There seems to be a strong desire expressed in the comments to talk about all of Beowulf -- the introduction, too -- and to discuss the poem as a poem, rather than simply looking at the narrative elements. We can certainly do that, and still discuss the elements that lead me to choosing this text as part of the longer series I've been writing on the Magical Other.

This will be interesting for me, too. *G* I haven't looked at seriously or taught Beowulf in something like twenty years, and that was an Intro to Lit survey class. There's a good deal of scholarship, translating, thinking, and writing that's happened around the poem, since, as well.

So.  Beowulf Basics from Michael Drout, a scholar, and a nice guy I got to meet  briefly at Kalamazoo last year.

Without further ado, then, we begin.

I shall be cribbing rather heavily from people who know this stuff a good deal better than I do. Should it prove fun, and people are hanging around and interested in talking about it, certainly I can fire off some emails to invite some people who, y'know, do this stuff for real. Our own ellen_fremedon , frex, is certainly more qualified to talk about the language itself, than am I -- if we can get her to think about anything but curling, anyhoo.  I want to point you to her comment on the previous post:

"Huh, I just noticed something-- that án, "one," in line 100 takes line stress and alliteration. That's very rare for pronouns (or determiners, or closed-class words in general), but it sets up an interesting parallelism with a line from Scyld's funeral, fifty lines earlier--

Nalæs hi hine læssan lacum teodan,
þeodgestreonum, þon þa dydon
þe hine æt frumsceafte forð onsendon
ænne ofer yðe umborwesende.

By no means did they provide him less in offerings,
treasures of the people, than those did,
who in the beginning had sent him forth
alone over the waves, when he was a child.

Stressed like that, the þa reads less as "than those ones did" and more like "than they *coughcough* did. You know, them. We're all Christians here, so don't make me spell it out, okay?" That's the only case in all OE literature of pronominal þa taking primary line stress-- I don't know how often it happens with án, but I'm guessing very rarely.

At any rate, the stresses make both words so semantically marked that I think there is definitely a neat parallelism going on-- not quite equating the nameless benefactors who sent Scyld with the lineage of Cain, but emphasizing the othering of all of them within the Christian framework of the poem."

Michael Drout also has an excellent series of posts about dating the manuscript. Which, actually, is a Big Problem. In part because, while the characters don't seem to be Christian, the poet almost certainly is - which introduces some interesting tension both within and without the text. 

Dating Beowulf, part 1
Dating Beowulf, part 2
Dating Beowulf, part 3
Dating Beowulf, part 4

Drout writes,  ". . . the dating of Beowulf is such an emotionally charged problem that friendships have been lost and beer spilled over it (and see the latest issue of Speculum, which I'll talk more about later). At the end of this post I'll speculate as to why this is, but here I thought I would try (as a useful exercise for myself, if for no one else) to lay out the problem as fairly as I can. I'll disclose right up front that I still haven't made up my mind about the date or, rather, that I've made up my mind several times and changed it just as often.

"We start with the manuscript, the unique copy of Beowulf that is known by its library shelfmark, London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv (the "Cotton Vitelllius" part means that it comes from the collection of Sir Robert Cotton and that in his library it was in the bookcase that had the bust of the Roman emperor Vitellius on it. The "A.xv" means it was on the first shelf down, the 15th manuscript over). From examining the handwriting of the manuscript and comparing it to other manuscripts that we do know the date of (some charters and writs and wills have dates on them, other manuscripts mention things happening and we know these dates), we can determine that the manuscript was copied somewhere around the year 1000 (say, between 975 and 1025). Thus the very youngest Beowulf can be is 1025, because the poem can't be written after the manuscript. A date this late would mean that the person who copied part of Beowulf (because in fact two scribes were involved) would have been the author, not just the scribe. I'll discuss this theory more below."

Citing historical events the poem seems to refer to, Drout identifies @ the year 515 as (most probably) the earliest possible date for the work. 500 years is a lot of territory.

"Tolkien was sure that Beowulf came from the "Age of Bede."

