TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE 80
Ryan: My guest today is Peter Ramey, who's an old friend. Pete and I go way back. I think we met on our very first day of freshman orientation at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.
Pete is now a full professor of English at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and the translator and editor of The Word-Hoard Beowulf, a new translation with commentary of the old English poem, Beowulf. Even though we don't usually, on the Beatrice Institute podcast, base the interview around a new book, it's really appropriate, especially in this Genealogies of Modernity thread because Beowulf is more than just a book; it opens onto an entire universe and really a very fascinating and alien culture that spans, really, close to a thousand years of European history and has a fascinating poetic legacy and historical legacy.
Pete is here to talk with us about that entire world and his really innovative translation that we'll get into a little bit. So, Pete, welcome.
Peter: Oh, so glad to be here. Great to talk with you, Ryan.
Ryan: I would say there are two main characteristics that set your translation apart from other existing translations, and we'll get to both of those. The first is that it takes seriously the poem's Christianity as integral to Beowulf and not just a tacked on or secondary overlay that came about in the writing process. So your picture is of an author who's taking oral material and integrating it with Christian culture.
So there's that aspect and then there's the translation aspect where you actually give us a large quantity of Old English vocabulary and integrate that into the poem. And you're teaching us along the way how to understand those words.
If you were to translate a gospel, a part of the New Testament from the Greek using the same method, what words would you retain from the Greek? Just to give people a sense of a text they might already know pretty well.
Peter: Yeah, I mean, evangelium, the Good News, the Gospel would be an example of a word that – I mean, the phrase “Good News” doesn't mean anything unless it's in the context of the New Testament. So that's an example of a term that's been acculturated. So we get it now, but at first you wouldn't get the sense of – so that'd be maybe an example of one thing.
But all the critical concepts. The Trinity. In fact, in old English, there's a cool word, þrīnes for the Trinity, before it was replaced by trinitas in Latin. They had to create words because there was no vocabulary for this. So that's maybe the example that comes to mind with the New Testament.
But language and values and concepts come packaged together, don't they? And that's a great question.
Ryan: And yeah. That's interesting. So partly you're just carrying over the Old English vocabulary, but partly you're also creating words, because, you discussed this in your introduction that in some ways you're, for example, adding the “s” to make nouns plural in the modern English manner, where that wouldn't be the case in the original.
Could you then give us some examples of key words that you carry over here that you think are important for us to understand?
Peter: Yeah. Terms for God maybe are where I would start. The terms for God are expansive and linked to the terms for “kingship” as well. God is a king, and the terms for “kingship” are expansive and they overlap.
But an example of one that doesn't overlap, a term for God that isn't used for kings is Metod. It's Metod, or sometimes it's spelled Meotod, depending on which dialect of Old English. And it's related to the word “metes out,” like you mete out a punishment today; that's related to it. And the Metod is the Ordainer, is the one who metes out fate, who allots fate. And it probably was a term that preexisted Christianity, but was adopted by the poet and other poets as “God,” because God is the one who's going to mete out fate, who's going to ordain all things.
And it's an important term in Beowulf. It's used all throughout Beowulf. The Beowulf poet's going to underscore that God, not fate, is in control of all things. Even allowing the depredations of Grendel, God is in control – and that's fundamental.
So the term is really important because we don't have – Most translators use “Providence” to translate that term, but “Providence” doesn't quite capture it, does it?
Ryan: It's a deist term, right? It's like 18th century, right?
Peter: Yeah. Or yeah, some of the early pilgrims, right? Providence, Rhode Island.
But it doesn't fit the mentality of the text. So that's one example of the terms for deity and there's just a plethora of these terms.
Ryan: I think it'll be helpful just to do the kind of thing that you and I do when we're first teaching Beowulf in a survey class, just to give our listeners who might not be familiar with it some sense of the interface between oral culture and the written culture in which Beowulf comes down to us. And in fact, I meant to mention in the introduction that Pete is the co-author with John Miles Foley of this really excellent article, “Oral Theory and Medieval Literature” that I've learned a great deal from and that I recommend.
What's the oral history of Beowulf? And then, how does it come into writing?
Peter: It's a vex question and it's continually being revised. But Beowulf and the narrative, heroic verse, that's linked to Beowulf comes out of an oral tradition. And it's an oral tradition that's inherited from the migrations from the mainland. So, the Anglo-Saxons, Jutes, the Frisians who came over, they had stories and these stories were rooted in Migration Age heroes, so heroes of the Migration Age. So these are figures like Helock, Beowulf is set in this; this is the time period of the poem. And it was kind of like the Wild West for Anglo-Saxons. This is the time when things were kind of chaotic, and Germanic peoples were on the move. And this was the time of heroes. It was a violent time of upheaval, destruction, and yet this is also the glory days. So they carried with them an oral tradition of these stories. And these stories are going to figure into everything that happens, and it's a source of identity.
And what's interesting is, even after Christianity comes to Anglo-Saxon England in around 597, it doesn't obliterate this heroic identity. It doesn't obliterate the heroic stories. Kings are still going to have these Migration Age heroes and their lineages. Even Odin makes an appearance in some of the different dynastic lineages, the royal genealogies. So it's important to identity and these stories continue to be retold. And the Anglo-Saxon names too, Old English names continue to be heroic and they're not replaced by saints names or biblical names. So this is a source of identity, and this oral tradition would've continued.
Ryan: So I think one of the most famous works of early English poetry is “Cædmon's Hymn.” And we get this from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Cædmon is a cowherd living on the fringes of a monastic community. And an angel appears to him and tells him he needs to join in the singing of songs at the feast.
