by Tom Birkett
Volume XI
Translating Early Medieval Poetry
ISSN 2043–8230
Series Editors
Karl Fugelso
Chris Jones
Medievalism aims to provide a forum for monographs and collections devoted to the burgeoning and highly dynamic multi-disciplinary field of medievalism studies: that is, work investigating the influence and appearance of ‘the medieval’ in the society and culture of later ages. Titles within the series will investigate the post-medieval construction and manifestations of the Middle Ages – attitudes towards, and uses and meanings of, ‘the medieval’ – in all fields of culture, from politics and international relations, literature, history, architecture, and ceremonial ritual to film and the visual arts. It welcomes a wide range of topics, from historiographical subjects to revivalism, with the emphasis always firmly on what the idea of ‘the medieval’ has variously meant and continues to mean; it is founded on the belief that scholars interested in the Middle Ages can and should communicate their research both beyond and within the academic community of medievalists, and on the continuing relevance and presence of ‘the medieval’ in the contemporary world.
New proposals are welcomed. They may be sent directly to the editors or the publishers at the addresses given below.
Professor Karl Fugelso
Dr Chris Jones
Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Art Department
School of English
PO Box 9
Towson University
University of St Andrews
Woodbridge
3103 Center for the Arts
St Andrews
Suffolk IP12 3DF
8000 York Road
Fife KY16 9AL
UK
Towson, MD 21252–0001
UK
USA
Previous volumes in this series are printed at the back of this book
Translating Early
Medieval Poetry
Transformation,
Reception, Interpretation
Edited by
Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons
D. S. BREWER
© Contributors 2017
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation
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First published 2017
D. S. Brewer, Cambridge
ISBN 978 1 84384 473 0
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Contributors viii
Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons
Introduction: From Eald to New
1
1 Chris Jones
From Eald Old to New Old: Translating Old English Poetry in(to) the
Twenty-first Century
13
2 Hugh Magennis
Edwin Morgan’s Translations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Turning Eald into
New in English and Scots
29
3 Inna Matyushina
Gains and Losses in Translating Old English Poetry into Modern
English and Russian
46
4 M. J. Toswel
Borges, Old English Poetry and Translation Studies
61
5 Rory McTurk
‘Let Beowulf now be a book from Ireland’: What Would Henryson or
Tolkien Say?
75
6 Elizabeth Boyle
The Forms and Functions of Medieval Irish Poetry and the Limitations
of Modern Aesthetics
92
7 Lahney Preston-Matto
Aislinge Meic Conglinne: Challenges for Translator and Audience
109
8 Tadhg Ó Síocháin
Translating Find and the Phantoms into Modern Irish
122
9 Hannah Burrows
Reawakening Angantýr: English Translations of an Old Norse Poem
from the Eighteenth Century to the Twenty-first
148
10 Carolyne Larrington
Translating and Retranslating the Poetic Edda
165
vi
Contents
11 Heather O’Donoghue
From Heroic Lay to Victorian Novel: Old Norse Poetry about Brynhildr
and Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native 183
12 Gareth Lloyd Evans
Michael Hirst’s Vikings and Old Norse Poetry
199
Bernard O’Donoghue
Afterword 213
Bertha Rogers
A Translation of Riddle 15 from the Exeter Book
217
Bibliography 218
Index 234
Acknowledgements
This collection arose from an international conference held in University College
Cork in June 2014, organised by the editors. We would like to thank all those who
attended and contributed to the conference, the poetry reading, and this volume.
The conference could not have taken place without the generous funding provided
by an Irish Research Council ‘New Foundations’ Grant, as well as financial assis-
tance from the School of English and the Information Services Strategic Fund at
University College Cork, the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and
Literature, and the Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Ireland. The
editors are especial y grateful to Michael Matto and Greg Delanty, editors of The
Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, for their support and advice. We owe a debt of gratitude to the School Manager Anne Fitzgerald, as well as the Head
of School, Claire Connol y, and the Director of Information Services (and gifted
poet), John FitzGerald, for their enthusiastic backing of the project. We would
also like to thank Caroline Palmer at Boydell & Brewer, the editors of the Medi-
evalism series, Karl Fugelso and Chris Jones, and the astute anonymous readers for
their critical help in bringing this collection together. We are incredibly grateful
to Bernard O’Donoghue for writing the afterword to this volume, and to Bertha
Rogers for permission to use her beautiful il ustration of Riddle 15 on the book’s cover. The vibrancy and energy of her artistic interpretation encapsulates many of
this volume’s themes, and it demonstrates the continuing influence of early medi-
eval poetry on the creative arts in the twenty-first century. Final y, we would like to thank our families and friends for their constant support.
