Listen, Bro

The poem called Beowulf shouldn’t even exist. Written in Old English, the early medieval language that people in Britain spoke in the centuries before the Norman Conquest of 1066 AD, the poem survives in only one ragged manuscript. Its pages are made, like all parchment, of animal flesh. In the 18th century, a fire at the Ashburnham House at Westminster singed the book around the edges, and at some point, an unidentified experimenter daubed parts of its ink in chemicals, trying to reveal a secret message but producing only further smudges. 

That the tattered text survived at all is profoundly unlikely; the Beowulf codex is one of only four manuscripts containing Old English poetry known to exist today. It was probably written sometime between the eighth and 11th centuries, inked by two anonymous scribes. The manuscript is officially titled Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, but scholars sometimes call it the Nowell Codex, after the owner who wrote his name and the date—1563 AD–in it. Beyond that, the trail peters out. So much of its origin culture has been lost that contemporary scholars can barely reconstruct the meaning of the words, let alone figure out who wrote them. 

Shining through the layers of decay, however, the plot of Beowulf is taut and minimal. The scene is Scandinavia in the sixth-ish century. The hero, Beowulf, a Geatish warrior from what’s now Sweden, sails across the sea to assist Hrothgar, king of the Danes, in his time of need. By killing Grendel and his mother, who have been terrorizing the Danish court, Beowulf becomes a hero, ready to trot home in triumph to work on becoming a king himself. But time takes its toll on his strength, and in the end, Beowulf is killed by a dragon’s bite, abandoned by all but one of his personal militia. His kingdom is left on the path to ruin.

Other Old English texts are bound with the Beowulf manuscript: a poem about the Biblical Judith and three prose pieces called The Passion of St. Christopher, The Wonders of the East, and Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle. If any theme unites the texts in the Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, it is monsters, which abound in the latter two texts’ depictions of far-off lands. (All Judith did was cut off Holofernes’s head, but many scholars find the act sufficiently monstrous to count.)

With so little to compare Beowulf to, making confident declarations about its composition is impossible. Most scholars agree that oral culture played a part, which tracks with the anonymity of its author. Nobody knows what combination of poets, singers, scribes, manuscripts, and editors went into creating Beowulf. There is only one historical “fact” (a word of debatable meaning) in the poem: when Beowulf explains how the Geatish lord Hygelac died in battle. Using the spelling Chlochilaichus, the sixth-century historian Gregory of Tours attests to the same event in his chronicle.

Beowulf runs to 3,182 lines of the most ambiguous and evocative poetry written in any language. When Beowulf invades Grendel’s mother’s home, for example, he has a hard time beating her because her species of monsters are invulnerable to human weapons. But then he spies an ancient sword among her possessions, which looks magical enough to work. Sure enough, when he grips her hard by the neck (“þæt hire wiðhalse heard grapode”) and sticks in the blade, it breaks her banhringas—“bone-rings,” or vertebrae. Then, something extraordinary happens to the weapon: “Sweord ær gemealt, / forbarn brodenmæl; wæs þæt blod to þæs hat, / ættren ellorgæst se þær inne swealt.” Roughly, word for word, these lines mean something like “The sword had melted, / patterned metal burned; her blood was so hot / the strange guest was poisonous who died in there.” 

Why does the blade melt? On the surface, it seems as though some enchantment is undone by the monster’s foul blood. But this is also the final extermination of an ancient, albeit monstrous, lineage, and there’s something anticlimactic about that final, cruel thrust. The sword melts away, leaving Beowulf with nothing to do but go home. As with every other apparently triumphant moment in the poem, it just doesn’t feel like a triumph.

A lecturer once told me she was sure the blade is a phallic symbol and that its melting represents Beowulf’s manhood going limp after finishing with the woman in the cave. She might be right. In The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019), Toni Morrison also argues for a symbolic reading. The melting sword, in her interpretation, is not necessarily the result of foul blood chemistry but the idea that “violence against violence—regardless of good and evil, right and wrong—is itself so foul the sword of vengeance collapses in exhaustion or shame.”

Since its rediscovery at the turn of the 19th century, Beowulf has become a favorite object of study for certain kinds of researchers. First, translators unscrambled its meaning. Some early renderings into modern languages (by the Icelandic-Danish nationalist Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin in 1815, say, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the United States) cast the poem into archaic, fancy dialect. Such translators saw a romance in Beowulf that matched their own fantasies of belonging to an ancient culture, and they hoped in their new versions to imply that Beowulf was part of their history, exclusively. In the young United States, Beowulf helped feed the ethnic fantasy of an “Anglo-Saxon” heritage for white people; to the Danes, the poem was proof of their nation’s eternal grandeur.

Within the formal academy, scholars soon approached Beowulf as a repository of empirical data about the past. Much the same way that a paleontologist subjects a dinosaur fossil to various scientific tests, scholars of philology (the history of language), northern European medieval history, and paleography (the study of ancient handwriting) found riches to catalog in Beowulf. In the early 20th century, prosody specialists broke down its meter, and others decoded and endlessly argued over the poem’s vocabulary and speculated on its relationship to Scandinavian folklore. 

