Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell

by J. R. R. Tolkien

  This seems to me to have taken place in the case of Sigemund. But the ‘dragon-slaying’, the supreme feat which made its achiever the most renowned hero of the North, could not be duplicated. It was therefore taken over by the son. But it does not fit him so well. It is indeed unnecessary to his tragic story, and in German it is practically forgotten. Sigemund, whatever historical ‘kernel’ his story contained, belongs to an older, more primitive (indeed more savage) past, in which eotenas and dracan are more appropriate. In the Völsunga saga, a ‘cento’, made of different sources and different lays, one is conscious of this division. It may also be observed that while Sigemund’s name remained fixed, his son’s, sharing the prefix Sige-, is not fixed: in Norse sources it is Sigurðr (which would be O.E. Sigeweard), in German sources Sigfrit (Siegfried), which would be O.E. Sigeferþ. That the name of the original dragon-slayer and prime hero should not be fixed in form would be strange.

  731; *898 wrecca

  In the social and political Germanic world of the early centuries of our era were founded the divergent developments of this word: on one side to our ‘wretch’, on the other to German Rocke, ‘valiant knight, hero’ (of old). Both lines were fully developed in Old English.

  wrecca means in origin an ‘exile’, a man driven out from the land of his home – for any reason: crime, collapse or conquest of his people or princely line, economic pressure or the desire for more opportunity, and often (if he was of high birth) dynastic struggles among members of the ‘royal family’. In *2613 wræcca(n) wineléasum (2194 ‘a lordless exile’) is applied to Eanmund the son of the previous Swedish king Ohthere, driven out by his uncle Onela. In *898 (731) sé wæs wreccena wíde mǽrost it is seen on the other hand that a wrecca might win great renown. Cf. The Fight at Finnsburg 25 where Sigeferþ boasts of his status: Sigeferþ is mín nama, ic eom Secgena léod, wreccea wíde cúð [known far and wide]. The term is also applied to Hengest, *1137 (‘the exile’ 932). It may mean then no more than the immediate fact that Hengest had now under necessity become nominally Finn’s ‘man’, and accepted lodging and ‘keep’ from him, though in a foreign land. But Hengest was probably already a wrecca, an ‘adventurer’, a man who with his héap or personal following had, though a Jute, taken service with Hnæf. Except then in not being ‘legally’ an exile, Beowulf was himself for the nonce of the wrecca-class. With a personal following chosen by himself (héap *400, 323; *432, 349) he had gone off, in time of peace at home, in search of adventure and profit, and offered his service to the king of another people. Ecgtheow, his father, had been in all senses a wrecca, being driven out from his own land because of his deeds (372–4, *461–2), and taking service with the Danish king (‘oaths he swore to me’ 381, *472).

  But, of course, in ‘real life’ the position of a wrecca was unhappy. Only a man of commanding character and great courage could long survive in a state of outlawry, still less win renown or wealth. Most such men lived ‘wretchedly’ or perished; while many of them were no doubt justly outlawed or exiled, and were men of evil character. Hence already in unheroic language a wrecca meant a ‘wretch’ – either a miserable unhappy homeless man, or a despicable and wicked one.

  769–71 Lo! this may she say, if yet she lives, whosoever among women did bring forth this son among the peoples of earth; *942–6 Hwæt, þæt secgan mæg efne swá hwylc mægþa swá þone magan cende æfter gumcynnum, gif héo gýt lyfað

  The ‘exclamatio’ Hwæt ff. has been regarded as a reminiscence of Scripture. But there is not in fact any close verbal resemblance between Hrothgar’s words and Luke xi.27: Blessed is the womb that bore thee . . . The ‘exclamatio’ nonetheless has the appearance of an addition, that does not fit the situation. Hrothgar knew all about Beowulf’s parentage, and he himself says (300–1 ff., *373–5 ff.) that Beowulf’s mother was the only daughter of Hrethel. Yet here he says: ‘whatsoever woman bore this son, if she yet lives.’ The difficulty cannot be resolved by making the exclamation ‘general’. It is cast in the present indicative. A general expression would take the form (in this situation when Hrothgar knew the facts): ‘Lo, any woman whatsoever who had borne such a son might praise God for this favour’: mæg and gyf héo gýt lyfað (‘may’ and ‘if yet she lives’) do not fit. The natural way of taking ðone magan (‘this son’) is demonstrative indicating Beowulf (here present). [Added later:] It is possible that praise of the victor’s mother was an old element in the folk-legend of the ‘strong man’ and has not been fully assimilated to his historical background.

