Blogging Beowulf: Fit I, lines 53-114

30 January 2009

Fit I gets us right into the meat of the poem. It picks up after Scyld’s funeral and zips through the reign of Beow (a.k.a., the other Beowulf) and that of Healfdene, Beow’s son. Healfdene is also the king that builds Heorot, the great mead-hall that Grendel will plunder. The throne eventually passes to Hrōðgār, Healfdene’s son, who is also reckoned a great king who also bēagas dælde (dispensed rings). We are then introduced to the monster Grendel, who lurks in the shadows, jealous of the joy and feasting that is going on in Heorot.

The opening of the fit is more genealogy. Healfdene has four children, three sons: Heorogār, Hrōðgār, and Hālga, and an unnamed daughter. It does not appear that the daughter was meant to be left out; rather it looks like scribal error. Several words, and perhaps several lines, are missing. The manuscript reads (fol. 130r):

Heorogar ond
Hroðgar ond Halga til; hyrde ic þæt elan cwen
heaðo silfingas healsgebedda

The missing words are between þæt and elan. Klaeber’s edits this as:

Heorogār ond Hrōðgār     ond Hālga til;
hyrde iċ þæt [……     wæs On]elan cwēn,
Heaðo-Scilfingas     healsġebedda.

(Heorogar and Hrothgar     and Halga the good;
I heard that [name     was On]ela’s queen,
of the War-Swedes,     dear bedfellow.)

Onela, the king of the Swedes, appears later in the poem and from other sources we understand that his wife’s name was Ursula, or something similar.

The line with the missing words is the sixth from the bottom of the folio. You’ll also note that the manuscript does not present the text in poetic lines with caesuras. These are the work of later editors. In the manuscript, the poem is written out as if it were prose, continuously from one edge of the folio to another.

We cannot forget that Grendel is introduced to us starting on line 86. He is called an ellengæst (courageous spirit). This is the only place in Old English literature that this word appears. At four other places in the poem, he is referred to as ellorgast or ellorgæst (spirit from elsewhere/faraway) words that also do not appear outside of Beowulf. Since “courageous” doesn’t seem to be all that appropriate for Grendel, this may be scribal error and ellorgast is what was originally intended in line 86 as well. But on the other hand, there could also be punning going on with gast. Two unrelated, but similar, roots give us the modern words ghost and guest. A “courageous guest” is not so strange and perhaps the poet is slyly introducing Grendel as a “visitor” before revealing in the next few lines that he is actually a monster. All this goes to show that how the manuscript is edited and presented in print really makes a difference in how the poem is read.

The fit ends with us learning that Grendel is in Cāines cynne (of the lineage of Cain). In the universe of the poem, Cain fathered a line of untydras (bad broods), including eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas, swylċe ġī(ga)ntas (ogres and elves and evil spirits, also giants). This, by the way, is where Tolkien gets his orcs.

This introduces another contradiction in the poem. Beowulf is a pre-Christian hero, but the poem was written from a Christian perspective. The poem recognizes that the heroes and kings in it are pagans, but it is also filled with references to the Christian God and beliefs.

Finally, the discussion of Grendel’s lineage bookends the fit with the listing of Beow’s descendents at the beginning. In the next fit, the comparison of Grendel with Hrothgar will continue.

(Next: Fit II, lines 115-88)

Blogging Beowulf: Prologue, lines 1-52

28 January 2009

I’m taking a course on Beowulf at UC Berkeley this semester. (The professor is Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe for those who know who’s who in the field.) I’ve read the poem before, of course, but only in translation. This is the first time I’ll be reading the poem in the original Old English. So, inspired by others like David Plotz, who blogged the Bible for Slate, and Ammon Shea, who wrote Reading the OED, I decided to blog about my impressions of the poem as I translate and read. Beowulf isn’t nearly as long as either of those two works, but I have to translate. There will be about two blog entries per week through May, roughly corresponding to one entry for each of the poem’s fits.

Beowulf is, of course, the great epic poem of Anglo-Saxon England, filled with heroes, monsters, and dragons and has as its major theme of the search for nobility in death. The text I’ll be reading is Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 4th Edition, edited by R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. For those of you not familiar with medieval works, it really does make a difference what version you read. The editorial decisions made in taking a handwritten manuscript to print, especially a damaged one like the Beowulf manuscript, really make a difference.

Beowulf survives in only one manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, occupying folios 129r-198v. (That’s the shelf mark, essentially the library call number of the manuscript. Medieval manuscripts are usually paginated by numbered sheets, or folios, divided into recto (front) and verso (back) sides.) The poem consists of 3182 extant lines (originally it was probably somewhat longer, but scribal error and damage have taken their toll), divided into a prologue and 42 (or 43, depending on how you count) fits, or sections.

Like all Anglo-Saxon poetry, Beowulf is in alliterative verse. It does not rhyme; instead it relies on alliteration, rhythm, and meter. But enough of introductory stuff and on to the poem. I’ll fill in background info as I go.

