no longer paired in the they threaten to become simply doggerel Wax means to grow, to flourish—as it same way as in the Anglo-Saxon verse or cant, or impede the flow of the poem still does today. Under has not changed architecture, but it is paired, and cross- he has created through his translation. meaning. Wolcnum has become the connected, just as in the original; the I highlight the above with emphasis rarely used modern English word welkin meaning is intact, and the line is metri- because, at bottom, that is what Heaney (sky, heaven)—and there is at least one cally satisfying. has done: create a new poem, and for modern translation of Beowulf that ren- Another striking feature of Anglo- good reason. One cannot translate a ders that phrase as “wax under Saxon poetry lies in its rich use of poem literally, and have it still be poetry, welkin”—great for etymologists, but metaphor, combinations of thoughts or since in poetry, evocation and metaphor unintelligible to most readers. (Another things which make us see the world dif- are everything. There exist perfectly modern translation supplies “prosper ferently, offer new analogies, possibili- respectable, and extremely useful, prose under heaven”—accurate as to meaning, ties, ironies; and incidentally, enable us translations of great poetical works; but but dead as to the poetry of the passage.) to see through the eyes of the Anglo- really to translate a poem, to give us in In the “off-verse,” worth means Saxons in an age long past. Thus, the our own time and idiom, the poetic worth; myndum means mind or now-famous images for sea—“whale- impact of the original, means essentially remembrance, and so worth-myndum road” (hron-rade); or sail—“sea-shawl” to write a new poem, which will, as close- has the connotation of fame, praisewor- (mere-hraegla); or ship—“wave-crosser” ly as possible, create in our minds the thiness. (weg-flotan); or language—“word- experience that the original poem creat- Here is how Heaney translates it: hoard” (word-horde); for skeleton, ed in the minds of its first hearers or “bone-cage” (ban-cofan). readers. as his powers waxed and his worth These and many more occur fre- That, of all the translators of Beowulf was proved. quently, as fixed phrases, part of the thus far, Heaney is uniquely qualified to The alliteration (signified in both poetic stock (or word-hoard) that is do.

120 The Poem the Northern beserker-hero so beloved and find friendship in the Father’s But, why Beowulf at all? of the Romantics, the battle-axe-swing- embrace. There is no doubt that Beowulf is a ing champion actuated by rage. At first, Perhaps most moving of all, is the great work of art. In the “ringing, before he performed his great feats, advice the old king Hrothgar gives the singing” language of Old English, as one Beowulf’s countrymen regarded him as young Beowulf, embarking on his great reviewer called it,1 it is the story of the a weakling, precisely because of this battle against Grendel. Hrothgar teaches young man Beowulf who, defeating the gentleness: the lesson—to Beowulf, and to the monster Grendel, frees the Danes from ... poem’s readers and hearers—to avoid the monster’s thrall; the story of he was formidable in battle yet the sin of overweening pride, the lust for Beowulf fifty years later, an old man behaved with honour power, for blood, for gold, and to be and king, defeating the dragon that and took no advantage; never cut ever-mindful of the bounty of God, the menaces his people, and dying in the down transitoriness of this life, and the impor- attempt. a comrade who was drunk, kept his tance of how we live these short lives of Against this remote and barbarian temper ours, to make a difference: backdrop, the poem examines the great and, warrior that he was, watched issues of man in his relations among and controlled “ . . . It is a great wonder men, and his relation to God: the tran- his God-sent strength and his out- how Almighty God in His magnifi- sience of life, mortality, and one’s life’s standing cence work; the roles of freedom and neces- natural powers. He had been poorly favours our race with rank and scope sity; of the individual person, and of regarded and the gift of wisdom; His sway is Fate. Some of the poem’s strangeness for a long time, was taken by the wide. and its power, lie in the fact of its com- Geats Sometimes He allows the mind of a bining the pagan world of the Northern for less than he was worth: and their man heroic age, with an unmistakably Chris- lord too of distinguished birth to follow its bent, tian outlook, transmuting the Anglo- had never much esteemed him in the grants him fulfillment and felicity on Saxons’ grim Nordic view of inexorable mead-hall. earth 2 Fate, into something freer and more They firmly believed that he lacked and forts to command in his own forgiving. force, country. Beowulf was written perhaps only that the prince was a weakling; . .. He permits him to lord it in many decades after the Anglo-Saxons were lands evangelized (a process whose beginning The viewpoint of the poet is made until the man in his unthinkingness is traditionally dated to 597, and the beautifully clear in the following pas- forgets that it will ever end for him. arrival in England of missionaries from sage, in which he describes the practices He indulges his desires; illness and the Rome of Pope Gregory the Great), of his pagan ancestors: old age composed by an artist who was looking Sometimes at pagan shrines they mean nothing to