  783–5 Yet rather had I wished that thou might see him here, Grendel himself, thy foe in his array sick unto death!; *960–2 Úþe ic swíþor, þæt ðú hine selfne geséon móste, féond on frætewum fylwérigne!

  This is frequently misinterpreted, even by those whose business it is to know Old English grammar and syntax: e.g. the old J.R. Clark Hall crib has: ‘I heartily wish that thyself (sic! for ðú hine selfne) couldst have seen him’ – i.e. ‘I wish (now) that you (Hrothgar) had been there then!’ That (Old English grammar apart) is both a foolish and insolent remark. It is nonetheless retained in C.L. Wrenn’s revision of Clark Hall.

  Actually Beowulf says: ‘I would have liked far more that you should be able to see Grendel himself.’ And he means (deprecatingly): ‘I am very sorry only to have an arm to show you; I should have preferred to have presented you with Grendel himself complete – and dead.’

  Úþe swíþor: úþe is past tense subjunctive (of unnan) used in an unfulfilled or unrealizable wish: = ‘I should have been more greatly pleased’; móste, also subjunctive (because it also refers to something merely thought and not a fact), is past tense by the sequence of tenses normally practised (as in Latin) by O.E. – and by modern English: so ‘I should have been happier, if he had been here now – or were / was here.’ Translate then: ‘I should have been better pleased that thou shouldst have seen him himself, thy foe in his war-gear, lying felled’ (literally ‘felling-weary’, fyl-wérigne, that is weary (= dead) after being laid low).

  on frætewum is probably carelessly used, since warriors fallen in battle were usually on frætewum unless stripped. But it is dangerous to attribute such ‘carelessness’ to this author. The picture Beowulf had in mind was of Grendel complete, but dead. He did not wear ‘armour’ like men, but he had the equivalent of weapons in his hands, each finger of which (as we are soon to learn) had a long tearing nail like steel. Now Grendel is not there entire, and part of his frætwe has been already torn off.

  785–6 I purposed in hard bonds swiftly to bind him upon his deathbed; *963–4 Ic hine hrædlíce heardan clammum on wælbedde wríþan þóhte

  As wæl- shows, this does not mean that Beowulf thought of catching him alive and binding him. It is a poetic periphrasis (of a kind more admired then than now) for ‘kill him with my hand-gripes’, elaborated in 786–7 (*965–6) ‘that by the grasp of my hands he should be forced to lie struggling for life’.

  789–90 I did not cleave fast enough for that; *968 nó ic him þæs georne ætfealh

  This is appropriate modesty, and more or less true. If Beowulf had been even stronger than he was, he might have held the ogre in such a way that he could not have got away by leaving one arm. It may be observed that Grendel only put one hand out to grasp Beowulf (*746, *748; 608–10); so that Beowulf never had hold of more than one hand before Grendel pulled away and tried to escape.

  791–2 Nonetheless he hath left behind upon his trail his hand and arm and shoulder; *970–2 Hwæþere hé his folme forlét tó lífwraþe lást weardian, earm ond eaxle

  Cf. lífwraðe *2877 ‘life-support’ = defence against death (2419 ‘succour of his life’); so here tó lífwraþe = ‘as a defence against death’ = ‘so as to save his life (by escape)’. If Grendel’s arm had not broken off Beowulf would have throttled him. Though there is no suggestion in the actual account of the wrestling (608 ff, *745 ff.) that the casting of an arm was in any way willed by Grendel, as a last desperate trick to escape, the use of swice
*966 ‘tricked, cheated’ [bútan his líc swice; ‘had not his body escaped me’ 787–8], and the present lines, certainly suggest that this notion was once part of the tale.

  [It will be seen that the words tó lífwraþe were left untranslated in the original typescript B(i), and the omission was not subsequently repaired.]

  lást weardian ‘to guard the track’, very frequent in verse = ‘to remain behind’.

