Battle dress kenning in beowulf

A L S O BY S E A M U S H E A N E Y

P O E T R Y ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

Death of a Naturalist I S E ^ ^ \ » J k # I I | E Door into the Dark %J E ^ ^ W W \ ^ L I

Wintering Out North

Field Work A N E W V E R S E T R A N S L A T I O N

Poems 1965-1975 Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish

Station Island The Haw Lantern S E A M U S H E A N E Y

Selected Poems 1966-1987 Seeing Things

Sweeney's Flight (with photographs by Rachel Giese) The Spirit Level

Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996

C R I T I C I S M

Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 The Government of the Tongue

The Redress of Poetry

PLAYS

The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

New York • London

Copyright©2000 by Seamus Heaney ^ m e m Q r y 0f Ted HugkeS All rights reserved u J °

Printed in the United States of America Designed by Cynthia Krupat

First bilingual edition 2000 published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux First published as a Norton paperback 2001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beowulf. English & English (Old English)

Beowulf I [translated by] Seamus Heaney. — 1st ed. p. cm.

Text in English and Old English. 1. Heroes—Scandinavia—Poetry. 2. Epic poetry, English (Old).

3. Monsters—Poetry. 4. Dragons—Poetry. I. Heaney, Seamus. PE1383.H43 1999 829^.3—dC2i 99-23209

ISBN 0-393-32097-9 pbk.

W. W. Norton ir Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton ir Company Ltd. Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T3QT

0

The Old English text of the poem is based on Beowulf, with the Finnesburg Fragment, edited by C. L. Wrenn and W. F. Bolton (University of Exeter Press, 1988), and is printed here by kind permission ofW. F. Bolton and the University of Exeter Press.

http://www.wwnorton.com
Contents

Introduction page ix

A Note on Names by Alfred David page xxxi

B E O W U L F page 2

Family Trees page 217

Acknowledgements page 219

Introduction

And now this is 'an inheritance'— Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked In the long ago, yet willable forward

Again and again and again.

B E O W U L F : THE P O E M

The poem called Beowulf was composed sometime between the middle of the seventh and the end of the tenth century of the first millennium, in the language that is to-day called Anglo-Saxon or Old English. It is a heroic narrative, more than three thousand lines long, concerning the deeds of a Scandinavian prince, also called Beowulf, and it stands as one of the foundation works of poetry in English. The fact that the English language has changed so much in the last thousand years means, however, that the poem is now generally read in translation and mostly in English courses at schools and universities. This has contributed to the impression that it was written (as Osip Mandelstam said of The Divine Comedy) "on official paper," which is unfortunate, since what we are dealing with is a work of the greatest imaginative vitality, a masterpiece where the structuring of the tale is as elab- orate as the beautiful contrivances of its language. Its narrative elements may belong to a previous age but as a work of art it lives in its own continuous present, equal to our knowledge of reality in the present time.

The poem was written in England but the events it describes are set in Scandinavia, in a "once upon a time" that is partly his- torical. Its hero, Beowulf, is the biggest presence among the war- riors in the land of the Geats, a territory situated in what is now southern Sweden, and early in the poem Beowulf crosses the sea to the land of the Danes in order to clear their country of a man-

eating monster called Grendel. From this expedition (which in- extent (if at all) the newly Christian understanding of the world volves him in a second contest with Grendel's mother) he returns which operates in the poet's designing mind displaces him from in triumph and eventually rules for fifty years as king of his his imaginative at-homeness in the world of his poem—a pagan homeland. Then a dragon begins to terrorize the countryside and Germanic society governed by a heroic code of honour, one Beowulf must confront it. In a final climactic encounter, he does where the attainment of a name for warrior-prowess among the manage to slay the dragon, but he also meets his own death and living overwhelms any concern about the soul's destiny in the enters the legends of his people as a warrior of high renown. afterlife.