him; his mind is back on the pagan days with new eyes. vowed untroubled It simultaneously honors the past, and offerings to idols, swore oaths by envy or malice or the thought of polemicizes for the new faith, being that the killer of souls might come to enemies composed for an England whose popu- their aid with their hate-honed swords. The lation is perhaps half-Christian, half- and save the people. That was their whole world pagan. Its author takes every opportuni- way, conforms to his will; he is kept from ty to teach his hearers, to remind them of their heathenish hope; deep in their the worst the superiority of the new religion of the hearts until an element of overweening “All-Father,” over one-eyed, sinister they remembered hell. The enters him and takes hold Wotan/, and hammer-wielding Almighty Judge while the soul’s guard, its sentry, /Thunor. It is therefore a civilizing of good deeds and bad, the Lord God, drowses, undertaking. Head of the Heavens and High King grown too distracted. A killer stalks As a work of art, it remains with us of the World, him, because the character of Beowulf was unknown to them. Oh, cursed is An archer who draws a deadly bow. remains with us, a man who at first he And then the man is hit in the heart, seems to embody the heroic who in time of trouble has to thrust the arrow flies beneath his defences, marauders, but who instead, we come to his soul the devious promptings of the demon realize, is an expression of something in the fire’s embrace, forfeiting help; start. much higher: a hero, yes, but more he has nowhere to turn. But blessed His old possessions seem paltry to important, a “Christian,” generous and is he him now. gentle, and in protecting others, great- who after death can approach the He covets and resents; dishonours hearted. This portrait is the antithesis of Lord custom

121 and bestows no gold; and because of good things that the Heavenly Powers gave him in the past he ignores the shape of things to come. Then finally the end arrives when the body he was lent collapses and falls prey to its death; ancestral possessions and the goods he hoarded are inher- ited by another who lets them go with a liberal hand. The Granger Collection “O flower of warriors, beware of that trap. Left and above: The Venerable Bede, and Choose, dear Beowulf, the better part, an 8th century manuscript page of Bede’s eternal rewards. Do not give way to “Ecclesiastical History.” Below: Manuscript pages from the Lindisfarne Gospels, pride. A.D. 698 (right), and Alcuin’s revision For a brief while your strength is in of the Latin Vulgate Bible (left).

bloom The Granger Collection but it fades quickly; and soon there will follow monastery at Lindis- illness or the sword to lay you low, farne, off the coast of or a sudden fire or surge of water English Northum- or jabbing blade or javelin from the bria—religion and air letters took hold fast or repellent age. Your piercing eye and deep among the will dim and darken; and death will English, such that, arrive, within a short time dear warrior, to sweep you away.” of the founding of the Irish monastery The Cultural Context at Lindisfarne, St. Broadly, Beowulf was part of the process Cuthbert, an Eng- The Granger Collection of the Christianization of all Northern lishman, was widely The Granger Collection Europe—for the English, once convert- recognized as the ed, played a central role, as did their monastery’s greatest son. This was so calculation. His History continues to this neighbors the Irish, long Christian, in much true that within a century of the day to be a vital source of information the evangelization of the continent. It very beginning of the conversion, there on the Coming of the English to Britain, was the product of a period of tremen- had arisen in Northumbria one of the as it was called, on the life of the “Old dous literary fertility among the Anglo- very greatest of the early medieval schol- Saxon” relatives left behind on the conti- Saxons, which was, in turn, the result of ars and saints: the Venerable Bede (673- nent, and on the history of the English the Anglo-Saxon Renaissance (some- 735). His greatest work (in Latin) is his adoption of Christianity. times called the Northumbrian Renais- History of the English Church and People, From the same area as Bede, in the sance, in deference to one of its geo- sometimes called the Ecclesiastical Histo- city of York, came the great scholar graphical foci; less often, but usefully, ry of the English People, probably the first Alcuin, the intimate of Charlemagne. called the Anglo-Irish Renaissance, in history written by a Northern European, Thirty years after Bede published his recognition of the role of Irish Christian- and certainly one of the greatest. History, Alcuin, in 767, took over the ity in helping to civilize the English). Bede was the product of twin centers church school established at York by his When, at length, and after many of learning at Wearmouth and Jarrow, teacher and master, Aethelbert. Fifteen reversions and scrappy civil wars, the by the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall, years after that, Alcuin embarked on the English people overall did become near where Newcastle-on-Tyne stands second half of his career—in the court of Christianized—primarily from Rome, today. He was regarded, especially in Charlemagne at Aachen, where he cre- but in part thanks to the impact in the Carolingian age, as one of the great ated and directed the Palace School, northern Britain of the Irish missionary Church fathers. He was the author of which he oversaw from 782 to 796. He saints, foremost among them St. Colum- numerous commentaries on Scripture, was joined there by many of his English ba and his foundation at Iona off north- of scientific treatises, and of books on circle, to help him teach King and court ern Scotland; and Aidan and his technical chronology and astronomical the “English learning” of York; he

