Blogging Beowulf: Fit XI, Lines 710-790

25 February 2009

There’s a lot of action in this one. Grendel comes into the mead-hall and devours one of Beowulf’s men. He then reaches for Beowulf, who sits up in his bed and grabs the monster by the arm. The two struggle, almost destroying the hall in the process. Grendel, realizing he is overmatched, tries to escape, but Beowulf grips him tighter. The fit ends in mid-fight.

The fit opens with Grendel approaching Heorot (lines 710-13):

Ðā cōm of mōre      under misthleoþum
Grendel gongan;      Godes yrre bær;
mynte se mānscaða      manna cynnes
sumne besyrwan      in sele þām hean.

(Then from the moor      under cover of mists
Grendel came stalking;      he bore God’s anger;
the guilty ravager intended      one of mankind
to ensnare      in that high hall.)

Then a bit later on we get one of the most famous passages from English literature (lines 721b-727):

                              Duru sōna onarn,
fyrbendum fæst,      syþðan hē hire folmum (æt)hran;
onbræ¯d þā bealohy¯dig,      ðā (hē ġe)bolgen wæs,
reċedes mūþan.      Raþe æfter þon
on fāgne flōr      fēond treddode,
ēode yrremōd;      him of ēagum stōd,
liġġe ġelīcost      lēoht unfæġer.

(                              The door gave way at once,
fast in its fired bands, as soon as his hands touched it;
intending harm, he swung open,      he was enraged,
the mouth of the building.      After that, quickly
across the decorated floor      the fiend trod,
he went angrily;      from his eyes shone,
most like flame,      an unfair light.)

Note: there are some issues with my translation here, besides the stilted syntax which I use to try and preserve the word order so you can more easily recognize the meaning of individual words. In line 726, I translate the adjective yrremōd, anger, as an adverb; I guess I could have said with anger, but yrremōd isn’t in the dative case, so there would still be a problem. In the same line I translate stōd, stood, as shone; I could have said stood forth. In 727, I retained the unfair for unfæġer, even though it doesn’t mean the same in modern English as it did back then, but you should get the meaning from the context.

For a more poetic, but less accurate, translation there is Seamus Heaney’s:

The iron-braced door
turned on its hinge when his hands touched it.
Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open
the mouth of the building, maddening for blood,
pacing the length of the patterned floor
with his loathsome tread, while a baleful light
flame more than light, flared from his eyes.

It’s also worth noting that the Beowulf poet marks that the door bursts open when Grendel touches it with his hands. There’s a lot going on with hands, and body parts in general here, but especially hands.

The description of Grendel devouring Beowulf’s man is particularly gory (lines 740-745a):

ac hē ġefēng hraðe      forman siðe
slæ¯pendne rinċ,      slāt unwearnum,
bāt bānlocan,      blōd ēdrum dranc,
synsnæ¯dum swealh;      sōna hæfde
unlyfiġendes      eal ġefeormod,
fēt ond folma.

(But he quickly seized      at the first pass
a sleeping warrior,      he slit him open eagerly,
bit his joints,      drank his blood in streams,
swallowed huge morsels;      he had at once
of the unliving man      all devoured,
feet and hands.)

When it comes to murder and mayhem, it doesn’t get better than this, plus more with the hands. And there is that great word for joints, bānlocan, literally bone-locks.

Another problematic word in this fit is in line 769, ealuscerwen. From the perspective of the Danes hearing the commotion from outside the hall, the fight is described with this word. Literally, it means a dispensing of ale, but is routinely translated as terror. Some commentators translate it as bitter drink, instead of ale. Others think it’s just an ironic comparison of the fight to a wild party in the mead-hall, particularly since the fits preceding the fight detailed the ale-drinking at the feast. I tend to agree with this last.

There’s much more description of the fight, but I’ll save that for the next fit, which continues the battle.

Blogging Beowulf: Fit X, Lines 662-709

24 February 2009

This is a transitional and short fit and not much happens in terms of plot. Hrothgar and his men depart the hall and Beowulf and his men settle down to sleep. But before he lays down, Beowulf announces that he will forgo the use of weapons in the upcoming fight; he will battle with his bare hands, just like Grendel. Finally, we see Grendel creeping up to the hall and all the warriors asleep—save one, presumably our hero.