Contributors
Tom Birkett is Lecturer in Old English at Univ
ersity College Cork, and author of Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry (Abingdon, 2017). He led the IRC-funded ‘From Eald to New’ Project in 2014.
Elizabeth Boyle is Head of Early Irish at Maynooth University. She has published widely on medieval Irish literary, religious and intellectual culture, and on the
history of Celtic Studies in the nineteenth century.
Hannah Burrows is Lecturer in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Aberdeen.
Her scholarly and creative projects bringing medieval material into modern
contexts include: an edition and translation of the poetry from Hervarar saga
ok Heiðreks for the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages project; the Financial Times Christmas Carol 2015; and performances of Bandamanna saga
with Aberdeen Performing Arts (2016 and 2017).
Gareth Lloyd Evans recently completed his DPhil in Old Norse Literature at the
University of Oxford and is currently a Stipendiary Lecturer in Medieval Litera-
ture at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. He has published on skaldic poetry and post-
modern engagements with medieval literature.
Chris Jones teaches English at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford,
2006).
Carolyne Larrington is Professor of Medieval European Literature at the Univer-
sity of Oxford and is Official Fellow in medieval English literature at St John’s
College, Oxford. She researches into Old Norse literature, Arthurian literature
and medievalism, and has published the leading translation into English of the
Old Norse Poetic Edda.
Hugh Magennis is Emeritus Professor in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast. His research focuses on ideas and imagery in Old
English and related literature, on saints’ lives and on the reception of Anglo-
Saxon writings in the modern period. His publications include Translating
Beowulf (Cambridge, 2011), a study of modern verse translations of the poem.
Kirsty March-Lyons obtained her PhD from University College Cork and was
co-organiser of the IRC-funded conference ‘From Eald to New’. Her research
examines the emergence of affective piety in Old and Middle English prayer.
Inna Matyushina is an Honorary Professor at Exeter University, and Professor
at the Russian State University for the Humanities. She has published seven
Contributors
ix
monographs and over 100 articles on Old English and Old Norse heroic epic,
skaldic poetry, medieval lyric, chivalric sagas, and flyting in Old Germanic
culture. She is currently working on a monograph on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
Rory McTurk, Professor Emeritus of Icelandic Studies at the University of Leeds, is a translator of Old and Modern Icelandic poetry and prose, and the author of
books and articles on Icelandic and related literature. He is currently contrib-
uting to the col aborative nine-volume edition of Skaldic Poetry of the Scandina-
vian Middle Ages.
Bernard O’Donoghue is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, where
he taught Medieval English and Modern Irish literature. He has published seven
volumes of poetry and a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for Penguin Classics. He is currently translating Piers Plowman for Faber.
Heather O’Donoghue is Professor of Old Norse at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Linacre College. Her publications include Skaldic Verse and the Poetics
of Saga Narrative, From Asgard to Valhal a, and English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History, as well as individual articles about the influence of Norse myth on writers such as Blake, Morris, MacDiarmid, Auden and Heaney.
Tadhg Ó Síocháin is the former Head of Examinations and Assessment at the Irish State Examinations Commission, and is currently studying for a PhD in early
and medieval Irish at University College Cork. He has published a Modern
Irish translation of short stories by Marcel Aimée ( Delphine agus Marinette, An Daingean, 2011) and is currently preparing an edition and English translation of
the medieval Irish tale ‘The Abbot of Drimnagh’.
Lahney Preston-Matto is Associate Professor of English Literature at Adelphi
University on Long Island, New York. She has published numerous articles in
the field of medieval studies, and recently produced a major new translation of
Aislinge meic Conglinne: The Vision of Mac Conglinne (Syracuse, NY, 2010).
Bertha Rogers produced the cover art and accompanying translation of Riddle 15.
Her translation of Beowulf was published in 2000; her poems and visual art have appeared in journals and anthologies and in Heart Turned Back (2010) and other collections. Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon Riddles from the Exeter Book,
Uncommon Creatures, Singing Things, is forthcoming, as is Wild, a new poetry collection.
