Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell Page 14

  In the manuscript B(ii) the words ‘his lady aged’ were replaced by ‘many a Geatish maiden’, and this is present in the typescript C as typed. I have found no comment on this among my father’s papers, but in a text of the conclusion of Beowulf that seems to have been intended for recitation occur the words Géatisc méowle. It may also be mentioned that an illustrative text associated with one of the versions of his 1938 lecture on ‘Anglo-Saxon verse’ (see the Appendix to The Fall of Arthur) is an alliterative translation of the last lines of Beowulf, in which occurs this passage:

  Woeful-hearted

  men mourned sadly their master slain

  while grieving song Gothland-maiden

  with braided hair for Beowulf made,

  sang sorrowladen, saying oft anew

  that days of evil she dreaded sorely

  dire deeds of war, deaths and slaughter,

  shameful serfdom. Smoke rose and passed.

  Against the third line my father wrote subsequently ‘while her grievous dirge the grey lady’, perhaps suggesting that he regretted the loss of this last appearance of Hygd, if indeed it was she.

  *

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE COMMENTARY

  At Oxford University, in the years when my father was the Professor of Anglo-Saxon, candidates for the degree of bachelor of arts in the English faculty were obliged to follow a course, or courses, of varying scope, in the oldest English literature (‘Anglo-Saxon’). Few indeed were those (‘the philologists’) who elected to take the course in which the emphasis was expressly and extensively ‘mediaeval’; the very great majority of undergraduates took what was known as the ‘general course’ in English literature. In this, one of the nine papers that constituted the final examination was concerned with Old English; and for this there was a requirement to read a substantial part of Beowulf in the original language, and translation of passages from it was compulsory in the examination.

  The portion prescribed was from the beginning to line 1650, that being just over half the poem, a halting place that my father thought mistaken. The lectures from which the commentary in this book is largely derived were in their written form headed ‘Lectures for the general school, Text, 1–1650’. I hope that I have found, by putting a selection of them into company with his translation of Beowulf, a suitable setting in which to bring them to light.

  It must be said that the preparatory writings, and often subsequent rewritings, for these lectures, taken as a whole, offer many intrinsic difficulties and complexities hard to disentangle, and I doubt that any final ordering would be possible. But most notable is the fact that the earlier parts of the commentary have a distinct character. They were written fairly carefully and legibly with sufficient uniformity to suggest that it was all done more or less at the same time: there are many later additions and alterations, but relatively very little correction or hesitation in the course of the original writing. This work does not end sharply, but after some thousand lines of the Old English text it becomes by degrees rougher and much less uniform: hasty notes in pencil rather than ink, clipped, abbreviated and allusive in manner, often very hard to read, and ultimately petering out. (There is thus a long gap (p. 302) in the commentary as it appears in this book, and the notes that follow it are derived from another set of lectures, addressed to the ‘philologists’, clearly written and lengthy discussions of major problems in the interpretation of the text of Beowulf: these lectures I have also used occasionally elsewhere in the commentary.)

  The conclusion seems to me to be unavoidable that the well-written earlier parts of his commentary was an abandoned undertaking of my father’s based on earlier (and no doubt rougher) material, although the evidence for this is limited to a few pages where erased pencilled text can be seen beneath the well-written text in ink. There is no indication of his purpose, but it seems to me very unlikely that he had in mind some possible publication: I think it much more probable that his intention was simply to clarify his material, grown complex and confused from repetition and alteration of these lectures over the years.

  I append here some indications of the ways in which I have treated these lectures for their place in this book. In the first place I must make it clear that my selection from the lectures was dictated not only by considerations of suitability for this purpose, but also by the need to keep within limits of length.

