Light On Dark Water

Since a Beowulf discussion has sprung up on the immediately preceding thread, and since I just read it and have been meaning to post a note on it anyway, I’ll go ahead and do it now.

I borrowed the Norton Critical Edition from my daughter, who had recently read it for a college course. It includes the Seamus Heaney translation, which is apparently very well-regarded, as well as a number of critical essays and informational notes, including Tolkien’s famous essay (well, “famous” among Tolkien fans, anyway), “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” I deliberately ignored all the apparatus and started reading the poem, not wanting to be prejudiced or encumbered by someone else’s views.

I read Tolkien’s essay immediately after the poem, and was sorry I hadn’t read it first, because if I had I would not have embarrassed myself by falling straight into exactly the shallow reading which Tolkien was determined to correct: to wit, that it’s an odd, aimless poem consisting of a Big Scene, some not particularly relevant lore, and another Big Scene. I won’t try to summarize Tolkien’s argument, which is complex, but I found it persuasive.

However, no amount of abstract demonstration that a poem is good can change the fact that one did not much respond to it. And I think that has to do with Heaney’s translation. I understand—again, abstractly—why it’s considered a good one. But I don’t find much music in it. I’m going to try another translation that maybe attempts to capture more of the archaic dignity that I know must be there.

I’m really struck by how much Tolkien was indebted to Beowulf and, I assume, early Northern literature in general, including, as Ryan mentioned in the other discussion, lifting the whole dragon-guarding-the-hoard story (in The Hobbit) straight out of the poem. And I’m suddenly extremely interested in the lore and history of the period, of which there are tantalizing glimpses in this edition. I really want to learn more, and also want to find that web site I linked to in a comment a few weeks ago which has someone reading the poem aloud in Old English.

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