122 became chief adviser to Charlemagne on the Germans, St. Boniface, born around the new faith proposed to them by the doctrinal matters, and his agent in all his 675. His Anglo-Saxon name was Wyn- Roman missionaries: relations to England. frith; he was raised in a monastery in “Your Majesty, when we compare the Alcuin and his colleagues from York Exeter, later headed the monastic school present life of man with that time of played a crucial role in the Carolingian at Nursling in Hampshire near which we have no knowledge, it seems to Renaissance. Under Alcuin, the Palace Southampton, and then, in 716, left Eng- me like the swift flight of the lone spar- School became an important factor in land for Frisia and the very beginnings row through the banqueting-hall where Frankish national life, a magnet for the of his mission. In 722, at Rome, he was you sit in the winter months to dine with sons of patrician and plebeian alike. Any consecrated Bishop to the Germans, your thanes and counsellors. Inside there boy with talent, no matter how humble whereupon he returned to his work, by is a comforting fire to warm the room; his station, was welcomed. Alcuin now in Hesse and Thuringia, bringing outside, the wintry storms of snow and taught the classes in person, drawing to Germany numerous Englishmen to rain are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly other intellectuals in to follow his exam- help in his task of founding churches in through one door of the hall, and out ple, and Charlemagne set the tone by and suppressing heathen sanctuaries. By through another. While he is inside, he is taking classes himself. 742 he had founded sees at Wurzburg, safe from the winter storms, but after a Alcuin bought books widely for the Buraburg, and Erfurt, and had brought few moments of comfort, he vanishes school, but also wrote numerous primers over Englishmen to be their first bishops. from sight into the darkness whence he covering, among other subjects, orthog- He died a martyr in 754, massacred with came. Similarly, man appears on earth for raphy, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, more than fifty of his companions by a a little while, but we know nothing of “astrology” (more akin to cosmology heathen band in Frisia, to which he had what went before this life, or what comes and astronomy, than to the present-day returned at the end of his long life. after. Therefore, if this new teaching can mumbo-jumbo) and theology—works Although Bede wrote exclusively in reveal any more certain knowledge, it which are still extant. Under Alcuin’s Latin, there is a passage so famous from seems only right that we should follow direction, students of marked talent his History, concerning the conversion in it.” were selected for further training to 627 of the Northumbrian English King That haunting image, of the lone become abbots of the Frankish monas- Edwin and his thanes, that we repro- sparrow flying from darkness through teries, and great monastic schools were duce it here, mostly for the way it con- light and warmth into darkness again, set up at Fulda, Tours, and the like. veys the early Anglo-Saxon worldview has resonated throughout centuries, per- Scribe-monks working in the Carolin- in transition from paganism to Chris- haps the most remembered of the all the gian scriptoria preserved the writings of tianity, the same view illuminated so speeches, letters, and colloquia recorded authors of Classical antiquity. perfectly in Beowulf. in Bede’s History. At the same time, the Northumbrian Bede recounts the argument one of Nor did Anglo-Saxon literature writ- English were the first to undertake mis- Edwin’s thanes gives, for acceptance of ten in English (as opposed to Bede’s and sions of evangelization to Alcuin’s Latin), lag behind this Northern Europe, their man- efflorescence of culture and date being to convert their evangelization. From this gen- cousins in Frisia, among the eral period come the beautiful “Old Saxons,” and in Central and haunting elegaic poems, Germany. English missionaries like “The Wanderer,” “The set up foundations at Fulda, Seafarer,” or “The Ruin”; the Echternach, Regensburg, Eich- great religious poems, of which statt, as far south as Salzburg, “The Song of the Rood” (Sev- as far north as Bremen. With enth or Eighth century) is cer- them they brought beautiful tainly the greatest (rood is an illuminated Gospels, done in Anglo-Saxon word for cross); the Anglo-Saxon scriptoria— the work of the poet Caedmon, like the Echternach Gospels, and so on. now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. (Among the Alfred’s Translation Project illuminated manuscripts creat- Then, in the great crisis of • Centers of Anglo-Saxon ed in Anglo-Saxon England Renaissance and Church Anglo-Saxon England, as the were the famous Book of Dur- + Principal English missions to Danes were invading and pil- row and the Book of Kells, now the Continent laging their English cousins, # Charlemagne’s court at Aachen both in the library of Trinity came the most remarkable cul- College, Dublin.) tural achievement of Anglo- An almost exact contempo- Anglo-Saxon missionaries brought learning and Christian Saxon high culture. That rary of Bede was the Apostle of civilization to the homelands of their Germanic ancestors. achievement is associated with