We know about the poem more or less by chance because it ex- However, when it comes to considering Beowulf as a work of ists in one manuscript only. This unique copy (now in the British literature, there is one publication that stands out. In 1936, the Library) barely survived a fire in the eighteenth century and was Oxford scholar and teacher J.R.R. Tolkien published an epoch- then transcribed and titled, retranscribed and edited, translated making paper entitled "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" and adapted, interpreted and reinterpreted, until it has become which took for granted the poem's integrity and distinction as a canonical. For decades it has been a set book on English sylla- work of art and proceeded to show in what this integrity and dis- buses at university level all over the world. The fact that many tinction inhered. He assumed that the poet had felt his way English departments require it to be studied in the original con- through the inherited material—the fabulous elements and the tinues to generate resistance, most notably at Oxford University, traditional accounts of an heroic past—and by a combination of where the pros and cons of the inclusion of part of it as a com- creative intuition and conscious structuring had arrived at a pulsory element in the English course have been debated regu- unity of effect and a balanced order. He assumed, in other words, larly in recent years. that the Beowulf poet was an imaginative writer rather than some

For generations of undergraduates, academic study of the kind of back-formation derived from nineteenth-century folklore poem was often just a matter of construing the meaning, getting and philology. Tolkien's brilliant literary treatment changed the a grip on the grammar and vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon, and be- way the poem was valued and initiated a new era—and new ing able to recognize, translate, and comment upon random ex- terms—of appreciation. tracts which were presented in the examinations. For generations It is impossible to attain a full understanding and estimate of of scholars too the interest had been textual and philological; Beowulf without recourse to this immense body of commentary then there developed a body of research into analogues and and elucidation. Nevertheless, readers coming to the poem for sources, a quest for stories and episodes in the folklore and leg- the first time are likely to be as delighted as they are discomfited ends of the Nordic peoples which would parallel or foreshadow by the strangeness of the names and the immediate lack of episodes in Beowulf Scholars were also preoccupied with fixing known reference points. An English speaker new to The Iliad or the exact time and place of the poem's composition, paying The Odyssey or The Aeneid will probably at least have heard of minute attention to linguistic, stylistic, and scribal details. More Troy and Helen, or of Penelope and the Cyclops, or of Dido and generally, they tried to establish the history and genealogy of the the golden bough. These epics may be in Greek and Latin, yet the dynasties of Swedes and Geats and Danes to which the poet classical heritage has entered the cultural memory enshrined in makes constant allusion; and they devoted themselves to a con- English so thoroughly that their worlds are more familiar than sideration of the world-view behind the poem, asking to what that of the first native epic, even though it was composed cen-

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turies after them. Achilles rings a bell, but not Scyld Scefing. in a bunraku theatre in Japan, where the puppetry and the poetry Ithaca leads the mind in a certain direction, but not Heorot. The are mutually supportive, a mixture of technicolour spectacle and Sibyl of Cumae will stir certain associations, but not bad Queen ritual chant. Or we can equally envisage it as an animated car- Modthryth. First-time readers of Beowulf very quickly rediscover toon (and there has been at least one shot at this already), full of the meaning of the term "the dark ages," and it is in the hope of mutating graphics and minatory stereophonies. We can avoid, at dispelling some of the puzzlement they are bound to feel that I any rate, the slightly cardboard effect which the word "monster" have added the marginal glosses which appear in the following tends to introduce, and give the poem a fresh chance to sweep pages. "in off the moors, down through the mist bands" of Anglo-Saxon

Still, in spite of the sensation of being caught between a England, forward into the global village of the third millennium, "shield-wall" of opaque references and a "word-hoard" that is Nevertheless, the dream element and overall power to haunt old and strange, such readers are also bound to feel a certain come at a certain readerly price. The poem abounds in passages "shock of the new." This is because the poem possesses a mythic which will leave an unprepared audience bewildered. Just when potency. Like Shield Sheafson (as Scyld Scefing is known in this the narrative seems ready to take another step ahead into the translation), it arrives from somewhere beyond the known main Beowulf story, it sidesteps. For a moment it is as if we have bourne of our experience, and having fulfilled its purpose (again been channel-surfed into another poem, and at two points in this like Shield), it passes once more into the beyond. In the interven- translation I indicate that we are in fact participating in a poem- ing time, the poet conjures up a work as remote as Shield's fu- within-our-poem not only by the use of italics but by a slight neral boat borne towards the horizon, as commanding as the quickening of pace and shortening of metrical rein. The passages horn-pronged gables of King Hrothgar's hall, as solid and daz- occur in lines 883-914 and lines 1070-1158, and on each occasion zling as Beowulf's funeral pyre that is set ablaze at the end. a minstrel has begun to chant a poem as part of the celebration These opening and closing scenes retain a haunting presence in of Beowulf's achievement. In the former case, the minstrel ex- the mind; they are set pieces but they have the life-marking presses his praise by telling the story of Sigemund's victory over power of certain dreams. They are like the pillars of the gate of a dragon, which both parallels Beowulf's triumph over Grendel horn, through which wise dreams of true art can still be said to and prefigures his fatal encounter with the wyrm in his old age. pass. In the latter—the most famous of what were once called the "di-

