Fallow

A wet colt trembles

pushing for the teat;

snail paths, old tears, run down

from the corners of his eyes.

There is no sky but iron,

there is no rain but pours;

the fields are pale yellow or red

as withered grass or leaves.

-------------

(Bosworth-Toller: FEALO, fealu, feale; def. se fealwa; adj. FALLOW, pale yellow or red coloured as withered grass or leaves, dusky, bay? flāvus, gilvus, fuscus :-- Fealo líg feormaþ and fénix byrneþ the yellow flame consumes and burns the Phœnix, Exon. 59a; Th. 213, 1; Ph. 218: 104b; Th. 396, 8; Rä. 16, 1. Fealu busius? [= fuscus?], Ælfc. Gl. 79; Som. 72, 81;Wrt. Voc. 46, 38. Se fealwa holen the fallow or withered holly leaf, Exon. 114a; Th. 437, 19; Rä. 56, 10.)

A History of English Poetry, Chapter Two: The Big Lie

Histories of English literature generally begin with a whopping lie. They say that English literature begins in the 7th Century, or thereabouts, it flowers in the great Old English elegiac poems – The Wanderer, The Seafarer – and culminates in Beowulf, the great national epic, the first masterwork of English. Or maybe it flowers with Beowulf and culminates in the elegies -- people still quarrel about the dates of these things. But that's the general idea.

The only trouble with this is that it is wholly untrue. There is no linguist in the world who would identify Old English as the same language as English, if she met them without knowing their historical relationship. Old English is no more English than Latin is French. The two languages are not mutually intelligible. You could make a much stronger case for Dutch being the same language as English than you can for Old English: its grammar and vocabulary are much closer.

Well, giving up that position, you could retreat to this: it may not be the same language, exactly, but it's the same literature. Middle English literature grew out of Old English literature: there's an organic relationship between the two.

But in fact there is no literary relationship. The Middle English poets, so far as we know, were utterly ignorant of Old English. There is no evidence in the whole corpus of Middle English literature of a single reference to Beowulf or any other Old English poem. Old English literature did not grow into Middle English literature. It was completely destroyed by the Norman conquest. It was as dead, by the year 1300, as Hittite or Akkadian. The first important English poet who could read any Old English – and he certainly didn't read Beowulf – was Milton, in the 17th Century. You could speculate that there was a living ballad tradition, which both the sophisticated Old English poets, with their utterly different metrics, and the Middle English poets, with their French verse-forms, were familiar, although the Old English poets never mentioned it and Chaucer mocks the ballads with devastating parodies – but we could speculate all kinds of things. Perhaps they all studied message-in-a-bottle Chinese poetry too, without ever mentioning it. This is not the stuff of literary history.

There is a historical linguistic relationship. The West Saxon dialect of Beowulf is a sort of linguistic uncle (not father) to the Middle English of Chaucer's London. Old English did grow into Middle English, and if you believe that a literature mystically transmits its national soul, by way of the blood of language – and people after all have believed much sillier things -- then you can say that Beowulf begot the Canterbury Tales. But that's the only demonstrable relationship there is. The only thing they have in common beyond that is that they were written on the same island.

The truth of the matter is that the tradition of English poetry begins in the 14th Century, with Chaucer and Gower. And their mentors were not the Beowulf-poet and his ilk: they were above all the Latin poets that they studied in school. Chaucer himself lists them off in the envoy to Troilus – his greatest work, in his own estimation and mine, and the one on which he staked his reputation:

Go, litel book, go litel myn tragedie,
Ther god thy maker yet, er that he dye,
So sende might to make in som comedie!
But litel book, no making thou nenvye,
But subgit be to alle poesye;
And kis the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace
Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.

Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, and Statius. Now, if you've had a modern literary education, you go along just fine with Virgil, Ovid, and Homer. Sure. We read 'em too. But at the end of the line we get a little shaky. Lucan? Maybe we've heard of him. Wrote about the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, right? Fell afoul of Nero? Right, got it. Not that we've read him, but at least we have him placed. But Stace? Who's Stace? Someone who was just brought in because his name rhymed with pace?

No, Stace in fact is Statius, who wrote the Latin silver-age epic, the Thebaid. Chaucer refers to him a lot, in fact; he clearly read him closely and thought highly of him. We have never heard of him, and rightly so: his poetic merits are meager. But he was in Chaucer's pantheon of poets. Chaucer was daring to hope to rank with him.

