Dragonslayer

“Beowulf” is a flamboyant adventure story, an indispensable Saxon epic and the first great heroic poem in English literature. It was composed more than 1,000 years ago, most probably in Northumbria in the first half of the 8th century, when England was widely converting from paganism to Christianity. It survives as the longest poem (3,182 lines)--the only one of its type--in the language now known as Old English or Anglo-Saxon. It is also the first major poem in a European vernacular language. Think of it as a book of origins welling up from the pagan past, a foundational work like “The Aeneid.” It has a somber grandeur, a mythic vitality. Its clamorous alliterative cadences rise from the dark sea floor--the unconscious sound stratum--of English poetry.

Seamus Heaney’s splendid verse translation and bilingual edition of “Beowulf” bring the poem into focus again as a work of the greatest imaginative intensity. Heaney supplements his supple and highly readable version with an insightful introduction, which serves as both an aesthetic defense and a classical explanation of the poem. He supplies a useful personal note about the nature of the translation and helpful marginal glosses throughout the text (“The Geat hero announces himself and explains his mission,” “Wiglaf stands by his lord” and so forth), which should help readers puzzled by the absence of recognizable reference points and the plethora of unfamiliar Anglo-Saxon names.

The elegiac narrative recounts the adventures of a Scandinavian hero, a legendary prince named Beowulf, who saves the Danes by slaying a ferocious and seemingly invincible monster, Grendel, and, later, a second grim demon, Grendel’s avenging mother. He returns to his own country, where he reigns with great renown (“He ruled it well / for fifty winters, grew old and wise / as warden of the land”) and dies an old man after mortally wounding an ominous fire-eating dragon.

Although “Beowulf” may have an unfortunate reputation as an official text (“Just don’t take any course where they make you read ‘Beowulf,’ ” Woody Allen advises English majors), Heaney’s work goes a long way toward deepening a wondrous quality in the poem that students might have missed in their required study of it. “Beowulf” is not a series of isolated passages translated for a textbook anthology or a penal lesson for students struggling to get a handle on the grammar and vocabulary of Old English, which now feels like a foreign language. Rather, it is a poem operating at the highest level of mythic attainment, a work with the knowledge and wisdom of tragic dreams, an epic phantasmagoria. The epic truly is, as the fabulist Jorge Luis Borges once observed, “one of the necessities of the human mind.”

Heaney has been preparing himself for this task all his life. “Lie down / in the word-hoard,” he instructed himself in his 1975 poem “North,” and he does so here with a marvelous burrowing credibility. As a poet, he has always had an affinity for northern things, mythic grounds, peat bogs, archeological digs, archaic texts. He was in part instigated into his own poems by reading his great Welsh forebear, Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose heavily accented consonantal music he linked to the Ulster writer W.R. Rogers, another poet “lured by alliteration.” All three sank root in a bumpy Anglo-Saxon ground. In acknowledging his debts, Heaney also points out that without any conscious intention on his part, certain lines in “Digging,” the first poem in his first book, “Death of a Naturalist” (1966), conformed to an Anglo-Saxon metric pattern. They consist of two balancing halves, each with a pair of stressed syllables. As the “Beowulf” poet might have lineated them:

the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father digging. I look down.

The repetition of the letter D in the second line (“digging,” “down”) pulls the rhythm and meaning across the dividing caesura. “Part of me,” Heaney says, “has been writing Anglo-Saxon from the start.” He calls “Beowulf” part of his “voice-right.” It is also part of ours.

Heaney’s translation begins with a lively conversational push, a down-to-earth, exclamatory “So” (rather than “Lo” or “Hark” or “Attend,” as the opening word is sometimes translated) that thrusts us into the narrative presence of the poem:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by

and the kings who ruled them had courage and

greatness.

We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

We are placed immediately in the hands of a storyteller eager to remember the days of great legendary exploits, and he looks back with yearning nostalgia and pride to the heroic lineage of an ancient people, a lost ancestral world. It’s as if the “Beowulf” poet were imitating an Anglo-Saxon scop, the minstrel-poet who both composed his own poems and sang or recited the compositions of others. He is akin to the singers he describes, such as Hrothgar’s minstrel:

Meanwhile, a thane

of the king’s household, a carrier of tales,

a traditional singer deeply schooled

in the lore of the past, linked a new theme

to a strict metre.