Hwæt! Wē Gār-Dena     in ġeardāgum,
þēodcyninga     þrym ġefrunon,

Like a lot of Old English poetry, Beowulf begins with Hwæt!, roughly translated as Listen! or Lo! The whole first two lines read in translation:

Listen! We have heard of the glory in days of yore
of the glory of the kings of the people of the Spear-Danes.

A good start. It grabs you with the martial verbiage. It also introduces you to one of the first contradictions of the poem, or at least of its critical reception. The poem is set mostly in Denmark and the hero, Beowulf, is a Geat, from what is now southern Sweden. Despite the fact that it is written in Old English and the story is not known to have existed in Scandinavia, the subject of the poem has nothing to do with England. But Hamlet was a Dane too, so I guess it still qualifies as English literature.

This prologue, which consists of the first 52 lines of the poem, is all about Scyld Scefing, the legendary founder of the Danish kingdom. Scyld washes up on the Danish shore, Moses-like, as an infant and grows to become a great king and patriarch. The first half of the prologue describes his rise and the second describes his funeral. This is not directly related to the meat of the Beowulf plot, but Scyld’s great-grandson is Hrōðgār, the beleaguered Danish king whom Beowulf will rescue from the predations of the monster Grendel.

When you hit line 10, you come across the word hronrāde. Literally, this means whale-road, a figurative term for the sea or ocean. This is a kenning, a type of poetic metaphor. Because Anglo-Saxon poetry is alliterative, you need a lot of synonyms beginning with different letters to maintain the alliteration. Now if you look up kenning in just about any reference, the example given, almost without exception, will be whale-road. Now I know why this is; whale-road appears in the first ten lines of Beowulf, easy pickings for a first-semester freshman taking a survey course in English Lit.

On line 18 you run into the name Beow, or at least that’s how Klaeber’s gives it. It actually appears as Beowulf in the manuscript. No, it’s not THE Beowulf of the poem; he doesn’t appear until later. This is another guy, Scyld’s son. Different edited versions split on this name; some give it as Beow, others as Beowulf. Other stories about Scyld give his son’s name as Beow, so that appears to be the “correct” one, despite what the Beowulf manuscript says. This has given rise to the speculation that the scribes, knowing that the poem was about some guy named Beowulf, and mistakenly wrote that name instead of Beow. Both Beow and Beowulf work metrically.

So Scyld is a great king, a bēaga bryttan (line 35), or dispenser of rings. In the Germanic traditions kings were ranked according to how much loot they could give to their minions. This concept is revisited endlessly throughout the poem.

But like any king, Scyld eventually dies and is given a grand funeral. He is set in a boat, laden with weapons, armor, and treasure and the boat is pushed out to sea where (lines 50-52):

Men ne cunnon
secgan tō sōðe,     selerædende,
hæleð under heofenum,     hwā þæm hlæste onfēng.

Men do not know
truth be told,     neither counselors
nor heroes under heaven,     who unshipped that cargo.

(Next time: Fit I, lines 53-114)

Review: The Visual Thesaurus

26 January 2009

One of the downsides of digital dictionaries is that you’re less likely to be sidetracked by an interesting word while you’re looking another one up. It’s happened to you; you’re flipping through the dictionary on your way to a word and another catches your eye. With digital searches, this is less likely to happen; the software takes you directly to the word you were looking for originally.

All this changes with the Visual Thesaurus by Thinkmap (www.visualthesaurus.com). When you look up a word, the Visual Thesaurus provides a branching graphic that shows the word’s relationships with other words (synonyms, antonyms, super/sub-categories, etc.) and different senses. Looking up the word cabinet, for example, results in four definitions: a head of state’s advisors, a cupboard, an electronic console, and a storage locker. And two clicks can take you to Kashag, the advisory board of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

The Visual Thesaurus is quickly becoming my preferred, fast reference tool for looking up words. It’s no OED, of course, but the OED is too clunky to use when you just want to check a usage or spelling. The Visual Thesaurus, with entries for 145,000 English words, is in the class of collegiate dictionaries—a “desktop” reference tool.
Sound files provide pronunciations (you can configure the software for British or American pronunciation). The online version also provides access to French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Dutch words. The software prompts you with choices if it thinks you’ve made a spelling error and you Google searches for the word or for images related to that word are only one click away.

While it’s easy and fast to look up words, it’s not easy to reference the results. The Visual Thesaurus needs an easy way to cut and paste definitions and to provide IPA character-based pronunciations in addition to the sound files. Also, it would be great if one could produce an image (e.g., jpg format) of the word tree for reproduction elsewhere.

Another quirk is that the parts of speech displayed do not include prepositions or conjunctions. Prepositions are listed as either adjectives or adverbs and conjunctions aren’t included at all. These aren’t major failings. Prepositions are included, just not listed as such, and no one will seriously be using the reference to look up conjunctions.

The downside to all this is that it is not free. An individual subscription is $19.95 per year. For those who need to use it on systems without an internet connection, a CD-ROM or download version is available for $39.95 + shipping. Institutional and volume pricing is available.