  797 the great Day of Doom; *978 miclan dómes

  Note the reference to Doom’s Day (called in Old English (se) micla dóm, dómdæg and dómes dæg), here actually made by Beowulf himself. Here Grendel is regarded as a ‘man’ with a soul that survives death – cf. 693 ‘yielded up his life and heathen soul’, *851–2 feorh álegde, hǽþene sáwle – as a descendant of Cain. Ignorance of Germanic beliefs untouched by Christian teaching (as they inevitably were before they could be written down) makes it impossible to say whether references to a Last Day are purely Christian or not. Hell was a native word. Punishment of the wicked is certainly contemplated in Old Norse (more or less) ‘heathen mythology’, and the poem Völuspá reserves a place of torment for them; though Hell, like Hades, was the ‘hidden land’ of all the dead – apart from the Odinic conception of Valhöll.

  803–5 (of the nails on Grendel’s hand): At the tip was each one of the stout nails most like unto steel, grievous and cruel were the spurs upon the hand of that savage thing. All agreed . . . *984–7 (MS) foran æghwylc wæs steda nægla gehwylc / style gelicost hæþenes hand sporu hilde/[verso of page] hilde rinces egl unheoru æghwylc gecwæð . . .

  The manuscript is plainly to some degree corrupt. In my opinion there is far too much hwylc: my suspicion is chiefly aroused by the first ǽghwylc in *984 which is not required for sense, and is in the same manuscript line as gehwylc. The latter is in its right idiomatic place; the former is not.

  The attempt to keep the manuscript readings (except for the repeated hilde) leads to a punctuation of this sort: foran gehwylc wæs, steda nægla gehwylc, stýle gelícost . . . ‘in front (i.e. at the tip) each (of the fingers) was, each of the places of the nails, like unto steel’. This carries no conviction. It is the nails themselves, anyway, sticking out at the ends of the fingers like spikes, that are like steel; not the ‘places of the nails’.

  Now a way out of this difficulty has been found by emendation of steda to stíðra, genitive plural, ‘stiff’. Cf. *1533 stíð ond stýlecg applied to the sword Hrunting (1282 ‘steeledged and strong’). No reason for the corruption of so well-known and contextually intelligible a word as stíðra into steda can be seen. The resulting metre is scarcely credible. The correction of this by cancelling gehwylc cancels the wrong word, as I have suggested above. Old English seldom violates idiomatic word-order; and where an emphatic adverb usurps the first place in a sentence, as does foran here, the subject should follow the verb. In consequence ǽghwylc *984 must be either a misplaced anticipation or a corruption by anticipation of a word that is not noun or adjective, i.e. not the subject. The former alternative implies that a word, more or less parallel to nægla gehwylc, has dropped out after wæs. The latter is on all counts more probable. I should select as the real word that has been corrupted by anticipation into ǽghwylc is ǽghwǽr ‘at each point’.

  The corollary of this decision, which retains gehwylc, is that steda can only be replaced by a word scanning one long monosyllable or two short syllables, and so producing a normal E-line. Far the most probable emendation is to my mind stede-nægla. The corruption of stede into steda, by anticipatory assimilation of word-endings, would be an example of one of the commonest errors of transcription, especially in inflected languages. The word stede-nægl does not occur elsewhere, but it would bear an obvious sense: a fixednail, a nail driven into wood so as to stick out like an iron spike. It would be the equivalent of stedigra nægla.44

  We thus arrive at:

  foran ǽghwǽr wæs

  stedenægla gehwylc stýle gelícost

  ‘At each tip each of the standing nails was like a steel spike.’45

  egl. Since Grendel’s nails have been likened (i) probably to iron spikes fixed in a wooden post, (ii) to spurs, it is unlikely that the word egl here is to be identified with egl, egle, a word meaning an awn of barley. It is far more likely that it is an error for eglu, neuter plural of the adjective egle ‘grievous, repulsive’.

  The final translation of the passage will thus run so:

  ‘(They gazed upon the hand set above the high roof, beholding the demon’s fingers.) At the tip at every point each of the standing nails was like steel, spurs on the hand of the savage warrior, horrible and monstrous were they.’

  813–15 Sorely shattered was all that shining house within, from their iron bars the hinges of the doors were wrenched away; *997–9 Wæs þæt beorhte bold tóbrocen swíðe / eal inneweard írenbendum fæst / heorras tóhlidene

  [For the original text of the translation here see the Notes on the Text p. 116]

  If we look at the context and sense of these lines, we perceive that not only is fæst superfluous metrically, but destroys the sense. The poet is speaking of the smashing up of Heorot, not of its strength. It would seem evident, though remarkable, that this passage has been corrupted by reminiscence of *773–5: þæs fæste wæs / innan ond útan írenbendum / searoþoncum besmiþod (631–2 ‘stout was it smithied within and without with bonds of iron cunningly contrived’). There fæste is required; and it is from that passage that fæst has crept into the text of line *998: it should be removed. We should then read, punctuate and translate thus: Wæs þæt beorhte bold tóbrocen swíðe / eal inneweard, írenbendum / heorras tohlidene; ‘the shining house was all broken up within; the door-hinges were wrenched away from the iron bars.’