What happens in between is what William Butler Yeats would gressions" in the poem, the one dealing with a fight between have called a phantasmagoria. Three agons, three struggles in Danes and Frisians at the stronghold of Finn, the Frisian king— which the preternatural force-for-evil of the hero's enemies the song the minstrel sings has a less obvious bearing on the im- comes springing at him in demonic shapes. Three encounters mediate situation of the hero, but its import is nevertheless with what the critical literature and the textbook glossaries call central to both the historical and the imaginative world of the "the monsters." In three archetypal sites of fear: the barricaded poem. night-house, the infested underwater current, and the reptile- The "Finnsburg episode" envelops us in a society that is at haunted rocks of a wilderness. If we think of the poem in this once honour-bound and blood-stained, presided over by the way, its place in world art becomes clearer and more secure. We laws of the blood-feud, where the kin of a person slain are bound can conceive of it re-presented and transformed in performance to exact a price for the death, either by slaying the killer or by re-

ii I Introduction Introduction \ xiii

ceiving satisfaction in the form of wergild (the "man-price"), a hall of his "ring-giver," Hygelac, lord of the Geats, the hero dis- legally fixed compensation. The claustrophobic and doom-laden courses about his adventures in a securely fortified cliff-top en- atmosphere of this interlude gives the reader an intense intima- closure. But this security is only temporary, for it is the destiny tion of what wyrd, or fate, meant not only to the characters in the of the Geat people to be left lordless in the end. Hygelac's al- Finn story but to those participating in the main action of Beowulf liances eventually involve him in deadly war with the Swedish itself. All conceive of themselves as hooped within the great king, Ongentheow, and even though he does not personally wheel of necessity, in thrall to a code of loyalty and bravery, deliver the fatal stroke (two of his thanes are responsible for bound to seek glory in the eye of the warrior world. The little na- this—see 11. 2484-89 and then the lengthier reprise of this mo- tions are grouped around their lord, the greater nations spoil for dent at II. 2922-3003), he is known in the poem as "Ongen- war and menace the little ones, a lord dies, defencelessness en- theow's killer." Hence it comes to pass that after the death of sues, the enemy strikes, vengeance for the dead becomes an ethic Beowulf, who eventually succeeds Hygelac, the Geats experience for the living, bloodshed begets further bloodshed, the wheel a great foreboding and the epic closes in a mood of sombre ex- turns, the generations tread and tread and tread. Which is what I pectation. A world is passing away, the Swedes and others are meant above when I said that the import of the Finnsburg pas- massing on the borders to attack, and there is no lord or hero to sage is central to the historical and imaginative world of the rally the defence, poem as a whole. The Swedes, therefore, are the third nation whose history and

