“If you wish to translate, not rewrite Beowulf, your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day that the poem was made.” — J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics

I have been reading Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf: A New Translation. The excellent introduction explains her desire to avoid archaism and the constraints of older poetic forms (traps in which many previous translators have fallen) in order to produce a text that has some immediacy, that feels like it could be a story told over the counter1.

I wholeheartedly agree with her analysis. However, I find that her execution suffers from vocabulary that oscillates between archaisms (i.e., wyrd) and terms that are so anchored in the current moment that they instantly jerk me out of the text (i.e., hashtag blessed)2.

This got me thinking. I believe that there is a lot of value in the story; it has powerful images, interesting structure, depth, and buckets of blood. I would love to read something like Neil Gaiman’s take on the text3, telling the story but freeing himself from the constraints of the original form, or Rudyard Kipling’s, building on the orality of the text as he did in Just So Stories4.

So I sat down, fired up an artificial intelligence, and got started on the task of a new translation of Beowulf5. As I did so, working my way from Old English to a first, very literal, draft; it quickly dawned on me that all the references to Christianity felt bolted on, as if they were late additions by scribes desiring to reconcile the story they were putting to paper with their faith6. Thus, I did something no self-respecting translator of Beowulf would do and ripped the Christianity out of Beowulf7, putting the gory, eviscerated, corpse on display.

The following is the resulting translation. It is not yet what I want it to be: while acceptable prose, it does not read as well as it should, but it is now out there for others to read and in turn themselves engage with the text.

“Even when the poem is rendered into a modern language with only the most respectful literalist decorum, then someone, somewhere, is wanting to raise Beowulf from the dead and set it into motion again before a new generation of readers.” — John D. Niles, Rewriting Beowulf: The Task of Translation

  1. Her vision for Beowulf is that of a manly, adrenaline and testosterone-fueled, bar story. ↩︎

  2. If the project is of interest to you, I would recommend looking into Meghan Purvis’s translation of Beowulf. ↩︎

  3. He did co-write the screenplay of the 2007 movie, versions of which can be read in Beowulf: The Script Book. ↩︎

  4. Along similar lines, a wonderful existing take on writing an oral story is John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. ↩︎

  5. Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Beowulf might be the closest to my vision for the translation. Being in prose, strongly narrative, with a clear narrator’s voice, and no signs of Christianity. However, I found a lot of its simplications of the story unsatisfying as it drained it of a lot of depth that I precisely liked in it. ↩︎

  6. A feeling Tolkien appears to share in the commentary section of Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary. ↩︎

  7. This might not be optimal. My actual belief is that, while the narrator and some characters (such as Hrothgar) are overly Christian, Beowulf is set in a world that behaves by Pagan logic: a world where dragons are part of nature and giants have left artifacts to be found. For a good discussion of the topic, see Edward B. Irving Jr.’s The Nature of Christianity in Beowulf. He makes, in particular, the interesting observation that the poem is heterogeneously Christian: Beowulf thanks God a lot more when he is in front of the pious King Hrothgar. ↩︎