Give us a sense of what that means. What is that setting? And this is eighth century, right?
Peter: No, this would be probably late 600s, so earlier than that.
Ryan: Late 600, seventh century. Okay. What is it that the angel wants Cædmon to join into?
Peter: Yeah. So, Cædmon, like so many of us, he gets stage fright every time the harp is passed to him. And so the angel comes after he's run off. So famous, famous story, but Cædmon, has stage fright, runs home to his little huddle and he's cowering there in fear and an angel comes and says, “Sing for me.” And Cædmon says, “What shall I sing?” And the angel says, “Sing the creation of all things.” And then his lips are open and he can recite, but he only sings sacred verse. So we can presume, there were some “body songs,” as things are passed around as the mead was being quaffed. But Cædmon’s simply going to sing of holy things. And all of his verse, Bede tells us, was versions of Scripture. He would take and adapt Scripture. And so “Cædmon’s Hymn,” just the little nine lines we have are a poetic paraphrase of Genesis 1, where God creates all things.
Ryan: And can you recite that for us?
Peter: Nū sculon heriġean heofonrīċes weard,
Meotodes meahte ond his mōdġeþanc,
weorc wuldorfæder
The rest of it starts to slip away.
Ryan: Yeah, sure.
But there's that key word that you brought up, that name for God, Meotodes meahte.
Peter: Yeah. The “might of the Ordainer,” right?
Ryan: And so he's taking this word and this deity who already exists in the Germanic culture and Christianizing it in a way, right?
Peter: Yeah, and I wouldn't say it was a deity. I would say it was a most – well, we don't really know. Everything written is post-Christian. Because Christian's brat writing, the runic alphabet was used just for some inscriptions, for really short statements. And so we don't know what Meotod meant, but we can tell from, for example, the use in Norse, too, where the cognate is formed, that it probably meant something like “your fated death” or… metodsceaft is your death, when you're ordained to die. So it probably meant something like that, maybe a force or maybe a personalized force that that was your fate. But God is going to replace that. God, not fate, decides when you die.
But it becomes, to me – it means much more than that in Old English verse; it doesn't just mean “your fated death.” It also just means the one who isn't in control governing all things. So in “Cædmon’s Hymn,” it's the might of the Meotod, the power, the ordaining power of God. He's creating all things and it's deliberate. It's not random. It's not cruel fate. It's beautiful and ordered. And so Cædmon is replacing this earlier conception with this beautiful conception of God's majestic and ordered creation, like an ornament, like an artifact: beautiful, meaningful, lovely.
Ryan: And so, at this feast that Cædmon would've joined, is it possible that they would be singing of Beowulf, historically, or some of the other material that we find in Beowulf? Some of that heroic cycle material?
Peter: Yeah, so we don't know if Beowulf – Beowulf was probably a folklore hero, maybe a really minor hero known for his prodigious strength, that the Beowulf poet took perhaps as part of his theological agenda, and recast with a greater role as a monster fighter and set him within the heroic narratives. Nobody else mentions Beowulf. Beowulf is not known in the surviving sources where we have many other heroes that are mentioned other places.
Ryan: And many heroes in the poem Beowulf that are mentioned other places, right. But no Beowulf. Yeah.
Peter: Yeah, tons of them are. But no Beowulf. So that's a question mark right there.
But yeah, I think your question, Ryan, is that, would they be singing the songs, the stories, the inset narratives featured in Beowulf? Yeah, that's right. They would've known these and recited these, most likely.
I will say everything in Beowulf and everything in Old English studies is disputed. And there's a school that wants to say that there was no oral tradition. These legends weren't known to people, that they were imported late. That it's a Viking Age thing. We're talking 800s, 900s. And that basically Beowulf is a fantasy, it's fan fiction. This is a very flimsy argument, but there's a lot of people that really want this to be true. And it fits with different ideological agendas.
But if there's more of a consensus that's forming today, it's that Beowulf is early and that it's drawing on these traditions that were widely known. And they're widely known because we see them other places: other poems, in genealogies on the continent. So it seems quite clear that, however complicated this process actually was, that Beowulf and the stories in Beowulf are early and they're oral traditional.
Ryan: So, we have a couple of scenes of poetry at the feast and one of those… I'm wondering if you could read from your translation, line 868, on page 68. Beginning with, “At times the king’s thane.” Can you read that section and then explain what we should be understanding is going on here?
Peter: Sure.
At times the king's thane,
a gilp-hläden man, mindful of Yids,
one who remembered a great many of the old stories,
a vast number, found other words, bound truly together.
The man began again to recite Beowulf’s sith with skill
to fluently perform a ready tale, varying his words.
I'll maybe pause there. It goes on and says that particular tales, he tells this the story of Sigemund, for example.
And so what's this a picture of? These are men that are riding horseback. Beowulf has just had a great victory and they're exalting. And the picture here, which is going to be somewhat mannered. This is a poetic representation. This isn't an ethnographic account by any means, right? Just like heroes are larger than life, this is going to be maybe an idealized picture of performance. But I think, at its root, this is accurate.
And that is, somebody that knows stories, that's observed stories, just like you know people that tell jokes really good and that everywhere they go, they absorb new jokes and they're just funny at telling jokes and you just want be around them. And somehow you could tell the same joke and it would be flat and dumb, and someone else is going to tell and it's going to be hilarious. Some people were gifted reciters and there seemed to be people that had a special role called a scop, and it was their job to perform. But it was probably a skill that was available to many people because Hrothgar, the king of the Danes is also portrayed as performing poetry, skillfully.
So here's somebody, they’re riding horseback, and to pass the time and to celebrate this victory, this man is able to take old material and make it new. He's able to tell the story of Beowulf on the pattern of stories of old like Sigemund, the dragon slayer.