This passage is just as interesting for the people it doesn't mention. (You will notice not a peep about any balladeer or Old English poet). Chaucer was fluent in French as well as Latin. He translated a fair amount of French poetry, and in fact adopted most of his English verse-forms from it. He may or may not have known Italian, but he knew either the originals or translations of Dante and Boccaccio: he probably borrowed more from Boccaccio than from any other writer. But he declines to mention any of them. He knows them, he's willing to use them, but he has no intention of kissing their footsteps. Earlier on he's mentioned precisely one English poet – his friend and contemporary Gower. The two of them intend, together, to put English poetry on the map.*

For all the apparent humility of this stanza, the gist is not humble at all. His tragedy, he's asserting, is on the same staircase as the great poems of antiquity. Chaucer is well known for his charming self-deprecation, poking fun at his waistline and his bumbling in love, but as a poet he takes himself dead seriously. He knows how good he is. And he knows that he is creating a new national literature. If you read the Hous of Fame and the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women you can see him hammering it out. But this is really the clearest statement. He's written a great tragedy, and now he must write a great comedy. He was to spend the last years of his career taking running starts at a great comedy, groping this way and that in the Canterbury Tales, not quite grasping that it was precisely the mismatchedness, the out-of-control-ness, the centrifugal force of the Tales that would be his lasting contribution to world literature. No sooner did he mount a narrator than the narrator ran away with him: and those runaway narratives, those careening voices, are what we really read Chaucer for: the drunken Miller interrupting the Knight, the wife of Bath justifying her marital strategies, the Pardoner explaining his cons. Chaucer never finished it, and he even tried to take it back, but actually he'd succeeded beyond his dreams.

* Yes, I've read Langland. No, I don't think his poetry is important, either in itself or as part of the English tradition.

In Which I Unsubscribe from a List

Sometimes you don't know how hard you're holding onto something till someone tugs at it. I'd have thought I'd abandoned the idea of being an academic completely, that there was no lingering regret or nostalgia there. But I recently had an extremely unpleasant exchange on a scholarly listserve (I know! How quaint! But scholars are like that.) It's for Chaucer scholars. I'd lurked there for years -- possibly decades? But I almost never posted.

But someone had questioned whether students should be made to learn Old English in order to complete an English major. I then questioned whether Beowulf belonged in the syllabus of an English survey class. The responses were withering, and rather cruel: the assumption that we were simply too lazy to learn Old English, and too stupid to appreciate Old English poetry, reeked from every response. That was not the depressing part, although it was irritating: the depressing part was that absolutely no one would actually produce an argument. "I include Beowulf because it's written in English," someone declared. As if that weren't precisely the question that had been raised: is Old English close enough kin to be regarded as the same language as Modern English? And, the related question, is its masterwork Beowulf properly regarded as part of the tradition of English literature?

It has not always been so regarded. In the 19th Century, which is when people other than a few antiquarian cranks began reading it, it was generally considered a different, though of course genetically related, language. It was called "Anglo-Saxon." Renaming it "Old English" was largely a political move by astute academics, not a linguistic one. The West-Saxon dialect in which Beowulf is written is actually more uncle than father to Chaucer's Middle English. There's lots of ways to slice the pie. The old saying that "a 'language' is a dialect with an army" has a lot of truth to it: if Portuguese was spoken in a just a few villages it would be probably be regarded as a difficult dialect of Spanish, not its own language; if Catalonia had ever managed ever to win its independence, Catalonian would certainly be regarded as a language, not a Spanish dialect. There are no dependable objective ways of deciding these borderline cases. The motive for renaming Anglo-Saxon Old English was, at least partly, justifying its inclusion in the study of English literature.

The question's not all that important, and I don't really care how it's decided: Beowulf can look after itself, these days. And I understand that modern scholars who hoped to make a living out of selling their skills in Old English would not look kindly on someone proposing to drop it from the English syllabus. But the point is that I would expect this group of people to at least be able to have a conversation about it, a conversation that appreciated the complexities of classifying languages and dialects, and which bore in mind that everything you keep in a syllabus comes at the expense of dropping something else out. Whether Beowulf is worth reading in the original -- well, to me, and to most people who have ever read it, that's a stupid question. Of course it is. But the intelligent question is, is it more worthwhile than reading, say, Dryden and Pope? Or Swinburne and Sir Walter Scott? Those are the sort of trade-offs we're talking about. (A further depressing thing was the realization that no one was interested in this probably because almost none of them ever had given a damn, or ever would give a damn, about Dryden or Sir Walter Scott.)