There are two items of note in this fit. The first is Hrothgar’s departure, in which we are told, in lines 664-665b, “wolde wīġfruma Wealhþēo sēċan, cwēn to ġebeddan” (the war-chief would seek out Wealhtheow, his queen as bedfellow.) Is this a protective move, or is he hiding in the queen’s bedchamber? The poem is somewhat ambivalent in its treatment of Hrothgar. He is continually described as a brave and good king, yet there are incidents, like this one, where he is cast in a somewhat less than honorable light. He has just turned over guardianship of Heorot to another for the first time in his reign and he departs to the women’s sleeping quarters. Charitably, we can say that he is a once-good king who is now old and no longer up to the task.

(Occasionally one runs across Old English words that are simply humorous when read by a modern speaker. We have one such in the line quoted above, wīġ, meaning war. Another is hēap, which is the root of our modern word for a pile of things, but in the context of the poem means a company or host of warriors. In one place (line 477), we get the wonderful wighēap, meaning a war band, but which I can’t help but picture as a large mass of hair.)

The second item is the description of Grendel’s approach, lines 702b-703a: “Cōm on wanre niht scrīðan sceadugenġa.” (In the dark night came gliding the walker in the shadows.) Scrīðan sceadugenġa is just a wonderfully alliterative phrase.

Blogging Beowulf: Fit IX, Lines 559-661

23 February 2009

Beowulf’s response to Unferth’s challenge continues in this fit. He describes his victory over the sea-monsters and how he eventually washed up on the Finnish shore. He then goes on to question Unferth’s bravery and we find out that Unferth has killed his brothers (the reasons and details are not given). He reiterates his intention to fight Grendel and we are told that Hrothgar is pleased with Beowulf’s response. At this point, Hrothgar’s queen, Wealhtheow enters the hall and ceremonially presents a cup of drink to each of warriors in turn, starting with Hrothgar and ending with Beowulf. She tells Beowulf that she is happy he has come and he again pledges to defeat Grendel. There is more drinking and celebration, until Beowulf announces that he must rest because of the long night ahead of him. The Danes depart the hall, leaving it to Beowulf and the Geats, but before this happens Hrothgar formally entrusts Beowulf with the guardianship of the hall—something he hasn’t done with any warrior since he became king.

There’s a lot going on this section of the poem. Beowulf’s description of the fight on the sea floor is pretty neat. Lines 560b-561 read: “iċ him þēnode dēoran sweorde, swā hit ġedēfe wæs.” (I served them with my dear sword, as it was fitting.” The verb þennan is an interesting choice. It’s often translated here as to serve (it can mean to prostrate oneself before a lord), but it is the root of our modern verb to thin. So one could say, “I thinned them out with my dear sword,” although this sense of the verb, to reduce in number, doesn’t appear to have been used in Old English, not appearing until the 15th century. Instead, the Old English sense was to stretch out, to reduce in depth. So perhaps a modern, idiomatic translation would be, “I stretched them out...” or “I laid them out with my dear sword.”

Another great line from the battle description is in lines 572a-573: “wyrd oft nereð unfæġne eorl, þonne his ellen dēah!” (Fate often saves the unfated warrior, when his courage avails.) It’s presented as a gnomic statement or a maxim, and it nicely encapsulates the conflict in the poem between determinism and free will. From the poet’s use of words like wyrd (the root of our modern weird), he clearly presents the view that the events of the poem are fated, but it seems that this fate is not entirely independent of human action.

Another conundrum is the presentation of Unferth. Beowulf accuses him of cowardice, but this doesn’t seem plausible. Unferth is sitting at the king’s feet and a counselor in such a position could not possibly have been a coward in a Germanic culture. Some of suggested he was a court jester of sorts, but again this doesn’t square with what he know of him, that he is a warrior of some repute. More likely Beowulf is simply engaging in some Anglo-Saxon trash talk.

In lines 587-589a, Beowulf tells us that Unferth has killed his brothers. He is a bana, a murderer, a slayer and will suffer damnation in hell for it. This, besides being a bit of anachronistic Christian thinking, complicates the “trash talking” explanation. This isn’t just trash talk, it’s a serious accusation. The lines, as they appear in the manuscript are:

þēah ðū þīnum brōðrum tō
banan wurde, hēafodmægum; þæs þū in

[end of f.143r, beginning of f.143v.]