M. J. Toswell teaches English and Medieval Studies at the University of Western Ontario in Canada and has recently published The Anglo-Saxon Psalter (Turnhout, 2014), co-winner of the International Association of Anglo-Saxonists
award for best book; two projects on Borges, one a translation of his book on
Germanic medieval literatures and the other a study of his interest in the subject;
and Today’s Medieval University (Kalamazoo, MI, 2017).
Introduction:
From Eald to New
Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons
When The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation was
published in 2010, its ‘spirit of col aboration and creativity’ and produc-
tive juxtaposition of diverse poetic voices challenged the academy to
rethink how Old English poetry should be approached.1 Here was a collection of
Old English poems translated by poets with very different knowledge of the mate-
rial: some came to the project able to translate directly from Old English (or like
Bernard O’Donoghue, translate certain poems from memory), whilst others needed
the aid of prose translations, crib sheets and the careful guidance of the editors (the poet A. E. Stallings quips: ‘I have no Anglo-Saxon, except inasmuch as I speak
English’).2 All of the translations sought to make early medieval poetry accessible
and contemporary, and the collection as a whole demonstrates the full range of
possibilities that Old English poetry offers to the poet writing for a twenty-first-
century audience.
This particular anthology’s endeavour to match the Old English corpus with
‘a word-hoard of our times’ is also representative of a wider resurgence in atten-
tion to early medieval poetry,3 a rekindling of interest that has seen a succession of high-profile translations including Ciarán Carson’s version of the Táin Bó Cúailnge for Penguin Classics;4 a new translation of the Poetic Edda by Andy Orchard for
Penguin, by Jackson Crawford for Hackett, and a revised version of Carolyne
Larrington’s translation of the same for Oxford World’s Classics;5 and the arrival
1 Quoted from the book jacket of Greg Delanty and Michael Matto, eds, The Word
Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (New York, 2010).
2 A. E. Stallings, ‘On Translating Old English Poetry: The Riming Poem’, in The Word Exchange, p. 540.
3 Greg Delanty, ‘Preface’, in The Word Exchange, pp. xv–xvii.
4 Ciaran Carson, trans., The Táin (London, 2007).
5 Andy Orchard, trans., The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore (London, 2011); Jackson Crawford, trans., The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes (In
dianapolis, 2015); Carolyne Larrington, trans., The Poetic Edda: A New Translation (Oxford, 1996; rev. 2nd edn The Poetic Edda, 2014).
2
Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons
of Tolkien’s long-awaited translation of Beowulf into an already crowded market.6
The passing of Seamus Heaney in 2013 also saw renewed attention to his merits as
a translator, and particularly to his own much-lauded translation of Beowulf, which was serialised as BBC Radio 4’s ‘Book of the Week’ following his death;7 the original
Old English poem continues to be reinterpreted in every imaginable medium.8 The
successful ‘Modern Poets on Old Norse Poetry’ and ‘Kennings in the Community’
initiatives in the UK have led to some extraordinary reworkings of skaldic verse by
contemporary poets,9 and the hit series Vikings has seen Old Norse poetry recited in living rooms across the world. Whilst poetry in general may represent the least
commodified and certainly the ‘least translated genre’,10 it has been hard to escape
the impression, as Chris Jones points out in the first essay of this collection, that
something of a renaissance has been taking place in the reception and remediation
of poetry from the early medieval period, breathing new life into old texts.
The ‘From Eald to New’ conference from which this collection of essays arose
was held at University College Cork in 2014, and presented an opportunity to take
stock of this extraordinary proliferation of translation activity and to critical y
assess the ways in which the landscape of translation has changed in the twenty-first
century; how we arrived at this particularly productive juncture in the on-going
discourse between history and translation;11 and what impact new translations and
interpretations of medieval poetry are having on the study of Old English, medieval
Irish and Old Norse literature.
For both pragmatic and cultural-historical reasons these three literatures repre-
sent quite distinct fields of study and specialism, and it is little surprise that the discourse on modern translation and its implications has largely continued along
6 J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sel ic Spel , ed.
Christopher Tolkien (London, 2014). A great number of innovative translations of Beowulf have appeared in recent years, ranging from Meghan Purvis’s experimental verse imitation of Beowulf (London, 2013), to Michael Morpurgo’s wonderful retelling of Beowulf for children, il ustrated by Michael Foreman (London, 2013), to The Grinnel Beowulf (Tempe, AZ, 2015), a col aborative teaching edition produced by students at Grinnell College and published by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.