Of course, the main thing that distressed me was not being taken seriously. It wounded my amour-propre. If I'd finished my damned dissertation at Yale, if I'd stuck it out through the recession of the 80's and gotten an academic job, people would have responded to me completely differently. But still, there would have been no real conversation. Because scholars, of all people, are the least likely to actually talk about these things. The discussion of such things is the currency of their economy: they can't afford to do it for free. I remembered, in the course of this interchange, the oppressive atmosphere of the years when I was writing, or rather not writing, my dissertation: every stray thought I had, I seized and hoarded. It might be an article someday! It might prove that I'm a serious scholar! There was something horrible, and deforming, about treating my own thoughts as property. I hated it.

But. But. The first couple years at Yale were so wonderful. Because we weren't scholars yet, we grad students, and we did talk about books. We had wonderful conversations. It was the world I wanted to live in. Coming from Springfield, Oregon -- it was amazing, incredible. Like coming out of a dark hole and being in the sunlight for the first time. I was so grateful for the friends there, for the talk. It made me so happy.

And then it all crumbled and went away, as people got their degrees and went off to teach in Georgia or upstate New York or L.A., and for twenty long years, I had nothing of the sort. It's this blog community, all of you, who have given it back to me. I'm terribly grateful to you all. Thank you. All of you. For being willing to talk, and to listen. Most of you haven't read Beowulf in Old English. That's all right. Because you'd want to if you had the time. And even if you didn't want to -- if you did it anyway, you'd want to talk about it. It would engage your heart and your mind and you'd say what you damn well thought about it.

I unsubscribed from the Chaucer list this morning. I subscribed thinking I would find conversations of the sort I love, many years ago. I almost never did. I don't need to look for them there any more, though.

The Wanderer (complete)

Often a friendless man must wait it out for favor,
The Measurer's mercy, although, troubled in mind,
He must for a long while, over the water,
Stir with his hands the frost-cold sea,
Wander in exile: Wyrd has all been spoken.

So said the earth-stepper, remembering hardships,
And the fall of his family
In savage slaughter.

Often I have told my trouble to the dawn;
There is no living creature now
That I can talk to freely. I know for a fact
It is a better habit to keep your heart's cage locked --
To keep your mind's wallet closed -- think what you will.
A worn out heart cannot withstand Wyrd
And a disordered mind mends nothing.
Someone who wants to be thought well of
Binds his unhappiness up tight in his breast.

So I have hidden my heart-spirit
Miserable with care, cut off from home,
Far from my family, bound in fetters;
Since I wrapped my gold-friend, years ago,
In the darkness of earth, and I, abject,
Went from there, winter-troubled,
Over the lacing waves, looking, hall-sick,
For where I might find, far or near,
A master in a mead hall
Who knew of me and mine,
Or who would comfort a man of no kindred,
Welcome him warmly. Wise men know
How cruel a companion sorrow is
For a man meager in patrons.
He is attended by exile, not golden armrings;
A frozen heart-cage, not the flowering earth.
He remembers hall-friends and receiving treasure;
How in his young days his gold-friend
Accustomed him to feasting: all joy fails.

A man who must long forgo his friend-lord's counsel
When sorrow and sleep
Both together bind him
He imagines he embraces his lord
Holds him and kisses him, lays hands and head
On his knee, as he used to, years of days ago,
When his lord still gave gifts from the throne.
Then the friendless warrior wakes again
Sees before him the fallow waves,
The sea-birds swimming and spreading their feathers
Snow and frost, and falling hail.

Then his heart-wounds are the heavier,
Yearning for the beloved. Longing is renewed
When the memory of kinsmen runs through his mind;
He meets with song-staves, eagerly searches for
The faces of hall-friends. They swim far away;
The fleeting spirits will not speak.
Sorrow is renewed when a man often sends
His weary mind over the lacing waves.

I can't tell why, wandering this world,
My mind does not darken. I think of the lives of men:
How suddenly bold men leave the board;
How this middle earth, every day,
Withers and fails. No man becomes wise
Without a share of winters, in this world's dominion.
A thoughtful man must bide his time: he cannot be
Too hot-hearted or too hasty with words,
Too timid, too rash, too greedy for goods,
Nor too quick to boast, unless he knows best.
Before he promises, let him pause
Until he knows the turn
Of other men's hearts.

