Classics Considered

Last night I finished JRR Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf. I had read it previously, translated by Seamus Heaney, and wrote all of six sentences on it-–yikes! My memory of the first reading is very scanty, and that sure doesn’t help.

Tolkien’s translation is somewhat controversial. Some people consider it bad, some people think he wouldn’t have wanted it published, etc, etc. (It was published by his son Christopher, who seems to have been a scrupulous editor, so I can’t take the latter point too seriously.) I picked it up because I enjoy Tolkien’s language, and as someone who studied, taught, and loved the old legends, he seems like just the person you’d trust for a translation. A friend of mine who studies Anglo-Saxon literature at a high level recommended it as “a sense of what it’s like to read Beowulf in Old English,” with the caveat that it is extremely hard to read. Lastly, the paperback has a beautiful cover in my favorite color. I mean, what more could one want? 😉

The story is a fairly simple one… kingdoms in distress, monsters of humanoid or dragonish shape, and Beowulf, the “superhero” figure who shows up to make things right. Underlying this are strong themes of Christianity, family ties, and cycles of violence. Surprisingly (or maybe not), there is no romance here. It is a story of men, their honor, and their war.

The first third or half of the story went by rather smoothly for me. I felt that the translation illuminated details in the book that I had not caught onto before. As you might expect from Tolkien, there are some incredibly beautiful and poetic lines. The part where Beowulf goes down to the water to fight Grendel’s mother was a highlight for me—the descriptions of her lair and the sea monsters was glorious, if all too short.

Essentially, the main action of Beowulf is pretty easy to follow for seasoned readers. The parts that really frustrated me and made the latter half a drag were all the side notes or digressions by the narrator. Something big will happen with Beowulf and then the narrator will be like, “Oh, by the way, so-and-so’s second cousin went to war with our neighbors across the sea. YOU WON’T BELIEVE what the king did next…” I’m sure it all made sense to the original readers, but this is where annotations or margin summaries would greatly spare us moderns. And call me lazy, but I didn’t feel like reading the 200 pages of commentary to find out who Hetware was.

I own another edition of Beowulf published by Oxford World Classics. Surprisingly, it doesn’t appear to have notes, either. I am sure all the info is available online. However, I would very much like to find a copy that has it built in. I usually dislike reading annotated literature since it slows me down, but this is one exception where I would gladly do so and I don’t think it will impact my reading speed.