  Additions. My notes of all kinds, appearing chiefly in footnotes, are set within square brackets; but citations of the translation, which are of course additions to the lectures, are not as a rule distinguished. As I have noted in the preface, I have throughout given the line-references in two forms, those of the translation and those of the Old English; this has of course entailed a great many doubled references, and I have attempted to avoid confusion by printing those to the poem itself in smaller type and with an asterisk. It should be noted that, unless indicated otherwise, in the heading to each separate note in the commentary the translated word or phrase is almost always that found in the translation, irrespective of any rendering that may be advocated in the note. (It must be borne in mind that when writing the lectures my father did not consult his translation in any consistent fashion.) The Old English citation in the heading is the text found in Klaeber’s edition, unless shown otherwise.

  The only extraneous addition of mine of substance is the introduction of extracts from my father’s tale of King Sheave in the notes on line 3, Scyld Scefing, and 21, the ship-burial.

  Omissions and Alterations. In his edition Finn and Hengest (1982) of my father’s lectures on the episode of ‘Finnsburg’ in Beowulf Professor Alan Bliss wrote: ‘I have not attempted to alter the colloquial style appropriate to lectures, though occasionally it reads oddly in print. If Tolkien himself had revised his work for publication, no doubt he would have made many stylistic changes.’ In this case I think that the tone of a speaking voice – the direct, spontaneous, and accessible style – is an essential character of these written lectures, and the texts are printed precisely as he wrote them.

  In general I have applied no unvarying principles, but have treated each note, long or short, as I thought best for the purpose. I have quite often thought it necessary or desirable to make omissions in the case of my father’s introduction of difficult etymological detail, and of syntactic, grammatical, and metrical detail that does not affect the translation, or have given brief summaries. Here and there, where there has been an omission, sentences have been lightly remodelled, but I have taken pains to ensure that I have not modified the sense.

  In the course of these lectures my father sometimes repeated, more or less, views that he had already expressed in another context. In such cases I have retained the repetition, for to remove it might spoil the later argument. And I have not ‘improved’ the text where there are infelicities in the expression such as arise in rapidly written compositions (for example, the use of the word ‘mysterious’ three times in quick succession), for that is a slippery slope.

  In the difficult matter of the use of accents or markings of length in the printing of Old English, my father’s writing varied so constantly that I have decided to follow his usage in his Old English text of Sellic Spell, acute accent rather than macron, e.g. ó not ō, throughout.

  As regards the spelling of Old English names, both in the translation and in the body of the commentary, he used th beside ð or þ (which he used indiscriminately), so Hrothgar, Hroðgar. I see no advantage in keeping these variations, and thus I print Hrothgar, Ecgtheow, Sigeferth, etc., without accents; but I give in all cases (rather than ae and Ae) æ and Æ: Hæðcyn, Æschere.

  COMMENTARY ACCOMPANYING THE TRANSLATION OF BEOWULF

  1 Lo! [This translates Hwæt, the first word of the poem.]

  A genuine anacrusis – or a note ‘striking up’ at the beginning of a poem. Deriving from minstrel tradition: in origin a call for attention. It is ‘outside the metre’. It occurs at the beginning of other poems; but it is not confined to the beginnings of poems no
r to verse.

  3 ; *4 Scyld Scefing

  Scyld is the eponymous ancestor of the Scyldingas, the Danish royal house to which Hrothgar King of the Danes in this poem belongs. His name is simply ‘Shield’: and he is a ‘fiction’, that is a name deduced from the ‘heraldic’ family name Scyldingas after they became famous. This process was aided by the fact that the Old English (and Germanic) ending -ing, which could mean ‘connected with, associated with, provided with’, etc., was also the usual patronymic ending. The invention of the eponymous ‘Shield’ was probably Danish, that is actually the work of Danish þylas and scopas3 in the lifetime of the kings of whom we hear in Beowulf, the certainly historical Healfdene and Hrothgar.