Ryan: And there's that key word that I think Seamus Heaney even translates as “interlace” drawing on John Leyerle's work on interlace.
Peter: Which word is that?
Ryan: Oh, yeah, 870 to 71: “found other words bound truly together.”
That “binding together” - can you tell us a little bit about how the “binding together” works both as image and as literary method?
Peter: Yeah. Especially in oral tradition, every performance is new and it's also old and it's old in the pattern. So you've got readymade formulas like “Beowulf made a speech,” Beowulf meðelword , as I have it. So, Beowulf meðelword, made a formal utterance. And that's just a formula. So that just repeats throughout.
But much of the poetry takes a phrase and then does something new with it. So in part it's formulaic, and then it's also varied through alliteration. So remember, Old English poetry uses the technique of alliteration to yoke different ideas together. And skillful poets could take all the different terms for warrior, for king, for ship, for anything that's important in Old English, it's going to have a storehouse of synonyms for it, because you can slot it in in different places and you can vary your words, gewrixlan, exchange, continually multiply your words. And “Cædmon’s Hymn” too is a great example, where Cædmon says essentially the same few ideas over and over. But it's a way to sort of glory in something, isn't it? To say in different ways with different facets, to play it up, to celebrate it, to keep the idea suspended in the air while recasting it with different language. And that's what this poet is doing here. They're telling stories, but they're altering the language using formulas and synonyms.
Ryan: So at the line level and at the level of diction, there is this exchange, this mixing and matching that goes on. And then also in this episode, we find the scop taking the Beowulf material, which is news, which is live, which has just happened, and interweaving it with older heroic tales, right? So there's also on the plot level, the level of matter, there's an interlace going on.
Could you also then just say a bit about the current state of the comparison of that literary method to the interlace patterns that we see in the art?
Peter: Yeah. Let's see here. Ryan, give me an example of where you're going with this? What art in particular would you…
Ryan: So like in interlace patterns, in, say, the Book of Kells, where most famously where, if anybody says “Celtic patterns,” this is what comes to mind. You've got long snakes that are intertwined often in these impossible infinities where the snake's head is eating its tail and there's all this intertwining. Those kinds of patterns. I think everybody listening will have some sense of those images.
Peter: Beowulf has woven through, to use the interlace metaphor that John Leyerle made so famous, it's woven through with different narratives, like a quilt, a tapestry. And then the language too is interwoven out. So on the level of line and of section of verse, you have it interwoven with different synonyms and different verbs. And it would be wrong to look at these lines and study them for, just on the level of line, for example, you're going to miss out on the larger patterns. Or if you just zero in on a single story, inset story –
Because Beowulf, one of the odd things and the things that no scholar has completely solved is the presence of so many little – sometimes they're called “digressions” or “inset stories” – and it's just full of these stories in the background. There's the foreground, where Beowulf is fighting the monsters, but then continually the poet turns to these backstories, these digressions about other heroes, older heroes. And the presence of those can be argued that… And so this is an example again of interlace, where the main narrative is being continually interwoven with these subnarratives, these inset stories like Sigemund here, the dragon slayer.
And what's the function of these? They certainly make the poem beautiful. They add variety. They're interesting. But there's a mystery about what the function of these – some of them seem to have nothing relevant to the main text. But they're certainly part of this interlace pattern. And maybe there's things about these elusive moments that we no longer understand and would make sense if we did, but we don't have that traditional background.
Ryan: I've asked you to prepare a couple of passages where we can hear the old English, then hear your translation and get some sense of your method. Where would you want to take us first?
Peter: Well, I couldn't choose on just one.
Ryan: Sure. Great. More than one.
Peter: I picked two. So, one is the creation story. So, King Hrothgar, he consolidates an army; he gets power. And the first thing he does is he's going to build a hall, the greatest hall that's ever been known, kind of a city on a hill. And then what does he do? Well inside of it, he distributes gold, of course; that's what you do. And they drink mead. And then they sing. The poet performs and he sings the creation hymn. So that's one passage that I wanted to read. And it's the song of the scop, that reciting in Hoerot that upsets Grendel so much. So it's on page 27, line 85.
Okay. Here's the old English.
ða se ellengæst earfoðlice
þrage geþolode, se þe in þystrum bad,
þæt he dogora gehwam dream gehyrde
hludne in healle; þær wæs hearpan sweg,
swutol sang scopes. Sægde se þe cuþe
frumsceaft fira feorran reccan,
cwæð þæt se ælmihtiga eorðan worhte,
wlitebeorhtne wang, swa wæter bebugeð,
gesette sigehreþig sunnan ond monan
leoman to leohte landbuendum
ond gefrætwade foldan sceatas
leomum ond leafum, lif eac gesceop
cynna gehwylcum þara ðe cwice hwyrfaþ.
Okay, that didn't mean much to many people. But here's my translation and maybe – Ryan, could you hear anything that sounded like English?
Ryan: No.
Peter: Okay. Here's my rendering. And it goes this way.
Then the ellengæst suffered grievously
for a time, he who dwelled in darkness,
for each day he heard the dream
loud in the hall, where the harp sound was,
the scop’s clear song. He spoke, the one who could
recount the beginning of men from far back,
he said that the Almighty wrought the earth,
the bright shining plain which water encircles;
exulting, He set sun and moon,
the leams, as a light for land-dwellers
and adorn the earth's surface
with limbs and leaves; He also created life
and every creature that quickens and wherves.
So that one, it's going to have some unfamiliar stuff, but the language is mostly going to be straightforward, apart from special vocabulary.
