Delving deep into fantasy’s past, the Beamers went back a thousand years, with the able assistance of Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien, to meet the first and most legendary hero of Old English, Beowulf. Using the newly published translation by Prof. Tolkien, complete with commentary and story adaptation and poetry, we attempted to see if the great Geat was a true epic hero or merely the template for way too many mighty-thewed barbarian sword-swingers. Would we untangle the myth from the overgrowth of modern copycats, or would we get tripped up by the snags and snares of Anglo-Saxon, even with the guidance of our favorite Oxford don?
Beowulf, a 3000-line poem written in Old English, survived in a single manuscript that dates to 1000 C.E. or so. It tells of a Danish king whose stately manor is besieged by a terrible ogre, Grendel, and to whose rescue comes a Geat (or Goth) warrior named Beowulf. Mighty struggles against the monster and then against its mother bring acclaim to the victorious Beowulf. Becoming king of his own people, later in life he must again battle a supernatural foe, this time, a dragon, which fight leaves both of them dead. Seen mainly as a historic artifact or a linguistic source, the poem was rehabilitated as a literary work by Prof. Tolkien with his 1936 lecture, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”. Prof. Tolkien praised the epic nature of the poem through the figures of the ogre and the dragon, which had been seen as evidence of its less-serious status as mere folktale or fairy story. In Prof. Tolkien’s eyes, they instead raised the subject up to the heights of classical myth akin to Homer’s Odyssey.
“Lo!” or “So!” (or even “Bro!”)
Given our experience with fantasy, perhaps best illustrated by Prof. Tolkien’s own Lord of the Rings, we were a ready audience for tales of midnight monsters a-raiding and dragons disturbed by desperate thieves. We needed little convincing of the subject matter, especially as many of us were exposed in school to Beowulf, with its place in English literature secured by the Professor’s impassioned defense of its virtues. What caught us was the language. Even though he produced a prose translation, Prof. Tolkien was often poetic in his words and phrases, bringing out the cadences of the Old English verse within the more staid sentences of modern English. Not that he seemed to take much mercy on his readers, though, as the text is peppered with older terms (“the helm of battle sprang asunder”) and multiple allusions to figures of Scandanavian myth and/or history that would have been apparent to the original audience (“my hands were Daeghrefn’s death, the champion of the Franks”) but were opaque to us non-Norse moderns. Some of us had read Seamus Heaney’s verse translation, and the clarity of his stanzas (“It is a token of triumph and we tender it to you.”) stood in contrast to the hardier thickets of Tolkien’s text.
Unbearable Lightness of Beowulf?
Still, the literary quality of the poem does stand out in the Professor’s work. Kathy remarked on the sweetness of Beowulf as a self-effacing and self-sacrificing hero. Penn noted his true courtesy: having found Unferth’s sword useless in battle, Beowulf makes the effort to return it with thanks to a character who earlier had questioned the Geat warrior’s honor. So, we are pretty far away from the more modern, more hair-trigger barbarian protagonists who express contempt for anyone or anything weaker than themselves. Was it an effect of the Norse ethic of living a life that was worthy of emulation and which would be remembered long after death? Or was the influence of a northern strain of Christianity influencing the heroic? Bruce felt that Tolkien would be viewing Beowulf through a Christian perspective, looking at the fusion of pagan and Christian beliefs that Tolkien discusses in his “Monsters and Critics” lecture. And the Norse substrate is plain to see, I thought, as every heap of praise is spiced with a foreboding of doom (“the hall towered high with horned gables wide, awaiting the warring billows of destroying fire”). Did it get coated or merely stained with the Christian? Penn was perplexed at how to read Christian salvation doctrine into such a warrior ethic as Beowulf demonstrates, even with its monotheistic bent. Perhaps only the Fate that awaits us knows.
Rings abound!
The influence of Beowulf on Tolkien’s own work, though, was easier to see. Perusing the Old English text, I found several familiar words, such as the word for “prince” (“theoden”), which becomes an obvious Lord of the Rings element. Sylwia caught echoes of the dwarven song from The Hobbit in the Professor’s poem, “The Lay of Beowulf”, that Christopher Tolkien included at the end of the translation volume. And his story adaptation of the original work, “Sellic Spell” (from the Old English for “strange story”), showed off his creativity and injected more of the poetry of the original (using “Bee-wolf”, aka “bear” for the hero’s name, for example). Not to mention the regular occurrence of rings in the text (kings are often praised as “ring givers”, chain-mail shirts are “ring webs”). But Penn did mention the oliphaunt in the room, and Roberto was inspired to name Hrothgar as the Sauron of the saga. Well, how could we not?
Will there be a quiz?
Our biggest issue lay with the split between the literary and the linguistic, as denoted by the copious commentary, Christopher Tolkien’s arranging of his father’s lecture notes from his classes on Old English and Beowulf. Did they help or hurt our appreciation of the poem? Given a tendency to dive into the minutiae of minor moments and mere mentions (such as flagging words that appear only once, called “hapax legomenon”), most of us were wary of wasting much time on deciphering the Professor’s propositions from his son’s supplementary notes. Yet, there were some gold nuggets among the grit, such as discovering that the first victim of Grendel was named “Hand-shoe” (aka “Glove”), who was stuffed into the ogre’s dragon-skin pouch, a clothing metaphor that hides among the Anglo-Saxon verbiage till it is translated in an aside.
Thus, our ratings tended to split into “For Tolkien/Old English fans” and “For fantasy readers” numbers, with the former garnering ‘7’ or ‘8’, but the later only taking it up to ‘5’, mainly due to the foundational nature of the original, as Alan pinpointed in his pre-meeting e-mail. Still, that foundation did produce a lot of fine work, such as Maria Dahvana Headley’s novel about Grendel’s mother, The Mere-Wife, championed by Penn. Or Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, a clever blend of an historical account of an Arab traveler, Ibn Fadlan, to the Viking lands, which slowly morphs into the tale of Beowulf, something Gloria had read and was now tempted to re-read. The movie adaptation, The 13th Warrior, is not bad, either, especially as I recognized that Beowulf takes 12 warriors and 1 thief to the dragon’s lair. Echoes abound!