Translating the Unnecessary Beowulf

— a review of Beowulf, translated by Tom Shippey (Uppsala Books, 2023)

“Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way” — or so Roger Waters told us once.¹ But the sentiment feels appropriate for the rapidly-dwindling number of early English scholars who adhere to the traditional arguments regarding that old warhorse Beowulf. And though their last gasps might sound desperate indeed, they are far from quiet. If dinosaurs could keep lawns, they’d yell at you to keep off them.

And so here we are: looking at the recent translation of Beowulf, done by Tom Shippey, a long-enduring scholar of Old English & Northern European cultures who you might recognize from the commentary discs of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–3). This version is brought to you by Uppsala Books, whose website gives every indication of being Shippey’s own vanity press.² Very reassuring. Additionally, its introduction & commentary are written by Leonard Neidorf, probably best known for editing The Dating of Beowulf, a 2014 retro(ag)gressive collection more vituperative than visionary, assembling a group of scholars to pump the highly circumstantial case that Beowulf must have had a single author & been written around the year 700. All other opinions are dismissed & sneered at — with a lot of misogyny along the way.

Therefore, I don’t really have high hopes.

The volume begins in a contemptuous snarl masked by a truism: Neidorf offers “A translation is a continuous interpretation, in which the translator registers with the choice of every word an interpretation of the denotation and connotations of the text.”³ This, my friends, is the most basic postulate of Translation Theory, that translation is inevitably interpretation. It would be hard to find fault with that idea, yet here it’s glossed in a way that any bright undergraduate might be proud to have written [how exactly does one “register” an interpretation?]. This leads Neidorf to make an astounding claim, that “Many translations of Beowulf have been produced by people who show no interest at all in the poem’s interpretation.”⁴

I’m staggered by this — imagine my surprise! Most translators don’t come to this giant fucking task (3,182 lines, henny) without being interested in advancing an interpretation in some way? Like one takes on this enormous project, going through draft after draft, consultations, proposals, peer review, & marketing surveys without having some confidence that they offer sufficient new insight into this old chestnut?

Oh wait, hold on — this just in… it seems to be a message from Maria Dahvana Headley. Let’s read it now… it’s only one word long:

Bro…⁵

Neidorf goes on to give his estimation of a translator’s competence for the task: that they have written & published dozens of scholarly articles & books on the poem. Any others could not possibly be qualified to interpret the poem, let alone translate it (he calls these renderings “cobbled together” & based on “their own arbitrary intuitions”).⁶ Yet as I survey the very short list of translators he finds qualified to take on the challenge (he invokes J. R. R. Tolkien, R. D. Fulk, & Marijane Osborn), I don’t find myself particularly overwhelmed with admiration by any of them.⁷ These versions are frequently boring, to be honest — plodding & dull as dishwater both in the way they render Beowulf’s poetry & in the terms they re-envision the poem at all. I wouldn’t assign any of these versions to my students.

            Two paragraphs into this second section, one might begin to suspect that what angers Dr. Neidorf so is that the majority of modern translators are not interested in HIS interpretation of Beowulf. And that’s basically all that one need say about this volume. I wanted to find more to complain about or possibly even commend — and trust me, bro, he makes plenty of contradictory & stubbornly retrograde claims about the poem in his short introduction. As I survey the commentary & its lists of sources, I find few written after 1995 written by anybody other than Neidorf himself (or his clone & collaborator Rafael Pascual). But as I compiled my notes I realized something important — I have an actual life & am engaged in my own scholarship & translation aimed at a future beyond the salty necropolis that early English studies largely has become.

Yet —

Allow me to briefly address the central character in this drama: the translation of Beowulf itself — that one by Tom Shippey. You might be asking: “Should I buy a copy & just ignore the introduction?” I mean, most people don’t read introductions anyway, right? So don’t let me stop you, gurl.

There seems to be something of a “Beowulf Translation Industrial Complex” in early English studies & a “new” translation emerges every other year or so to compete for all that sweet, sweet college bookstore cash. But it’s sadly the case that so few offer anything new to say. The sole manuscript copy we depend upon for the poem is rarely questioned or examined beyond the pronouncements of Frederick Klaeber, its great 20th century editor (his 3^rd edition came out in 1929. He died in 1954 & the long-sought 4^th edition was only completed in 2008 by R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles). Also presuppositions about the poem’s tone, genre, style, or meter constrain any lexical or poetic choices to a very small range. To be more succinct, most all of them sound identical.

“But GM,” I hear you saying, “doesn’t the poem only have one meaning & the words that make up that poem have very clear meanings as well?”

No & No, are my answers.

First, any text (including sacred scriptures) only has the meanings that its current audiences give it. Also, with a text as distant from us as Beowulf (who, despite Neidorf’s fulminations) could have been written anywhere from 670 to 1000, & possibly in another language, it’s very hard to be certain we understand its purposes, genre, form, audience — and therefore meaning to any sort of absolute degree.

Second, Old English is a dead language, & we have a small fraction of its total lexicon available. We have little idea of how their poetic techniques worked or how substrate languages like Brythonic influenced semantics or poetics, & we’re just starting to think through how the presence of Old Norse as a powerful, wealthy, high status language also influenced Old English. Beowulf features many many Old Norse words which might make more sense were used out of a sense of contemporary cultural & poetic emulation or influence in the late 10th century, when Scandinavian influences were pronouced, rather than inherited from some Ur-stock of Germanic words (where they would have undergone numerous phonological changes along the way). Philological reconstruction can be useful, but it is not absolute either. We may like to think these rules & trajectories are ironclad, but these people had no idea about them, & used words the way they found significant. Those changes may seem capricious, but not all have to be enduring to be significant.