Some of these Beowulf-struck experts were influential in broader literary circles—C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were both professional medievalists—so the poem came to be a well-known and widely taught story, as well as one unusually suited to adaptation. 

Tolkien is a key figure in the Beowulf story because most scholars agree that real criticism of the poem as “a piece of literature” began with his lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” first delivered in 1936 and posthumously published in 1983. Tolkien argued that in the rush to consider Beowulf as a hunk of historical data, the archaeologists and philologists had rather crowded out views of the poetry itself. Readings such as Toni Morrison’s are part of that newer, literary-critical tradition. She treats Grendel’s mother as a character, not a bit of anthropological data. 

Dozens of published and unpublished writers have translated the poem into various languages over recent decades. There are a number of Beowulf movie adaptations too. Notable examples include the 2007 CGI extravaganza starring Angelina Jolie as a highly sexualized Grendel’s mother and the techno-fantasy Beowulf (1999), starring Christopher Lambert as a steampunk warrior. The poem is remarkably protean and has been adapted, translated, and bowdlerized to accommodate an array of aesthetics, both retrograde and visionary.

Beowulf has also occasionally inspired white supremacists. In the 2008 essay “Beowulf: Prince of the Geats, Nazis, and Odinists,” the medievalist Richard Scott Nokes records the racist comments made after a Black actor was cast in a low-budget movie adaptation of the poem. The film has long since faded into obscurity, but the racist protest sites still exist as odd blogs littering the internet. The strangest position held by those who think that white Germanic culture “owns” Beowulf is that the poem is not fiction but historical fact. For example, the whole idea of Anglo-Saxon as an ethnic category is based on white people’s buying into a historical fantasy of uncorrupted, ancient roots; believing Beowulf is literal history is just as silly.

Maria Dahvana Headley is the latest writer to respond to Beowulf’s strange blend of suspense and ambiguity with a clear political agenda. Her Beowulf: A New Translation (FSG, 2020) is billed in the publisher’s publicity materials as a “radical new verse translation” of the Old English poem and as a natural successor to Seamus Heaney’s popular but now 20-year-old version. 

Headley is already well-known as a feminist interpreter of the epic. Her bestselling novel The Mere Wife (2018) reimagines Grendel and his mother, a fugitive, on the outskirts of an archetypal American suburb, living on house cats and squirrels. 

It’s worth asking: what does it mean to call a version of Beowulf feminist? It’s a difficult question because the poem is arguably feminist all on its own—no assistance needed. Grendel’s mother is one of several powerful female characters in the poem, alongside Modthryth, a queen who had men killed for looking directly at her, and Wealhtheow, Hrothgar’s wife, who is famously described as freoðwebbe, “peace-weaver.” As far as I can tell, Headley is the first woman to publish a full-length modern English translation of the poem, but feminist scholars such as Helen Damico (author of 1984’s Beowulf's Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition, who passed away in April from Covid-19) have been writing about the subversive power and ambiguous agendas of Beowulf’s warrior-women for decades.

However, Headley certainly deserves credit for bringing those gender-conscious analyses to the mainstream. Just as John Gardner did in his popular novel Grendel (1971), Headley, in The Mere Wife, shows Beowulf through the eyes of the monsters rather than the other way around; her novel reveals that “monstrosity” is a construct born of fear and misunderstanding. For the community that occupies The Mere Wife’s uneasy American landscape, gender and race are ingredients in that construct. It’s suggested (though not specified) that most of the town’s residents are white; Grendel has brown skin. Headley muddles race with monstrosity to suggest how the two conflate in the racist mind. 

Headley’s historical transposition works. In the original poem, endless dynastic struggles are the backdrop to everything; blood has always just been shed or is about to be. Beowulf can rip apart as many enemies as he wants, but it’s all futile in the end—he weakens and dies like any other man. In The Mere Wife, that feeling of impending doom derives from residual trauma in the characters’ psyches, the result of American warmongering in the Middle East. The novel’s versions of Grendel’s mother and Beowulf (a cop cleverly named Ben Woolf) are both armed conflict veterans whose PTSD prevents them from seeing each other as human. “Good man,” Woolf thinks to himself, toting his gun around. “This is his training. This is his history, protecting the innocent, saving the community.” He’s delusional, of course, the way many armed people are, believing he can end a cycle of violence with more violence. 

This kind of cold, dark irony is true to the atmosphere the Old English original generates, in which Grendel’s mother lives in “cealde streamas” (cold waterways) and mead hall-benches are drenched in blood (“eal bencþelu blode bestymed”). The poem never lets readers forget that all men are mortal—after all, it ends with Beowulf’s corpse burning on a pyre, a woman screaming nearby.

The Mere Wife’s feminism, meanwhile, is earthy, even technophobic. The narrative voice toggles between third person and first person, roving between its human characters and unidentified, collective voices, sometimes speaking on behalf of a cadre of grandmothers, sometimes speaking from some older and less tangible place in the environment: 

We are the wilderness, the hidden river, and the stone caves. We are the snakes and songbirds, the storm water, the brightness beneath the darkest pools. We are an old thing made of everything else, and we’ve been waiting here a long time.