  Here the írenbendum are the transverse iron bars that go across the door, partly serving to strengthen it and bind together the separate planks or timbers, and partly to carry on their ends the rings or hooks (which fit into or over the hooks on the door-post) – the heorras. What is described is probably the forcing of the door outwards in Grendel’s efforts to escape, so that the bars bearing the rings were wrenched off the hooks on the posts (the other part of the ‘hinges’).

  817–18 No easy thing is it to escape – let him strive who will; *1002–3 Nó þæt ýðe byð tó befleonne – fremme sé þe wille

  The general context indicates that it is death that is not easy (i.e. impossible) to escape; but þæt is indefinite ‘it’, and does not refer to any previous or following words. A rough modern equivalent would be ‘escaping is not easy’. fremme does not mean ‘try it’; but in order to match ‘not easy = impossible’ the poet says ‘let him who wishes to, achieve it’.

  1393 a mighty sword and old; *1663 ealdsweord éacen

  Cf. 1307–8, *1560–1: the sword was so large that no other man but Beowulf could have wielded it. But éacen probably means more than this: it had an ‘added’ [the etymological sense], i.e. supernormal power: as is indeed shown by the fact that it slays monsters who had put an enchantment on all ordinary mortal swords: cf. 654–5, *801–5.

  1395–6 [I slew . . .] the guardians of the house; *1666. . . húses hyrdas

  We cannot take a mean grammatical refuge from the charge of ‘inconsistency’ in the story, by treating this as a ‘generic’ plural, like mécum wunde *565, bearnum ond bróðrum *1074. For one thing, they are not good parallels: mécum implies sword-thrusts [so in the translation, 461]; bearnum ond bróðrum is probably an ancient grammatical ‘dual’ idiom. [The translation, very oddly, retains the plural, ‘of brothers and of sons’, 877.] But where is the discrepancy? Grendel received a mortal wound in the wrestling in Heorot and apparently had died miserably on his bed before Beowulf reached his lair. But in *1618–19 we read of Beowulf: Sóna wæs on sunde sé þe ær æt sæcce gebád / wíghryre wráðra, wæter up þurhdéaf (1357–9 ‘Soon was he swimming swift, who had erewhile lived to see his enemies fall in war. Up dived he through the water’). Here (*1666) he s
ays that he slew when he got a chance ‘the house’s wardens’. In *1668–9 (1398–9) he says that he carried the hilt away from his enemies. Surely only an obstinate desire to find fault could find ‘discrepancy’ in this, or signs of ‘another version of the story’! *1618–19 and *1668–9 are both perfectly true, and in accordance with the story told. At the moment when Beowulf dived back up again he had in fact survived the fall in battle of both his foes, and he did carry the hilt away from the house of Grendel and his dam where both lay dead. In *1666 there is no real discrepancy if we consider (a) that sléan means ‘smite’ and Beowulf did in fact cut off Grendel’s head ‘when he got a chance’ (þá mé sæl ágeald, *1665), and (b) that though ‘dead’ this was necessary for the final laying of his fell spirit. Consider the trouble that Thorhallr had with Glámr the dead thrall, until Grettir cut his head off and laid it by his thigh.46

  1416–97; *1687–1784

  The whole of this passage is very important for the general criticism of Beowulf. We have in 1416–25 (*1687–98) a passage describing the ancient sword-hilt that is most interesting and important – especially with reference to the dating of Beowulf, and the blending and fusion of Scripture and pagan northern legend. The archaeological interest is only secondary: for if no swords with runic inscriptions naming their owners had ever been found, the poet plainly describes one, and it is the connexion made between the eotenas of the North and the gigantes of Scripture that is really significant.

  We then have Hrothgar’s sermon. In this we have Christian (virtually medieval) motives woven together with the pagan ‘exemplum’ of Heremod. The use of Heremod as a ‘dark contrast’ – a ‘caution’ – by Hrothgar links together the praise after the second deed with that after the first, where Heremod is also introduced.