One way of reading Beowulf is to think of it as three agons in destiny are woven into the narrative, and even though no part the hero's life, but another way would be to regard it as a poem of the main action is set in their territory, they and their kings which contemplates the destinies of three peoples by tracing constantly stalk the horizon of dread within which the main pro- their interweaving histories in the story of the central character. tagonists pursue their conflicts and allegiances. The Swedish di- First we meet the Danes—variously known as the Shieldings (af- mension gradually becomes an important element in the poem's ter Shield Sheafson, the founder of their line), the Ingwins, the emotional and imaginative geography, a geography which en- Spear-Danes, the Bright-Danes, the West-Danes, and so on—a tails, it should be said, no very clear map-sense of the world, people in the full summer of their power, symbolized by the high more an apprehension of menaced borders, of danger gathering hall built by King Hrothgar, one "meant to be a wonder of the beyond the mere and the marshes, of mearc-stapas "prowling the world." The threat to this gilded order comes from within, from moors, huge marauders / from some other world." marshes beyond the pale, from the bottom of the haunted mere Within these phantasmal boundaries, each lord's hall is an ac- where "Cain's clan," in the shape of Grendel and his troll-dam, tual and a symbolic refuge. Here is heat and light, rank and cere- trawl and scavenge and bide their time. But it also comes from mony, human solidarity and culture; the dugud share the without, from the Heathobards, for example, whom the Danes mead-benches with the geogod, the veterans with their tales of have defeated in battle and from whom they can therefore expect warrior kings and hero-saviours from the past rub shoulders retaliatory war (see 11. 2020-69). with young braves—pegnas, eorlas, thanes, retainers—keen to

Beowulf actually predicts this turn of events when he goes win such renown in the future. The prospect of gaining a glori- back to his own country after saving the Danes (for the time be- ous name in the wael-raes, in the rush of battle-slaughter, the ing, at any rate) by staving off the two "reavers from hell." In the pride of defending one's lord and bearing heroic witness to the

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integrity of the bond between him and his hall-companions—a For every one of us, living in this world bond sealed in the gleo and gidd of peace-time feasting and ring- means waiting for our end. Let whoever can giving—this is what gave drive and sanction to the Germanic win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, warrior-culture enshrined in Beowulf. that will he his best and only bulwark. (II. 1384-89)

Heorot and Hygelac's hall are the hubs of this value system upon which the poem's action turns. But there is another, outer In an age when "the instability of the human subject" is con- rim of value, a circumference of understanding within which the stantly argued for if not presumed, there should be no problem heroic world is occasionally viewed as from a distance and rec- with a poem which is woven from two such different psychic ognized for what it is, an earlier state of consciousness and oil- fabrics. In fact, Beowulf perfectly answers the early modern con- ture, one which has not been altogether shed but which has now ception of a work of creative imagination as one in which con- been comprehended as part of another pattern. And this circum- flicting realities find accommodation within a new order; and ference and pattern arise, of course, from the poet's Christianity this reconciliation occurs, it seems to me, most poignantly and and from his perspective as an Englishman looking back at most profoundly in the poem's third section, once the dragon en- places and legends which his ancestors knew before they made ters the picture and the hero in old age must gather his powers their migration from continental Europe to their new home on for the final climactic ordeal. From the moment Beowulf ad- the island of the Britons. As a consequence of his doctrinal certi- vances under the crags, into the comfortless arena bounded by tude, which is as composed as it is ardent, the poet can view the the rock-wall, the reader knows he is one of those "marked by story-time of his poem with a certain historical detachment and fate." The poetry is imbued with a strong intuition of wyrd hov- even censure the ways of those who lived in Mo tempore: ering close, "unknowable but certain," and yet, because it is

imagined within a consciousness which has learned to expect Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed that the soul will find an ultimate home "among the steadfast offerings to idols, swore oaths ones," this primal human emotion has been transmuted into that the killer of souls might come to their aid something less "zero at the bone," more metaphysically tem- and save the people. That was their way, pered. their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts A similar transposition from a plane of regard which is, as it they remembered hell. (II. 175-80) were, helmeted and hall-bound to one which sees things in a

slightly more heavenly light is discernible in the different ways At the same time, as a result of his inherited vernacular culture the poet imagines gold. Gold is a constant element, gleaming and the imaginative sympathy which distinguishes him as an solidly in underground vaults, on the breasts of queens or the artist, the poet can lend the full weight of his rhetorical power to arms and regalia of warriors on the mead-benches. It is loaded Beowulf as he utters the first principles of the northern warrior's into boats as spoil, handed out in bent bars as hall gifts, buried in honour-code: the earth as treasure, persisting underground as an affirmation of

a people's glorious past and an elegy for it. It pervades the ethos It is always better of the poem the way sex pervades consumer culture. And yet the

to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. bullion with which Waels's son, Sigemund, weighs down the