Ryan: And so what's the principle there? What are you trying to do as you translate this passage?
Peter: So some of the things that my translation's going to retain from the Old English would be mostly nouns. So ellengæst. What is an ellengæst? So ellen means “bold, reckless, daring.” And gæst, well, it's the source of “ghost,” but it's not a ghost. Obviously. Grendel’s not a ghost. It can mean “spirit.” It can also mean “demon” and I think that's what a lot of translators do here. “The bold demon” I think is Seamus Haney’s. But “the bold demon” isn't quite right either. So a gæst is a creature, is a living being of some kind, and it has a whole range of possibilities, from “demon” to “ghost.” It can even be “breath.” And then ellen also doesn't have a straightforward, simple way. So I've just retained a term like that and then I gloss it below and also have it in the glossary at the end of the book. So that's Grendel and that's the term that designates Grendel, the ellengæst.
And then we have the scop, we could use “minstrel.” But that is, a scop is a particular kind of oral poet, that's distinctive to the Old English culture. So there isn't an easy – “poet, singer, minstrel.”
And then I also included terms – a verb here. “Wherves,” hwyrfaþ in Old English is a term that means to “turn about,” “to move,” has a sense of turning. And so I guess there's no simple modern English equivalent. So I took this one, in this case just reintroduced it. Most of the words I have to say in my translation are extant. Maybe they're later forms, postmedieval forms. Most of them I take directly from Old English, so I just take the form and retain it. In some cases, I'll introduce a later form. In this case, “wherve,” it just died out, so I reintroduced it.
Ryan: It sounds like what it means maybe because of the modern English “swerve,” which has that sense of “turn” or “curve” or rhymes with “curve.”
So one of the things that I just was really struck by in your translation is how vivid and clear it is to me in Modern English. Even more so I find than Seamus Heaney’s, which is the translation I know best. And it's probably the translation that our listeners have read if they've read Beowulf. It's the translation that would be quoted in the AP English exams. So if you took AP English and you encountered Beowulf, it would've been Seamus Heaney’s translation. If you encountered Beowulf in college, it's the translation that's in the Norton Anthology.
A just a Nobel laureate, wonderful, magnificent Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, doing some really remarkable things with Irish: the Irish language and the Irish culture, and working through the very real and present danger of blood feud in modern Irish society through this poem. Really brilliant. His introduction is brilliant. It's the work of a poet. But it's a very Irish translation and a very modern translation that absorbs much of the mid-20th century scholarship that was establishing a pre-Christian, pagan Beowulf, with a veneer of Christianity. That's what Haney gives us.
So there's Haney, on the one hand, the best known. Then there's also this remarkable 19th century translation by the founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, William Morris, who decided that he was going to make a Library of England, all of the great literature that English people should know, and when necessary he was going to translate it if it was in Old English. But he really wanted it to be Old. And so his translation of Beowulf, I mean, I've heard scholars tongue-in-cheek say that it's easier to read it in the Old English than it is to read it in William Morris's translation. But I wanted to just read that same passage that you had just now from Morris's translation and then comment on that a little bit.
Then the ghost heavy-strong bore with it hardly
E'en for a while of time, bider in darkness,
That there on each day of days heard he the mirth-tide
Loud in the hall-house. There was the harp's voice,
And clear song of shaper. Said he who could it
To tell the first fashion of men from aforetime;
Quoth how the Almighty One made the Earth's fashion,
The fair field and bright midst the bow of the Waters,
And with victory beglory'd set Sun and Moon,
Bright beams to enlighten the biders on land:
And how he adorned all parts of the earth
With limbs and with leaves; and life withal shaped
For the kindred of each thing that quick on earth wendeth.
Peter: Hmm. Yeah.
Ryan: He's pulling up so much Middle English, so he's not really carrying over the Old English as he's using Middle English diction and Middle English filler words often drawn, to my ear, not from Middle English itself, but from Malory. I think he's taking Malory's, “Morte d’Arthur,” which is itself this kind of intentionally archaizing form, maybe some Edmund Spenser there too and just trying to –
Peter: And later, too…
Ryan: And later? Tell us about it.
Peter: Later poets. The Border Ballads, even in Victorian Poetry, it's a very archaic form, and it loves the old language. So most of the terms he uses, they have their roots in Old English, like so many things. But at this point they've become poeticisms, “a swore thee swain,” that kind of language. And so one of the challenges – and I have to say I love Morris. I just find it delightful. And I love the challenge he took on and he tries to retain every – it's an etymological translation, where he tries to pick modern English words that are descended from the Old English words, like bebugeð in Old English means to surround, to encircle, the waters encircle, the planes. Morris sees that. And he says, “Well, we have a word for that: ‘bow.’” The word ‘bow’ comes from bebugeð. It's the same root. But of course, ‘bow’ has nothing to do with that anymore. And that's one of the reason why it's a bit of a funhouse mirror to read Morris, because he's so dedicated to retaining some of the etymologies.
The problem with etymologies is that just because a word descends from another word doesn't – they change their meanings over time, and they mean something new and different. The word “knight,” like “a knight in shining armor,” doesn't mean cniht in Old English, which meant “a boy servant.” And so if you wanted to translate cniht, you wouldn't use the word “knight,” but Morris would.
Ryan: Right. That's fascinating because I do find it lovely to read out loud and almost impenetrable to understand,
Peter: You have to know the Old English to understand Morris. It's true. You kind of think, “Oh, that's what he's doing. I see,” because yeah. But it's bold. And I love it for that. And I love, of course, the illustrations, and just the typography is beautiful.