But allow me to be more specific:

I’ve taken three versions of the same passage, one I’ve selected at random, to compare how they present or translate those same words. The first version is of course by Tom Shippey. The second is R. M. Liuzza, whose 2013 translation published with Broadview Press, is widely favored by US & Canadian instructors these days. The last is by the poet & translator Dan Veach, published in 2021 by Lockwood Press (Veach is also a “contributing editor” for this press) — also I recently reviewed his Beowulf & Beyond for the medieval studies journal Speculum (full disclosure).

Let’s find out how much better Dr. Shippey’s version proves to be! For this exercise I’ve chosen lines 115–25, where Grendel is first introduced to the story & the problem is set:

1) When night came, then, Grendel made his way

to seek the high hall, how the Ring-Danes

had settled into it after their beer-drinking.

Inside he found their troop of nobles,

sleeping after their banquet – they did not know sorrow,

sad human condition. The uncanny creature,

grim & greedy, wasted no time,

but, cruel, and savage, he snatched thirty thanes

from their beds, went back home

exulting in his prey, reaching his lair

with his fill of the dead.⁸

2)       When night descended, he went to seek out

the high house, to see how the Ring-Danes

had bedded down after their beer-drinking.

He found therein a troop of nobles

asleep after the feast; they knew no sorrow

or human misery. The unholy creature,

grim & ravenous, was ready at once,

ruthless and cruel, and took from their rest

thirty thanes; thence he went

rejoicing in his booty back to his home,

 to seek out his abode with his fill of slaughter.⁹

3) After night had fallen, Grendel stirred

and sought out that high house

where the Ring-Danes, after a bout of beer,

had settled in. There he found the noble troop,

sleeping soundly after their feast. Sorrow

and the sad fate of men were all forgot.

Grim and greedy, the evil thing

was suddenly eager now—

with cruel ferocity, he ripped

thirty men from their rest.

Exulting in his booty,

he headed back home

with a bellyfull of slaughter.¹⁰

Hmmm….

There is not a thimbleful of difference between any of these three translations. I’d say all three are about even in terms of their cadence — at best, Shippey lingers in some form of free verse, though the bagginess of some of these lines feels more like a casual prose cadence. The other two maintain tighter lines, mostly falling into a four-beat rhythmic structure like the original, but not feeling bound to some kind of emulation. Liuzza has some remarkable cross alliteration or assonantal patterns that feel natural where the other two don’t really attempt it. Veach occasionally pulls out a word that sears & scars with its visceralness. The lexical choices of all three are more or less modest, non-controversial, never straying too far from the dictionaries. So just on this very tiny sample, there’s no real reason to favor Shippey’s over anyone else’s. It’s the same old same old.

1. Roger Waters, “Time,” The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd (prod. Alan Parsons, Harvest Records, 1972).

2. The Uppsala Books “About Us” webpage prominently features cringeworthy glurge in celebration of Tom Shippey, cited as its “Creative Director.” Furthermore, it will always seem a bit fishy to me when any scholarly volume features the recommendations of its own Editorial Board on its rear cover. Here, Joseph C Harris, Research Professor of English and Research Professor of Folklore at Harvard University & Marijane Osborn, professor emerita from University of California at Davis, both impart warm reviews of the book they greenlighted. Also, Neidorf sits on this same Editorial Board. The Royal House of Thebes had more outside circulation.

3. Leonard Neidorf, “The Editor on the Translator” in Beowulf: Translation & Commentary (London: Uppsala Books, 2023), 29 [emphasis mine].

4. Neidorf, “The Editor on the Translator,” 29.

5. Maria Dahvana Headley, Beowulf: A New Translation (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2020), 1. Quotations from verse translations will be by line number.

6. Neidorf, “The Editor on the Translator,” 29.

7. A university library of any size may have more than 50 different English translations of Beowulf, and very few of these —ESPECIALLY those produced by distinguished university professors— manage to be very interesting or even distinguishable from each other. The versions by those Neidorf deplores, the “professional translators and creative writers” (29), tend to be much more dynamic, fiery, & enduring. Burton Raffel’s 1966 version was the product of much acrid discussion with university professors (as Raffel chronicles in The Forked Tongue [The Hague: Mouton, 1971]) yet remained on US high school booklists until the 2000s. Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s 1999 version was labeled as “Heaneywulf” & criticized for his temerity at using Northern Irish dialect words for the sacred English text. But this was not even the first translation done by a Celtic poet: the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan did a version in 1952. And Maria Dahvana Headley’s 2021 energetic & rich translation triggers all the right male scholars — so how could I not love it?

8. Beowulf, translated by Tom Shippey, ll. 115–25.

9. Beowulf, translated by R. M. Liuzza (Toronto: Broadview, 2013), ll. 115–25.

10. Beowulf, translated by Dan Veach in Beowulf and Beyond: Classic Anglo-Saxon Poems, Stories, Sayings, Spells, and Riddles (Atlanta: Lockwood, 2021), 115.