  As for Scefing, it can thus, as we see, mean ‘provided with a sheaf’, ‘connected in some way with a sheaf of corn’, or son of a figure called Sheaf. In favour of the latter is the fact that there are English traditions of a mythical (not the same as eponymous and fictitious) ancestor called Scéaf or Scéafa, belonging to ancient culture-myths of the North; and of his special association with Danes. In favour of the former is the fact that Scyld comes out of the unknown, a babe, and the name of his father, if he had any, could not be known by him or the Danes who received him. But such poetic matters are not strictly logical. Only in Beowulf are the two divergent traditions about the Danes blended in this way, the heraldic and the mythical. I think the poet meant (Shield) Sheafing as a patronymic. He was blending the vague and fictitious warlike glory of the eponymous ancestor of the conquering house with the more mysterious, far older and more poetical myth of the mysterious arrival of the babe, the corn-god or the culture-hero his descendant, at the beginning of a people’s history, and adding to it a mysterious Arthurian departure, back into the unknown, enriched by traditions of ship-burials in the not very remote heathen past – to make a magnificent and suggestive exordium, and background to his tale.

  [In 1964 my father wrote in a letter (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, no. 257) of ‘an abortive book on time-travel [The Lost Road] . . . It started with a father-son affinity between Edwin and Elwin of the present, and was supposed to go back into legendary time by way of Eädwine and Ælfwine of circa A.D. 918, and Audoin and Alboin of Lombardic legend, and so to the traditions of the North Sea concerning the coming of corn and culture heroes, ancestors of kingly lines, in boats (and their departure in funeral ships).’ I published what he wrote of Sheaf (‘King Sheave’) in The Lost Road and Other Writings, 1987 (The History of Middle-earth vol.V, pp. 85 ff.), to which the reader is referred. I gave there the text of the lecture reprinted above, and it seems to me appropriate to cite again here portions of the tale of King Sheave in prose version and in alliterative verse that he wrote at that time. The former (ibid. p. 85) begins thus:

  To the shore the ship came and strode upon the sand, grinding upon the broken shingle. In the twilight as the sun sank men came down to it, and looked within. A boy lay there, asleep. He was fair of face and limb, dark-haired, white-skinned, but clad in gold. The inner parts of the boat were gold-adorned, a vessel of gold filled with clear water at his side, at his right was a harp, beneath his head was a sheaf of corn, the stalks and ears of which gleamed like gold in the dusk. Men knew not what it was. In wonder they drew the boat high upon the beach, and lifted the boy and bore him up, and laid him sleeping in a wooden house in their burh.

  From the poem, which runs to 153 lines (ibid. pp. 87–91), I cite the passage corresponding to that in the prose version just given:

  The ship came shining to the shore driven

  and strode upon the sand, till its stem rested

  on sand and shingle. The sun went down.

  The clouds overcame the cold heavens.

  In fear and wonder to the fallow water

  sadhearted men swiftly hastened

  to the broken beaches the boat seeking,

  gleaming-timbered in the grey twilight.

  They looked within, and there laid sleeping

  a boy they saw breathing softly:

  his face was fair, his form lovely,

  his limbs were white, his locks raven

  golden-braided. Gilt and carven

  with wondrous work was the wood about him.

  In golden vessel gleaming water

  stood beside him; strung with silver

  a harp of gold neath his hand rested;

  his sleeping head was soft pillowed

  on a sheaf of corn shimmering palely

  as the fallow gold doth from far countries

  west of Angol. Wonder filled them.

  The boat they hauled and on the beach moored it

  high above the breakers; then with hands lifted

  from the bosom its burden. The boy slumbered.

  On his bed they bore him to their bleak dwellings

  darkwalled and drear in a dim region

  between waste and sea.

  This work on ‘Sheaf’ or ‘King Sheave’ probably dates from 1937; and it would reappear some eight years later in The Notion Club Papers (Sauron Defeated, 1992 (The History of Middle-earth vol.IX), pp. 269–76).]

  4 the seats where they drank their mead; *5 meodosetla

  The Old English word meodosetl is a compendious expression for ‘benches in the hall where knights sat feasting’. The symbolism and emotional connotations of mead and ale are very different in Old English verse, especially what survives of heroic and courtly verse, from the modern associations. ‘Scyld denied the mead-benches to men’, i.e. he destroyed the kings of lesser tribes and their halls. [See the note to 627, p. 278.]