A man with eyes will understand
How ghostly it will be when the good
Of the world is all laid waste;
As now here and there, throughout this earth,
Walls stand, swept by the wind,
Frost-white, the courts frozen,
The mead-halls crumbling, their masters lying
Far from the feast; all of them fallen
Proud by the door-posts.

All borne away. Some have been taken in war;
Some, scavenger-birds have scattered
Over the high sea; some the pale wolf
Has shared out with death; some, blood-dabbled,
Have been hidden by friends in scrapes of earth.
The One who made the generations of men
Emptied this earthyard, until --
The noise of its townsmen stopped --
Its old giants' work stood idle.

So a man who thinks through it all --
This dark life, this deep-laid wall --
Wise-minded, he remembers
War's slaughter, and speaks these words:

Where is the horse? Where is the rider?
Where is the giver of treasure?
Where are the places at the feast?
Where are the pleasures of the hall?
Ea-la, the bright cup! Ea-la, the burnished warrior!
Ea-la, the prince's glory! How the time departs,
Darkens under the helmet of night, as if it had never been!

The warriors have been carried away
By the ash-wood's power,
By death-greedy weapons, by Wyrd in its glory;
And these stone cliffs are beaten by storms.
Frost settles, and grips the ground,
Declaring winter. The dark comes,
The night-shadow darkens; it sends from the North
Raw hail against raised faces.
Everything is earned with pain
In this earth's kingdom; below heaven
It is Wyrd that turns this world.

Brief the time of having, brief the time of home,
Brief the time of family, brief the time of friends.
All the works of this world lose their worth.

So he said to himself, sitting apart in thought:
Well for him who keeps faith, and doesn't uncover too soon
What's deep in his heart, till he knows what to do,
How to mend matters; well for him who looks for mercy --
For our only solid ground --
for the grace of our Father in heaven.

The Wanderer (V)

Here is the end of the poem. Spears were made of ash-wood, and ash-trees are emblematic of fate in Germanic mythology; the poet is drawing liberally on both his cultural traditions, both of which emphasize the shortness and fragility of life in this world.

The warriors have been carried away
By the ash-wood's power,
By death-greedy weapons, by Wyrd in its glory;
And these stone cliffs are beaten by storms.
Frost settles, and grips the ground,
Declaring winter. The dark comes,
The night-shadow darkens; it sends from the North
Raw hail against raised faces.
Everything is earned with pain
In this earth's kingdom; below heaven
It is Wyrd that turns this world.

Brief the time of having, brief the time of home,
Brief the time of family, brief the time of friends.
All the works of this world lose their worth.

So he said to himself, sitting apart in thought:
Well for him who keeps faith, and doesn't uncover too soon
What's deep in his heart, till he knows what to do,
How to mend matters; well for him who looks for mercy --
For our only solid ground --
For the grace of our Father in heaven.

The Wanderer (IV)

So a man who thinks through it all --
This dark life, this deep-laid wall --
Wise-minded, he remembers
War's slaughter, and speaks these words:

Here follows the passage that is, rightfully, the most famous ubi sunt in Old English poetry. Tolkien rewrote a version of it, a very good one, as a sample of the poetry of the Riders of Rohan, and thence, altered again, it actually appeared on the lips of Theoden in the Jackson Lord of the Rings movie -- the only bit of Old English poetry, that I know of, ever to have reached a mass audience.

Where is the horse? Where is the rider?
Where is the giver of treasure?
Where are the places at the feast? Where are the pleasures of the hall?
Ea-la, the bright cup! Ea-la, the burnished warrior!
Ea-la, the prince's glory! How the time departs,
Darkens under the helmet of night, as if it had never been!

Difficulties for the translator abound. First of all: hwaer com mearh? is not exactly "where is the horse?" It is not even "where has the horse gone?" Literally it's "where came horse?" Maybe I'm being too finicky, but it seems to me of great importance that the speaker actually locates himself in the same place as all these lost things -- they haven't gone away from him, they have come to the same place he has -- the place of ruin and loss. I was tempted to try "where has the horse come to?" or even "what has the horse come to?" and I might have gone with it, except that the question is repeated twice, with different subjects, and what is iffy once becomes emphatically ridiculous three times in a row. Tolkien's solution is the neatest and most economical, I think -- dropping the question of coming and going altogether, and saying simply "where is the horse?" (I don't know, by the way, that Tolkien invented this solution, only that he used it. I'm deliberately avoiding other translations till I'm done.)