Ryan: But by contrast, your translation, which is not just drawing on etymology, but is retaining actual Old English diction, is surprisingly easy to read. I mean, it really just comes across so clearly. I feel like I'm reading modern poetry, and yet you're teaching us this language. So I find it incredibly successful.
Let's turn to another passage that you've picked out.
Peter: So I want to talk a little bit about the Christianity in Beowulf, since that's been such a fraught and fascinating topic. A passage that takes that on directly is the passage… I won't read it all, but it starts around, let's see... Starts around line 170 on page 34.
And this is called “the Christian Excursus” among scholars, and it's called this because it seems to be a little departure from the main text. It's one of these passages that's almost explicitly Christian. There's nothing that's really explicitly Christian in Beowulf, which we can talk about too. But it's a moment where the poet sort of becomes a preacher, sort of a fiery preacher. Talks about hell and idle worship, and it's a stern rebuke.
And so some scholars, including Tolkien, thought that this was added by a later poet. The consensus today is that it isn’t; that it is the Beowulf Poet, and for stylistic reasons... An article I just published looks at other works, Old English texts, that were influenced by Beowulf, and they cite this passage. So clearly within the Old English period, this was considered part of the text.
So I'll read a little bit of this. And what's the context here is Grendel is attacking Heorot and no one can do anything about him. They're powerless. They can't stop Grendel. And he comes at night and he ravages the hall. And so what do you do? What would you do if Grendel was ravaging your hall? Well, you might worship, you might go to idols, you might backslide a little bit and you might go and maybe even make some sacrifices. You do what you gotta do.
If you look at the Old Testament, you'll see in moments of danger that, well, that's what happened; you'd go to Baal or you'd do something that seemed expedient. And so some of the Danes begin to make vows to idols. And that the idea is they're making some kind of sacrifice. And the poet condemns this.
So I'll read my translation first – I'll do the Old English first…
Ryan: Well, actually maybe this time we could flip it around. Read your translation first and then we'll know what we're listening for
Peter: Sure. Starting on line 175.
Sometimes at heargs – heathen shrines – they pledged
worship to idols; with their words they implored
the Slayer of Souls to provide them help
against the people's distress. Such was their custom,
the heathens’ hope; in their hearts
they remembered Hell; the Metod they did not know,
the Judge of deeds, or know of Drighten God,
or even how to praise the Helm of heaven,
the Waldend of glory. Woe to him
who in terrible affliction must thrust his soul
into the fire's fæthm and expect no comfort,
no changing at all. Well it will be for him
who can seek the Drighten after his death-day,
and ask for refuge in the Father's fæthm.
Okay, fæthm means “embrace,” right? You stretch out your arms and you embrace, and eventually the term for “stretching out your arms” becomes “fathom,” the depth measurement that's used by sailors. But I know Old English, it means “embrace.”
All right, so I'll read the Old English and I bet you can hear some of the same terms that I just read. And I'll just read that last little snippet. The “Woe” part where things get really fiery.
Wa bið þæm ðe sceal
þurh sliðne nið sawle bescufan
in fyres fæþm, frofre ne wenan,
wihte gewendan; wel bið þæm þe mot
æfter deaðdæge drihten secean
ond to fæder fæþmum freoðo wilnian.
So some of the same terms there, right? You could hear fæthm, you maybe heard “Death Day.” You heard drihten or Drighten. But the function words, those are all Modern English in my translation. I've just retained some of the key terms.
So, what do we make of this and what am I trying to do with this passage in particular? One thing I've retained is along with fæthm – and fæthm's important because it repeats, right? It's the fire's fæthm. So if you go to hell, you're going to be embraced by flames, buddy. It's going to be hot and it's going to never end. There's no changing at all. So you don't want to worship idols. You don't want to sacrifice them. Bad idea. Now, the Danes, the poet seems to be hedging and saying, “The Danes maybe didn't know better, but you, my reader, you know this is a no-no. And I'm going to remind you just how bad it is.”
But, the flip side here is the Father's fæthm, the embrace of God, the refuge of heaven. And the poet's going to use a whole bunch of terms for God. He's got Metod here. The Ordainer, the one who controls everything. The judge, the ademan in Old English, the deemer of deeds. Who's going to judge? They didn't know that judge. They didn't know exactly that they could intuit knowledge about this. And Beowulf and Hrothgar, they're pious monotheists, but they didn't know explicitly revealed religion. They didn't know the Christian story. And so they didn't know the Judge of Deeds and they didn't know of Drighten, God or in Old English, drihten, or how exactly to praise the Helm of Heavens, the Waldend, the Ruler of Glory.
I think this passage is excusing the Danes to some extent. They're not as culpable, but for Anglo-Saxons and the people, even though they were Christian, they were surrounded by people that weren't Christian that would make honor titles. And this was a reminder that did not do that, that that was serious.
So it's a theologically rich passage, one that's an occasion of debate. And I think the richness, the interlace, even, of the terms for God is lost by calling – “God,” “the Ruler,” “the Lord,” you're going to run out of terms pretty quick.
Ryan: Yeah. In your introduction, you call this a “both-and” approach to culture and to religion. That something can be both natural and supernatural. Something can be both the work of the Christian God and the work of a more impersonal, supernatural force.
And I hear in the background there one of Barbara Newman's categories for how medieval culture would approach the sacred and the secular. Did you have that in mind? Barbara Newman's “both-and” approach?
Peter: No, I’m not familiar with that.
Ryan: Okay. I think it's really fascinating, though, that this “both-and” theology, or this “both-and” cultural aesthetic of the Beowulf poet is, we can't say that “Oh, that's just a medieval thing.” Because in fact, contemporary with the Beowulf poet, we have people who do not agree with a “both-and” approach to this cultural integration.
