By Bob Tedder • There are two certainties concerning the opening declaration of the Old English masterpiece “Beowulf.” There is no explicit definition of the initial word “Hwæt!” and over the past 1,000 years or so various translators have concentrated more on the exclamation point than the word itself. Hence the reader may stumble across a “Listen!,” a “What Ho!,” a “Look!,” a “Hear Me!,” an “Indeed!,” or an “Attend!” However, when Seamus Heaney, Nobel literature laureate, turns the soul of an Irish poet toward “Hwæt!” he eschews the exclamation and greets the reader with a subtle and magnificently simple “So.”
“Beowulf: A Verse Translation, Translated by Seamus Heaney” in its “Norton Critical Edition” awaits the curious. So. Why this poem and why this edition?
First the edition. The bulk of the volume (217 of 294 pages) is devoted to critical essays which, of course, may be ignored entirely. Doing so, however, deprives the reader of much entertainment and insight. For instance, nowhere else will one find a character – in this case, Grendel – described as a mixture of Caliban and a hoplite. One finds the expected academic posings over such literary topics as internal structure, Christian language and themes and even the “Beowulf” poet’s sense of humor. My favorite “Wow I didn’t know that” discovery is why the British Library, home of the only original copy of “Beowulf,” catalogs it as Cotton MS Vitellius A.XV. ( A cup of the Paw’s best is on me for anyone looking this up.)
So. Why read “Beowulf”? The answer lies in the volume’s must-read essay, “The Monsters and the Critics.” Here philologist J.R.R. Tolkien successfully argues that an obscure manuscript is actually the great national poem of the Anglo Saxon canon. The success of his argument lies in the fact “Beowulf” – first recorded sometime between the 8th and early 11th century – is still found in high school textbooks. This vindication of Tolkien’s argument is saddened by the fact few assigned the poem actually read its paltry 3,182 lines. For those readers please note that “Beowulf’s” confrontation with a gold-hoarding dragon predates all such creatures in English literature.
So. If you have ever dueled a Hungarian Hornback, riddled with Smaug or gasped when Viserion’s blue eyes popped open, then you owe a debt of gratitude not only to Rowling, Tolkien and Martin but most of all to the unknown poet of “Beowulf.” So! Repay the debt and read Heaney’s “Beowulf.”