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hold after an earlier dragon-slaying triumph (in the old days, a s the s e a around cliffs," utterly a manifestation of the Germanic long before Beowulf's time) is a more trustworthy substance than heroic code. that which is secured behind the walls of Beowulf's barrow. By Enter then, fifty years later, the dragon. From his dry-stone the end of the poem, gold has suffered a radiation from the vau l t> from a nest where he is heaped in coils around the body- Christian vision. It is not that it yet equals riches in the medieval heated gold. Once he is wakened, there is something glorious in sense of worldly corruption, just that its status as the ore of all the way he manifests himself, a Fourth of July effulgence fire- value has been put in doubt. It is lsene, transitory, passing from working its path across the night sky; and yet, because of the hand to hand, and its changed status is registered as a symptom centuries he has spent dormant in the tumulus, there is a found- of the changed world. Once the dragon is disturbed, the melan- edness as well as a lambency about him. He is at once a stratum choly and sense of displacement which pervade the last move- o f the earth and a streamer in the air, no painted dragon but a fig- ment of the poem enter the hoard as a disabling and ominous u r e of real oneiric power, one that can easily survive the preju- light. And the dragon himself, as a genius of the older order, is d i c e which arises at the very mention of the word "dragon." bathed in this light, so that even as he begins to stir, the reader Whether in medieval art or in modern Disney cartoons, the has a premonition that the days of his empery are numbered. dragon can strike us as far less horrific than he is meant to be, but

Nevertheless, the dragon has a wonderful inevitability about i n the final movement of Beowulf, he lodges himself in the imagi- him and a unique glamour. It is not that the other monsters are n a t ion as wyrd rather than wyrm, more a destiny than a set of rep- lacking in presence and aura; it is more that they remain, for all tilian vertebrae. their power to terrorize, creatures of the physical world. Grendel Grendel and his mother enter Beowulf's life from the outside, comes alive in the reader's imagination as a kind of dog-breath accidentally, challenges which in other circumstances he might in the dark, a fear of collision with some hard-boned and im- n o t have taken up, enemies from whom he might have been dis- mensely strong android frame, a mixture of Caliban and hoplite. tracted or deflected. The dragon, on the other hand, is a given of And while his mother too has a definite brute-bearing about her, his home ground, abiding in his underearth as in his understand- a creature of slouch and lunge on land if seal-swift in the water, i n& waiting for the meeting, the watcher at the ford, the ques- she nevertheless retains a certain non-strangeness. As antago- t i o n e r who sits so sly, the "lion-limb," as Gerard Manley Hopkins nists of a hero being tested, Grendel and his mother possess an might have called him, against whom Beowulf's body and soul appropriate head-on strength. The poet may need them as fig- m us t measure themselves. Dragon equals shadow-line, the ures who do the devil's work, but the poem needs them more as psalmist's valley of the shadow of death, the embodiment of a figures who call up and show off Beowulf's physical might and knowledge deeply ingrained in the species which is the very his superb gifts as a warrior. They are the right enemies for a knowledge of the price to be paid for physical and spiritual sur- young glory-hunter, instigators of the formal boast, worthy vival. trophies to be carried back from the grim testing-ground— I r has often been observed that all the scriptural references in Grendel's arm is ripped off and nailed up, his head severed and Beowulf are to the Old Testament. The poet is more in sympathy paraded in Heorot. It is all consonant with the surge of youth with the tragic, waiting, unredeemed phase of things than with and the compulsion to win fame "as wide as the wind's home, / any transcendental promise. Beowulf's mood as he gets ready to

xviii | Introduction Introduction | xix

fight the dragon-who could be read as a projection of Beowulf's The wisdom °fa8e is worthless to him' own chthonic wisdom refined in the crucible of experience-re- Mornin8 afier morninZ' he wakes to remember calls the mood of other tragic heroes: Oedipus at Colonus, Lear at that his cMd has 8one; he has n0 interest

his "ripeness is all" extremity, Hamlet in the last illuminations of in livin8 on until another heir

his "prophetic soul": rS born in the Ml" • '