And in your introduction, you talk about Alcuin echoing Tertullian “What has Ingeld to do with Christ?” And he says “The house is narrow. It cannot be both. The celestial king wishes to have nothing in common with lost in pagan kings whose names are rattled off, for the Eternal King rules in heaven while the lost pagan king howls in hell.”
So in a way, you could see the passage that you just read as being a kind of an echo of Alcuin. But as you said, if you read it carefully, it's taking a more assimilationist approach to pagan culture than Alcuin. Alcuin wants nothing to do with the pagan culture. Right?
Peter: We turn our back on this.
Ryan: Could you just say, right… So it seems that you're presenting a pretty distinctive disposition to non-Christian culture in early England. Where do you think that's coming from?
Peter: Yeah. In some ways. So, Alcuin... What is Ingeld? So Ingeld was a hero. He's featured in Beowulf actually, a violent, vengeful hero. And what Alcuin’s mad is that monastic people, instead of reading scriptures at meals, they're having a great time listening to these hero tales about Ingeld getting the guy. And so Aquin understandably, he's like, “Man, don't do that. Don't – Listen, read the scriptures. Ingeld; that's not what we're vowed to. That's not the life we're called to, this life of vengeance and violence.” And, well, the Beowulf poet, what's his answer to this? I think in some ways he's trying to say, “Well, let's not do the baby-bathwater thing here. Let's see if there's something redemptive or if… there's elements of goodness in this tradition. And this tradition is us, this is our identity, these are our names, these are our lineages, these are our people, these are our stories. We don't have to cut it all away. We can keep it. And here's a path forward, and it's called Beowulf.” It's the story of Beowulf that has a deep theology interwoven with these earlier stories.
In fact, I think that in some ways – I have a pet theory I'm working on right now that the inset stories in Beowulf are there in part to sneak in, and maybe that's not the right verb, but to bring in and to baptize the entire tradition. A righteous hero like Beowulf can show that this could be done well. And we can read the other stories through the lens that Beowulf gives us, which is that there is righteous violence. That there are demonic forces, that there are bad things, and that we need the law enforcement of the world to put those things in order because God's call is for that. So there's a right way to approach the tradition and there's also a wrong way to see it. If we take the right things from it, then we're okay. And that's what Beowulf does.
Ryan: Yeah. I completely buy that. I mean, what the method would be doing then is it's calling on the literary magic of scriptural allegory in order to integrate and transform an entire literary tradition.
And you call attention to the fact that “Let's suppose there was this oral tradition of the Beowulf story, prior to what we have in writing. The poet seems to go – the writer, the Beowulf poet – seems to go out of his way to say that the hour at which Beowulf descends into the sea to go after Grendel's mother, is the ninth hour, the hour at which Christ dies on the cross.” And then we get this little vignette looking at his thanes waiting on the shore. And it seems very clearly to be a Christological narrative reference. He doesn't have to say “Beowulf is like Christ, Beowulf is a Christ figure,” because that's not the way it works: Beowulf is in allegorical correspondence to Christ, which means it's not just symbolic. It is a real historical correspondence and through the correspondence, in this case of plot, of time, a real relation is established that transforms not only Beowulf's action, but also transforms Christ’s action because it's this mutually effective relationship in the allegory.
And so by doing that, then, it draws in all of the rest of that literary tradition, including Sigemund. So yeah, I completely buy that.
Peter: But it's good to enter into Alcuin's understanding, his critique. It's understandable. And I think pondering that helps us understand what the Beowulf poet is really up to in his text, which is trying to say that not only it's not – he's not saying “Beowulf isn't that bad,” or “These truths aren't that bad. They're okay.” He's trying to say “No, there are bad things about it, but there's a good – we can detect the echoes and the correspondence or the allegorical signifiers and these are telling the Gospel too, and they're also transforming our understanding of the Gospel, maybe deepening it, maybe enculturating it to some extent.”
But there's risks there, aren't there? There's always risk when you have two systems that come and touch and transform each other. And so does he pull it off? Well, I think largely he does. But there's tension, I think, in the text.
Ryan: Yeah. One place where this is fascinating and it's retained in your translation is line 852. And we're hearing about what happens to Grendel. So, alert, Grendel breaks into Hoerot with Beowulf pretending to be asleep, waiting for him. And they grapple and Beowulf tears off Grendel's arm and Grendel runs away. And then we get this omniscient narrator telling us that, “Well, Grendel went away and died.”
So your translation, line 850. Could you read that at line 850?
Peter: He hid away, doomed to die, dréamless,
when in the fen-refuge he laid down his life,
his heathen soul; there hell received him.
Ryan: Yeah. So that “there hell received him.” Tell us about how that word “hell” is working there.
Peter: Yeah, there's that doubleness, that “both-and” approach, earlier, where Grendel's just a monster; he's an ogre, he's a troll, but also, he's also a demon. And here also this mirror, so Grendel's Mirror, he has this pool that's deep and it's also imaged as hell. And so he both, on one hand he just goes into this pool and he dies. But also there, he's a captive of hell. He's hell's Halfling. And there hell takes him. It's got him. He's done. So that's the idea, I think, here.
Ryan: And hell as a space in spiritual geography, your note says, predates Christianity. And so it is this underworld that already exists, and yet here it's being coded “Christian” partly through Grendel's association with Cain, right? The poet tells us that Grendel is descended from Cain.
So how do you read – the “both-and” here is that it's a pagan underworld space, or non-Christian underworld space, but then it's also integrated into a Christian theology of salvation?