123 As one of the beacons of European cul- ture, it inspires us today, just as it did 1,400 years ago, with an understanding of how poetry can uplift and re-create a population; that is, bring civilization out of barbarism. In its history, and as a living work of art, Beowulf teaches us that human minds and human culture are not fixed and predetermined things, but processes open to transformation. Although the predicates of today’s great global crisis, and concomitant cultural degeneration, The Granger Collection The Granger Collection are different from those of that earlier King Alfred the Great (849-899). Alfred launched a project to translate Classical works into time, Beowulf’s example, and its capacity Anglo-Saxon, and initiated the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” (above right, 11th century manuscript). to inspire, can yet be used by those of us who are fighting today for a new, ecu- the name of King Alfred the Great (b. so that the people could read their own menical evangelization of the human 849), of whom historian Peter Hunter history in their own tongue. He directed spirit. Blair writes: the compilation of the material that —Molly Hammett Kronberg “In 878 this remarkable man had lit- inaugurated the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, tle left”—because of the Danish a monumental work of national record- 1. Blake Morrison, writing in The Independent. 2. The word “grim” is originally an epithet advances in eastern England—“but an keeping. Completed in 890, the compila- for the Norse god Wotan (Odin), one of island fortress in the Somerset marshes, tion incorporated material reaching the chief gods in the Anglo-Saxon pagan but ten years later, then a man rising back to the mid-400’s, and covered items pantheon. And the Anglo-Saxon word for forty, he ruled a wide kingdom and was of history on the continent, before the Fate is (modern: weird). Thus, in learning Latin, so that he could make , Saxons, , and Frisians Shakespeare’s Macbeth, when we meet the those translations of ancient books which migrated. It continued to be kept as a “Three Weird Sisters,” we are not meeting simply witches, but the three Fates— can now be recognized as the founda- national history until 1154 and the death whom we have seen before in Greek and tions of English prose literature. It was a of King Stephen, nearly 100 years after Roman mythology; or as the Norns, the very sound instinct which bestowed on the of 1066 put an three sister-Fates of Norse mythology. this man alone of all the kings of Eng- end to Anglo-Saxon England. land the title of The Great.” So, returning to Beowulf. It is not just Additional illustrations appear on the A number of the books Alfred chose some curiosity for musty antiquarians. inside front cover of this issue. to translate in this project, show his intense desire to give the English people, in the dark days of the Danish invasions, GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY land: 550-1042 (St. Albans: Granada a national identity, a sense of their histo- The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, trans. and ed. Publishing, 1977). ry, origins, and evangelization. This by Michael Swanton (New York: Millward, C.M., The Biography of the Eng- Routledge, 1998). lish Language (Fort Worth: Holt, preoccupation with national history and Bede, History of the English Church and Rinehart, and Winston, 1970). national identity was a precocious devel- People, also known as The Ecclesiasti- Mitchell, Bruce and Robinson, Fred C., A opment, with the Anglo-Saxons step- cal History of the English People, trans. Guide to Old English (Oxford: Basil ping directly, as it were, from Nordic by J.E. King (Cambridge, Mass.: Har- Blackwell, 1986), 4th ed., rev. barbarism, into a sense of nation. vard University Press, 1930). Stenton, E.M., Anglo-Saxon England Among the works Alfred translated Blair, Peter Hunter, An Introduction to (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943; 3rd ed. 1971). were the Dialogues and the Pastoral Care Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), Whitelock, Dorothy, The Beginnings of of St. Gregory (Gregory the Great). 2nd edition. English Society (Harmondsworth: Translating Gregory into English was a Crossley-Holland, Kevin, The Anglo- Penguin Books, 1952; rev. ed. 1965). project Bede had recommended in a let- Saxon World, An Anthology (Oxford: ter of 734, and Alcuin in 796; Alfred Oxford University Press, 1982). OTHER BEOWULF TRANSLATIONS took those admonitions to heart. From Diamond, Robert E., Old English Gram- Alexander, Michael (Harmondsworth: the fathers of the Church, he translated mar and Reader (Detroit: Wayne State Penguin Books, 1973). University Press, 1970). St. Augustine’s Soliloquies, Orosius’s Crossley-Holland, Kevin, in The Anglo- Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne, trans. Saxon World, An Anthology, op. cit. Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, by Lewis Thorpe (London, The Folio Wright, David (Harmondsworth: and Boethius’s Platonist Consolation of Society, 1970). Penguin Books, Penguin Classics, Philosophy. Finberg, H.P.R., The Formation of Eng- 1957). Alfred also translated Bede’s History,

124