[helle] scealt werhðo drēogan

(Because you became slayer to your brothers, your near-relatives, you shall suffer condemnation in hell.)

First note that the poem isn’t written out in the familiar half-lines separated by a caesura, that’s a modern editorial innovation. Like all Anglo-Saxon poetry, Beowulf is written out on the page as if it were prose. Second, the word hel does not appear in the manuscript. As you can see from the upper right of the picture of folio 143v, the page is damaged and the word is missing (only the final e remains, and that is covered by the frame that preserves the page). Helle is inserted because both the Thorkelin A and B transcriptions have this word. Evidently, the damage to the manuscript was subsequent to those transcripts being prepared. Some have suggested that Thorkelin and his scribe made an error and it should be healle, instead. So it would read “in this hall,” as opposed to “in hell.” There are other places in the manuscript where Thorkelin and his scribe have made the same transcription error. This would lessen the impact of Beowulf’s accusation from being a mortal sin to an embarrassing incident from Unferth’s past. From an etymological perspective, this is a good example of the need to check original documents to see if the word actually appears. In the case of hel, we have many other citations of use from Anglo-Saxon literature, but one would be on shaky grounds to cite this as an example. (The OED3, for instance, does not include this line from Beowulf in its citations for hell.)

The passage about Wealhtheow and the cup ceremony is interesting, but mainly from an anthropological and cultural perspective—the role of women in a Germanic court. There is also a minor theme in the poem about kingly succession, and Wealtheow plays a role in this, and this passage gives some illumination into her role in Hrothgar’s court.

Coming next, Grendel’s approach…

Blogging Beowulf: Fit VIII, Lines 499-558

21 February 2009

In the midst of the feast at Heorot, Unferth, one of Hrothgar’s thanes and evidently a particularly favored one as he is seated at Hrothgar’s feet, challenges Beowulf’s abilities. He claims that Beowulf once engaged in a swimming contest (or perhaps it was rowing—the text isn’t all that clear) with a man named Breca. According to Unferth, the swimming contest lasted seven days and Breca was the victor, indicating that Beowulf is not that strong and will be unable to defeat Grendel. Beowulf responds that Unferth is drunk and doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The two men swam together for five days, until the ocean floods separated them. The two men swam in armor and holding their swords in their hands (no mean feat, that) in order to protect themselves from “whales.” In Beowulf’s case, this proved fortuitous, as he was dragged under the waves by a sea beast, but his armor protected him against the creature’s bite and once on the ocean floor our hero defeated the creature with his sword.

Unferth’s challenge is often pointed to as an example of flyting, a ritual exchange of insult common in medieval Nordic literature. The Norse poem the Lokasenna, or The Flyting of Loki, is a more fitting example though. This incident in Beowulf isn’t much as far as flyting goes. And flyting is not all that characteristic of Anglo-Saxon literature—it’s more of a Norse tradition, although it does appear in late-medieval Scottish literature too. The big question is whether Unferth is challenging Beowulf on behalf of Hrothgar, something that Hrothgar, as host, cannot do directly, or whether Unferth is simply drunk as Beowulf accuses him of being. More on Unferth in the next fit as we hear more of Beowulf’s response and we learn more about the man.

The confusion over swimming v. rowing is the use of the verb rowan to describe the contest at some points. This may simply be rhetorical flourish or it could be that the rowan also carried a sense of swimming—it’s often difficult to ferret out all the connotations of words in a dead language.

There’s not a lot of notable language in this fit, although Beowulf’s description of the sea conditions during the swim is pretty neat (lines 545b-548):

                        oþ þæt unc flōd tōdrāf,
wado weallende,      wedera ċealdost,
nīpende niht,      ond norþan wind
heaðogrim ondhwearf;      hrēo wæron yþa.

                        until the flood drove us apart,
water welling,      the coldest of weathers,
descending night,      and the northern wind
turned battle-grim;      the waves were rough.

Current Eponyms

21 February 2009

Mark Peters’s latest column over at Good magazine is all about eponyms you’ll hear in the news today.