Support: The eighth century is seen as a high point of culture and development for Anglo-Saxon England. One strand of the argument (though it is not often stated explicitly any more) is that before the 8th century England was not developed enough to produce a complex written work like Beowulf and after the 8th century it had fallen to a lower level of development due to the destruction of the Viking raids of the 9th century."

Translating the thing, too, proves challenging.

You'll note that the differences begin with the translated versions of the opening word of the poem, Hwaet. This word, literally translated into modern English, means What, but  its Old English meaning is somewhat different. In Old English, when stories were told orally by a storyteller, the word Hwaet was used to get the audience's attention at the beginning of the story in the way that a phrase like Listen to this! might be used today. Translators know that just using the word What wouldn't make much sense to modern readers, so the four translators above have chosen words which they hope will convey a similar meaning. 

Immediately after Hwaet, the word Gardena is also problematic. Gardena is the name of the people who are the subjects of the poem: literally the word is translated as  Spear (Gar) -- Dane (dana). Some translations -- like those by Heaney and Liuzza in the boxes above -- use the literal translation, Spear-Dane, but others give modernized equivalents, such as Danish (in Raffel's translation) and the throne of Denmark (in Alexander's version). 

You'll also observe that each translator has made a different decision about how to translate the word æþelingas -- which, like many translators, I've translated literally as princes but which really has no modern equivalent. Liuzza refers to noble lords and Raffel to ancient kings, while Heaney calls them kings and  princes. Alexander, however, chooses to stay with the original word and calls them athelings -- a literal translation that leaves it to the reader to imagine what this might actually mean.

Beowulf Aloud

The Lesslie Hall translation is available as a free e-book from Project Gutenberg.

The Francis Gummere translation.

An online translation by Dr. David Breeden.

There's a good deal of enthusiasm about the Seamus Heaney translation, among the commenters. There are some reasonable objections to studying that translation as any kind of accurate representation, too, though:

"...the translation by Seamus Heaney is of course very well known already, and though it is not as literal of a translation as perhaps it should be, I think it may be a good introduction to the poem - but only as a first introduction.  Heaney is himself a poet, and so his translation is partially a translation of Beowulf, but also, in a sense, it is Heaney's own poem about Beowulf. More literal but still readable translations I would recommend are those of Howell D. Chickering, Jr., Louis Rodrigues and Roy Liuzza."

Via Unlocked Wordhoard, a new translation that looks quite promising and lovely -- as well as accurate -- from Dr. Sung-Il Lee:

What! Have we not heard of the glory
Of the Spear-Danes' kings in olden days --
How the princes performed deeds of valor?
Not a few times Scyld Scefing seized
The seats of banquet from many a tribe,
Mighty opponents, and terrified the earls.
Since the time when he was found a deserted infant,
He grew up in tender care, soared to the sky,
And prospered with unparalleled honor, till
All neighboring nations over the sea came
To obey and pay tribute to him: a good king he was!

So we have a gallimaufry of issues, all of which offer clues about the poem's age and authorship;: Christian vs pagan tension, linguistic oddities and anachronisms, possible historical events related in the text, and translation choices and vagaries.

First lines aren't really my strength, necessarily--I mentioned as much to Garunya, in his comments.

This was fun, though--and it's even more fun to follow them around to the various journals where people are playing, to get a sense of different styles. Some of 'em are friends-locked. I, umm, don't actually know how to do that since I've not had occasion to, yet. So mine aren't!


Mason Crowder sat in a straight-backed chair, precisely in the center of his basement.

For starters, she'd never been to Mexico. Molly thought about that a lot, delivering pizzas late at night in the Subaru hatchback she'd been driving since high school.

Donner Macklin rubbed a clear circle in the grimy window pane, and peered into the dim room beyond.

One of the best things about Erin was that she always woke first when I was dreaming.

Lucy Jordan drove up to the cottage in late February. She turned into the driveway, killed the engine, then just sat there clutching the wheel and trying not to cry.

Other people playing-- Bogwitch64 - Orogeny - and I'm sure I've missed many many others, once you start following links back.