Headley’s Beowulf is kindred in spirit to The Mere Wife—highly conscious of gender and modernized to the hilt—but totally different in form. Instead of changing names or places, Headley sticks closely to the original Old English text while updating the vocabulary with flourishes of internet humor. She uses the slang neologism swole to describe Beowulf’s body, for example, which actually has a ring of Old English about it. Elsewhere, the neologisms don’t work quite as well. For example, as he armors up to attack Grendel’s mother, the Beowulf-poet writes that he does not mearn for his ealdre—mourn for his life. In her version, Headley translates those words to mean Beowulf “gave zero shits.” It’s not inaccurate, I suppose, but that doesn’t necessarily make it funny.

Though Headley opts for some startling choices, such as translating the Old English word hwaet (usually rendered “Listen!” or “So”), as “Bro!,” her Beowulf is a close, line-by-line rendition of the original poem in all its baffling glory. She even follows the metrical pattern of the Old English, using alliteration on stressed syllables to create a propulsive, tense rhythm.

Compare the poem’s original Old English opening lines to those of Heaney’s 1999 translation and Headley’s new version:

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.—Original]
 
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.—Heaney]
 
Bro! Tell me we still know how to talk about kings! In the old days,
everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound. Only
stories now, but I’ll sound the Spear-Danes’ song, hoarded for
hungry times.—Headley]

All three versions use alliteration to indicate where the stress falls. The line breaks are arbitrary conventions because they don’t exist in the manuscript. And all three versions convey roughly the same message: a story is about to begin, and everybody better settle down to think about tales of bygone glory. 

But there’s a profound difference in the voices of Heaney’s and Headley’s translations. Heaney’s narrator is a serious, gray-bearded storyteller, rendering the Old English “þæt wæs god cyning” as “that was one good king;” Headley’s is a fratty youngster eager to get pumped on tales of warfare, impatient with archaic forms. “You know how it is: every castle wants invading,” he says. Her narrator’s tone is light and suspenseful, resembling nothing so much as a man telling a long but compelling story in a bar.

That comparison isn’t accidental. In her introduction, Headley writes that the tale-telling, historical sections of Beowulf remind her of “sitting at the bar’s end listening to men navigate darts, trivia, and women.” She argues that bro is one of those slippery, powerful words that can be “a means of commanding attention while shuffling focus calculatedly away from hierarchy.” By coding the narrator as a blustering blowhard who sees women as prizes (“The hostess was impressed by Beowulf’s boasts. / Brass balls, if nothing else”), she questions “the ways that men can afford (or deny) one another power and safety by using coded language, and erase women from power structures by speaking collegially only to other men,” as she writes in her introduction. Then she goes one step further, including God in the patriarchal structures that her translation satirizes, cheekily rendering his Old English name as “Almighty Big Boss.” 

The feminism in Headley’s translation is embedded in the texture and language of the poem itself rather than in its individual events or characters. When Beowulf’s boat sails into Hrothgar’s harbor, for example, Headley depicts the coastguard as a chagrined bouncer, puffing out his chest: “Did you send word? No! Were you invited? / No! You’re not on the guest list. And, also, who’s the giant?” By sending up this kind of pissing contest, which happens regularly in the story, Headley lampoons the narrative’s cartoonish masculinity and brings out the satirical, downright negative mood that characterizes the poem’s mournful ending.

Anachronism is no grounds for opposing Headley’s approach because there’s no complete “original” to prefer in the first place. No interpreter can pretend to be the master of Beowulf, simply because too much is unknown. Old English today survives in so few books that it’s impossible to understand every word in the poem, which is riddled with hapax legomena—words appearing only once in the known corpus of the language—meaning we will never have enough data to build a reliable definition. 

When she first introduces Grendel, Headley describes him as “fucked by Fate,” which is an attractive translation of the Old English “wonsæli wer,” literally meaning “unblessed man.” In the same passage, however, the word orcneas appears, which is a hapax legomenon. The noun appears as part of a list of Cain’s descendents, along with “eotenas ond ylfe” (“giants and elves”) and the Grendel clan. So, orcneas probably means something nasty, but we don’t know what exactly. Headley translates it simply as “monsters.” Heaney used “evil phantoms.” 

The translators seem to be in agreement. But when Tolkien encountered orcneas, he used it to name a hideous creature in his modern folkloric epic, The Lord of the Rings, dubbing them “orcs.” Now, I find it impossible not to think of orcs when I read that line: I see them ripping through muddy membranes in one scene from Peter Jackson’s 2001 film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring. Orcs are intertextual kin to Grendel, and that influence can’t be undone. Meaning can flow forward and backward over time.  

The case of orcneas is evidence that the holes in the Old English poem—whether made by fire or by gaps in the Old English dictionary that can be filled only with conjecture—are strangely reactive, like wounds in a living thing. Headley’s boyish narrator wraps his story in colloquial language almost as a trick, a flashy come-on to lure readers into a story that turns out to be full of dark lessons about traitorous soldiers and the inevitability of old age. Her Beowulf is a tragicomic epic about the things men do to impress one another. It’s as fierce an examination of masculine weakness as The Mere Wife was of feminine strength.