Peter: Yeah. That the pagans were right about Hell. They got that right. And they got a lot right. They got more right than they got wrong. And the word “hell,” of course, that's not a biblical – it's a biblical concept, but the word is Germanic. And so it's drawing these connections. It's pulling at your sleeve, the poet saying, “Look here; here's another place where we see that this tradition is right.” And of course they're right because God was there, too. God was working in the past.
And remember mostly these heroes are considered to be historical people that were believed to have lived. And some of them in fact are historically attested people. So this isn't just legend, this isn't myth. This is the past. This is our past. And so he's saying these people, God was there too. God was ordaining and directing and approving and condemning there, too. And in a way, if you think about that, that's of course true, right? God's everywhere and he always is ordering and he has a plan and he is opposed to evil everywhere, always. But how that plays out is a mystery. And he's exploring that mystery in a gentle, not persistent, not heavy-handed way, but he's raising the question and he's pointing at how that might play out. And that's what's fascinating.
Ryan: And it strikes me that here we have a warrior-culture vision of hell that's actually fairly close to the way that modern apologists sometimes talk about hell. Where we don't want hell to be the space in which a wrathful God avenges himself on the sinners, but we want it to be a self-inflicted isolation. So you've got Napoleon in C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce, 10,000 light years out away from the city center, pacing back and forth and says, “I should have won Waterloo” or something like that.
Peter: Yeah, it's the prison of the South. It's locked from the inside.
Ryan: So, can you comment on that? Through the term dréamless in “He hid away, doomed to die, dréamless?”
Peter: Yeah. So dréam looks like the word “dream,” but it's pronounced a little bit differently and it's etymologically linked to the word “dream” we have today. But in Old English, dréam means “joy,” “revelry.” It's always communal. You don't dréam alone. It's not a verb, but – it's a noun. But it's not something you do alone. And in fact, it often connotes music. So dréamcraft, the craft of dréam, is actually a word for music, because when you get together, you make music, you rejoice. So that communal festivity, the term is used for the saints in heaven and Old English religious writings.
And Grendell is marked off as dréam-less. He doesn't have this one key ingredient. And the poem images the moments of dréam, rejoicing in the hall, as a kind of heaven on earth. That's as good as it gets. You get together. And you're not just getting drunk. You are rejoicing in being together and being with your Lord and being with those that you fight and die for, and reciting the stories that are true and old and beautiful. And it's a picture of a heavenly realm that the poet is doing. And that's why there's not drunkenness. There's not orgy, there's not riot. It's orderly, it's ceremonial, it's elevated, it's beautiful. But it's got dréam, it's got noise and it's got merriment, rejoicing. It's a very important concept in the poem. And Grendel of course doesn't get any of that.
Ryan: Yeah, so Grendel and Grendel's mother are the most, I think, famous images, and maybe partly because some people don't finish what they read when they're in school and they don't get to the end. But really we've got a whole third of this poem that takes place fifty years after the big showdown with Grendel and Grendel's mother. And it, to me, and I think probably to many readers, is the most mystifying part of the poem because it would seem that Beowulf does not end up triumphing.
How does your translation frame the way we're supposed to understand King Beowulf and his encounter with the dragon?
Peter: Well, Beowulf has to die. He has to die, but he has to win. And I think that’s just riddled with Christian understanding of the Crucifixion and of defeat and what it means to lose and also win. But it's also inherited from Germanic stories. Migration Period stories tell tons of stories of defeats, of losses. Audiences had an endless appetite for watching heroes lose, which is interesting. Tolkien had this whole term for this, “the northern theory of courage,” he called it, where you watch a hero faced with insurmountable odds, and that's where you really find out what that person's made of.
And so Beowulf has to – and that's the ultimate sacrifice. To die and to die unflinching – So he's got to die. He is also old, right? How long can you live? He's an aged king. So he's going to go out fighting and he's going to face this dragon. And the dragon on some level is also the Devil. The Book of Revelation is in the background, too. The dragon's going to be defeated, but it's also going to kill the protagonist. So it's a victory and a loss. And to me, the poem hits this pitch-perfect. It seems to get it both. Where Beowulf wins, he triumphs, but he also dies.
Ryan: What do you make of Wiglaf’s final speech about Beowulf, where, page 162, line 3076:
Often owing to the will of one man
many an earl must endure misery, as has happened to us.
We could not persuade our beloved theoden,
the shepherd of the realm, with any ræd [with any advice]
not to approach the keeper of the gold [the dragon],
to let him lie where he had long been,
remain in his dwelling place until the world's end.
I mean, he seems to imply, “Beowulf shouldn't have done this. Because he did it, we are now bereft of our lord. And because of that, we are scattered to the winds. We are now weakened in the face of our enemies.” And then you get what many readers take to be an incredibly bleak ending of the poem.
So how do you frame that, given what you've just said about the Christ-like triumph of Beowulf?
Peter: You know, let me start with the second part, Ryan. The bleakness. Oh man. The desolation basically on all sides of the Geat. So Beowulf is a Geat, a people.
Ryan: Can you read the desolation passage for us?
Peter: Yeah. There's a couple little moments. There's the messenger's prophecy, which is a little before the end, that's pretty long. And it says that the Swedes in the north are going to get us, the Franks in the South – we're screwed. That's what it says. And then at the end, there's the funeral of Beowulf and there's a woman – So on page 164 and it's line 3150.
A Geatish woman also sang a sorrowful mourning-gydd
for Beowulf, her hair bound up;
again and again she said
that she dreaded harsh invading armies,
a multitude of slaughters, troop-terrors,
humiliations and captivity. Heaven swallowed the smoke.