So begins the first of two such entertaining performances by royal scops within “Beowulf.” “For a moment it is as if we have been channel-surfed into another poem,” Heaney explains, whereas “. . . we are in fact participating in a poem within our poem. . . .”

Heaney’s flexible adaptation has its own adhesive music, a keen contemporary authority, though for the sake of readability it also must deactivate some of the harsher sea-churning effects of the original. The translator loosely--skillfully--maintains the fundamental metrical pattern but bridges the strict medial pause at the heart of the Anglo-Saxon poetic line. He downplays the extraordinary number of kennings, or compound words, in the text--there are hundreds of verbal yokings in “Beowulf,” such as when the poet calls the sea swanrad (swan-road) or the human body banhus (bone house)--and at times he effaces the alliterations. But he can also physically forge the sounds, as when Beowulf boasts:

They had seen me boltered in the blood of enemies

when I battled and bound five beasts,

raided a troll-nest and in the night-sea

slaughtered sea-brutes.

Heaney’s translation has riled some scholars who prefer a more literal rendering of the poem. But many such literal translations get the gist of the poem while missing its cosmic meaning and music. The deep value of Heaney’s free adaptation is that it opens the poetic world of “Beowulf” to us. He captures the overall swing and pitch of the poem, even as he pursues the direct narrative utterance and the larger architectonics. As with his own poems, he has found a capable strategy for transforming mythic energy into verbal action.

One of the peculiarities of “Beowulf” is that the teller is Christian, injecting scriptural references and supplying a religious moral compass while recounting events that take place partly in the 6th century, partly in the legendary space of “long ago.” Written in England, set in Scandinavia, the poem has the texture of a written work rooted in oral tradition. It harks back to the ethics and values, the territorial imperatives and discomfiting male violence of a warrior culture. And it evokes an animistic natural world, Earth alive in all its parts.

In entering “Beowulf” we enter another world, an earlier consciousness delivered through a primal language. The momentum builds toward the conclusive illumination. As Heaney puts it: “[T]he poet is more in sympathy with the tragic, waiting, unredeemed phase of things than any transcendental promise. Beowulf’s mood as he gets ready to fight the dragon . . . recalls the mood of other tragic heroes: Oedipus at Colonus, Lear at his ‘ripeness is all’ extremity, Hamlet in the last illuminations of his ‘prophetic soul.’ ”

Going into final battle against that fire-eating dragon, that totemic creature, “a figure of real oneiric power,” as Heaney calls it, Beowulf already recognizes his destiny:

He wished good luck to the Geats who had shared

his hearth and his gold. He was sad at heart,

unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.

His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain.

The entire last part of the epic reverberates with Beowulf’s uncanny comprehension, his spiritual sense of wyrd, or fate, his capitulation to the wheel of necessity.

Beowulf was obsessed with trying to combat the fatality of evil. It came at him in three demonic forms, a triad of monstrous shapes, and Heaney acutely locates the deadly struggles in what he calls “three archetypal sites of fear: the barricaded night-house, the infested underwater current, and the reptile-haunted rocks of a wilderness.” These sites have a permanent hold on our imaginations. Beowulf’s warrior code may be archaic (“Let whoever can / win glory before death,” he cries out), but his ferocious confrontation with the blood-stained claw of evil is timeless.

The storybook element in “Beowulf” gives it the quality of a book of marvels and wonders--part Germanic folk tale, part Scandinavian saga. The sense of a world going under--a dynastic culture passing away--also lines it with the feeling of a prototypic English elegy--for a legendary hero, for a doomed civilization. There is a melancholy fatalism to the end of the poem: Enemies are amassing at the borders and, with Beowulf dead, no one can protect his people from the tragic future awaiting them. There is something utterly foreseen and yet perpetually surprising about the grief-stricken conclusion to “Beowulf.” The poetry itself partakes of the ritual mourning of a tribe building a funeral pyre for a renowned warrior and gracious king, going about the grim business of cremating his body and then building him a memorial barrow. One almost has to hold up an arm to fend off the unforgiving sight of the warriors laying the body into the middle of the fire, wailing aloud for their lord’s decease. Heaney nobly captures the unbearable dread--the wild lament--of an ordinary woman:

A Geat woman too sang out in grief;

with hair bound up, she unburdened herself

of her worst fears, a wild litany

of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,

enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,

slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.

In the end, “Beowulf” has an elemental grandeur, a ruthless beauty and an incandescent dignity that belong only to the greatest poetry.