  7–8 over the sea where the whale rides; *10 ofer hronráde

  hronráde is a ‘kenning’ for the ‘sea’. What is a ‘kenning’? (See my introduction to the Clark Hall translation revised by Wrenn [1940]). A kenning is an Icelandic word meaning (in this particular technical use) ‘description’. From Old Icelandic criticism of Norse alliterative verse it has been borrowed and used by us as a technical term for those pictorial descriptive compounds or brief expressions which can be used in place of the normal plain word. Thus to say ‘he sailed over the gannet’s bath’ (O.E. ganotes bæþ) is to use a kenning for the sea. You could, of course, strike out a kenning for yourself, and all must at some time have been struck out by some poet; but the tradition of Old English verse-language contained a number of well-established kennings for such things as the sea, battle, warriors, and so on. They were part of its ‘poetic diction’ just as ‘wave’ for ‘water’ (based on poetic Latin use of unda) is part of 18th century ‘diction’.

  Several of the sea-kennings refer to the sea as the place where seabirds or animals dive or travel. Thus ganotes bæþ (which in full means ‘the place where the gannet dives, like a man bathing’); or hwælweg (‘the place where whales go on their journeys’ as horses or men or waggons go over the plains of the land); or the ‘seal paths’ (seolhpaþu) or ‘seal’s baths’ (seolhbaþu).

  hronrád is evidently related to these expressions. Nonetheless it is quite incorrect to translate it (as it is all too frequently translated) ‘whale road’. It is incorrect stylistically since compounds of this sort sound in themselves clumsy or bizarre in modern English, even when their components are correctly selected. In this particular instance the unfortunate sound-association with ‘railroad’ increases the ineptitude.

  It is incorrect in fact. rád is the ancestor of our modern word ‘road’, but it does not mean ‘road’. Etymology is not a safe guide to sense. rád is the noun of action to rídan ‘ride’ and means riding – i.e. ‘riding on horseback; moving as a horse does (or a chariot), or as a ship does at anchor’; and hence ‘a journey on horseback’ (or more seldom by ship), ‘a course (however vagrant)’. It does not mean the actual ‘track’ – still less the hard paved permanent and more or less straight tracks that we associate with the ‘road’.

  Also hron (hran) is a word peculiar to Old English. It means some kind of a ‘whale’, that is of that family of fish-like mammals. What p
recisely is not known: but it was something of the porpoise or dolphin kind, probably; at any rate less than a real hwæl. There is a statement in Old English that a hron was about seven times the size of a seal, and a hwæl about seven times the size of a hron.

  The word as ‘kenning’ therefore means dolphin’s riding, i.e. in full, the watery fields where you can see dolphins and lesser members of the whale-tribe playing, or seeming to gallop like a line of riders on the plains. That is the picture and comparison the kenning was meant to evoke. It is not evoked by ‘whale road’ – which suggests a sort of semi-submarine steam-engine running along submerged metal rails over the Atlantic.

  13 being without a prince; *15 aldorléase

  I think that this reference to an ‘interregnum’ before the founding of the Scylding house is clearly connected with the downfall of Heremod referred to later, 731 ff. (*898 ff.), 1435 ff. (*1709 ff.). Heremod occurs in the genealogies of English kings that also use the Scyld and/or Sceaf traditions, above Sceaf and/or Scyld.

  13–14 the Lord of Life; *16 Líffréa

  The use of Líffré(g)a as a kenning for God is probably a piece of Christian poetic diction. Beowulf was not composed in the form we now have (however ancient may be some of the traditions it enshrines) until much Christian verse had already been written: i.e. after Cædmon’s time.4

  14; *18 Beow

  [Both here and again in line 41 (*53) the O.E. manuscript has Beowulf, not Beow. But this Beowulf, son of Scyld, is not the hero of the poem. In other lectures my father studied at great length and with great subtlety the fearsomely tangled history of this ancient genealogy, in far too great detail for the purpose of this book; but in more concise lectures concerned primarily with the actual text of Beowulf he discussed the question of ‘the two Beowulfs’ in the form that follows here.]