So she's mourning, this woman – we’ve got this really powerful picture of a woman mourning at Beowulf’s funeral, and she's prophesying all the terrible things that are in store for her people, which probably came true, historically speaking. The Geatish people were absorbed by the Swedes. And within the context of the poem too, they have enemies on all sides, so things don't look good.
So, did Beowulf make the wrong call? Should he have said, “I'm going to send in my men, or at least go in with an armed troop and fight the dragon”? He made the right call. Beowulf made the right call because he was old. So, he wouldn't live forever. I think we don't want a self-sacrificing death. We don't want a peaceful deathbed scene of Beowulf, old Beowulf just dying, like we can imagine King Hrothgar perhaps doing. We want him to die giving his life for his people, sacrificing his life. And that language is all over the place in the text.
But we do have this one moment here where it seems to be that Wiglaf is censoring Beowulf – seems to be criticizing Beowulf for his decision. I have to say, the language is ambiguous here and the manuscript is damaged at the end. So it's really hard to interpret this passage. But I would say that what Wiglaf is expressing is just grief at the loss of Beowulf. So, “Often owing to the will of one man, many an earl must endure misery.” My interpretation is that he's lamenting that they've lost Beowulf, that the misery they're enduring is that Beowulf, their shepherd, is gone. And then he goes on and says, “We tried to persuade him, ‘Don't do it Beowulf,’ but he did it anyways.” Well, I think that's only a test to Beowulf’s prowess that he was willing to take the dragon on. And he does destroy the dragon with Wiglaf’s help.
So, my reading of that, although it's a tough passage, is that in a way it's registering Wiglaf’s grief at the loss of his king. Beowulf couldn't leave the dragon alone, like he's suggesting. The dragon was destroying the countryside. He had to take action. No, he could have gone with an armed troop, but he still may have died. So in a way, Beowulf did what he needed to do.
Ryan: Is it possible that the dismantling of the warrior band that had made Beowulf's community so wealthy and powerful, is it possible that that demise somehow opens the way for a more modern, in this context, Christian, cultural form, where there's something about the warlord and the comitatus, the composition of society based around war and raiding and feuds that is inimical to Christianity and to have that community scattered to the winds is almost like Pope Benedict XVI welcoming a smaller, weakened, poorer church?
Peter: The creative minority.
Ryan: Yeah. Yeah.
Peter: Yeah. Well, I will say this: the poet underscores – not just the Beowulf poet, but all the Old English elegies – that that glory passes, that it's transient. The transience of all things is always on the lips of these poets. So yeah, this is a great world, but a limited world, it's circumscribed and it's impermanent. And so, yeah, I think the idea would be seek what is permanent. You don't have to reject this. This prefigures something good. But it's not the thing itself is it?
And something closer to the thing itself would be the monastics. This was a monk that wrote this. And he would have his comitatus; he would have his drihten, who would be the abbott. And that would maybe be more of a model as monks read and recite it, wasn't just monks that listened to this, but we know monks did enjoy this hero of poetry, thanks to Alcuin. But, yeah, seek a more permanent system. This prefigures something, but it's not the lasting thing itself.
Ryan: A lot is written about how Tolkien transformed Beowulf, bringing it into English literary canon and so on. Do you have a sense, how did Beowulf transform Tolkien?
Peter: It was a model for Tolkien for his own fictions. Tolkien wanted to be the Beowulf poet, and in some ways, he was. As a Catholic, he took not explicitly Catholic stories, heroic stories, stories that have tragic dimensions and violence and vengeance, and saw value in them. That's the short answer: that he saw a model.
But he also was transformed by the language he encountered in Beowulf. He just mines it for, he takes words and… It's scattered all over Lord of the Rings: Old English words, terms… And he saw those as little, triggered ideas for him, concepts.
The word ent in Old English, so Tolkien steals the word “ent.” And in Old English, it's a mysterious race of master builders that are not no longer extant in the world of Beowulf. So they lived long ago, and they built these fabulous structures. But we know they live because we can look around and see these fabulous structures. And so the entas, the ents were these giant peoples that had vanished. Well, Tolkien takes that, and he does something totally different. He makes them into giant people, but they're trees too. They're this tree people. And it's a cool concept. So he took that and ran with it.
Ryan: Why do you think Tolkien never published his translation in his lifetime?
Peter: I don't think he was pleased with it. It evolved and he changed it. It was a work in progress. I don't think he was satisfied with it.
What's more interesting about the translation is actually the commentary that accompanies the published translation today. It's really, really insightful. And I still liberally – I quote Tolkien, but it informs my own commentary extensively.
But yeah, I don't think many people reading – It's prose, for one thing. Tolkien’s translation’s just prose, not verse, and it isn't very satisfying to read.
Ryan: Well, your translation is incredibly satisfying. I commend it to all of our listeners. It's The Word-Hoard Beowulf by Peter Ramey, just out from Angelico Press. And it has a brief but incredibly comprehensive introduction. In fact, the next time I teach Beowulf, I'm skipping Seamus Heaney and we're going to – and Tolkien; I have been teaching it out of Tolkien’s version for a while, but for other reasons, because we do some Tolkien and everything. But the introduction is the best short introduction for undergraduate or reading, non-specialist purposes that I've come across. And you read it and it's really delightful. It's vivid and it reads like excellent modern poetry. You're learning a bit of Old English as you read it but very easily, without thinking about it. And then the commentary is incredibly rich and is going to give you everything that you want as a first-time or a second-time non-specialist reader of Beowulf. All of the cultural “otherness,” I think, does a great job of achieving that.
I highly commend this and for those who haven't read Beowulf and those who want to return to it. Hopefully this conversation has kindled your interest.
Peter Ramey, thank you very much.
Peter: Thanks so much, Ryan.