The other thing that defeated me was the alliteration. All three subjects in the first two lines of the ubi sunt alliterate, in the Old English -- mearh, magu, mathum-giefa -- mare, man, and mathom-giver -- and it's important that they should do so. But I could not for the life of me come up with three plain but suitable words that would alliterate in Modern English, and here of all places the diction needed to be simple, clean, straightforward. So I surrendered, I hope gracefully. The first two lines alliterate, if you can call it that, on nothing but the repetition of "where?"

Then there's "ea-la!" (the "ea" is a diphthong, a long 'a' sliding into 'aw'.) Most people translate it as "alas!" but I couldn't bring myself to do that. It's accurate enough, and etymologically correct, but its associations are disastrous. Love-sick swains, Romeos, and Ophelias say "alas!" -- not hardbitten soldiers. Since it has no real semantic content, I decided it didn't need to be translated at all, that it wouldn't hurt anyone to have to learn the sound, in Old English, of inarticulate grief.

The Wanderer (III)

A man with eyes will understand
How ghostly it will be when the good
Of the world is all laid waste;
As now here and there, throughout this earth,
Walls stand, swept by the wind,
Frost-white, the courts frozen,
The mead-halls crumbling, their masters lying
Far from the feast; all of them fallen
Proud by the door-posts.

All borne away. Some have been taken in war;
Some, scavenger-birds have scattered
Over the high sea; some the pale wolf
Has shared out with death; some, blood-dabbled,
Have been hidden by friends in scrapes of earth.
The One who made the generations of men
Emptied this earthyard, until --
The noise of its townsmen stopped --
Its old giants' work stood idle.

Giants. What to do with the giants? Giants to us are irresistably fairy-tale and comic -- since we don't believe in them -- and their presence here can only mystify most modern readers, who can't be expected to know that any impressive stonework of forgotten origin was assumed by the Anglo-Saxons to be the work of giants -- a race struck down by God, ages ago, for their pride and presumption. It is not the first time, that is to say, that God has depopulated this place. At first I tried just leaving the giants out, and no doubt if I had been able to settle on a good line about ancient ruins standing empty I would have done so.

I have to confess that the warriors of this deserted place did not really fall proud by the door-posts. They fell proud by the wall -- wlanc be wealle, one of my favorite formulas of Old English verse. Though to tell the truth though I'm not quite sure what falling proud by the wall means -- possibly it connotes last-ditch struggle -- backs against the wall -- fighting to the last man. But anyway, Modern English has no initial 'wl' sound, more's the pity, and it has no word for pride that I could think of that begins even with plain 'w', and there are already too many "walls" in this section of the poem for my taste -- and more to come -- so I made them fall by the door, with posts to alliterate with proud. (Plus I've always loved the compound "door-post" -- I don't know why. If I were a scholar I couldn't do this, but I'm a massage therapist, and I can do whatever I like.)

The Wanderer (II)

A man who must long forgo his friend-lord's counsel
When sorrow and sleep
Both together bind him
He imagines he embraces his lord
Holds him and kisses him, lays hands and head
On his knee, as he used to, years of days ago,
When his lord still gave gifts from the throne.
Then the friendless warrior wakes again
Sees before him the fallow waves,
The sea-birds swimming and spreading their feathers
Snow and frost, and falling hail.

Then his heart-wounds are the heavier,
Yearning for the beloved. Longing is renewed
When the memory of kinsmen runs through his mind;
He meets with song-staves, eagerly searches for
The faces of hall-friends. They swim far away;
The fleeting spirits will not speak.
Sorrow is renewed when a man often sends
His weary mind over the lacing waves.

The lacing waves is the best I can do for wathuma gebind, literally "the binding of the waves." The image is clear to me -- the way that, after staring at the sea for a long time, you see the waves start to form interweaving patterns, to tie knots in the water. But I didn't like "binding," which has for me its chief connotations with ski technology. I like the sound of "lacing," but it loses an important resonance with the overriding images of constriction and imprisonment. I've played with words for tangling and snaring and knitting and knotting and tying, but nothing has quite come together.

I can't tell why, wandering this world,
My mind does not darken. I think of the lives of men:
How suddenly bold men leave the board;
How this middle earth, every day,
Withers and fails. No man becomes wise
Without a share of winters, in this world's dominion.
A thoughtful man must bide his time: he cannot be
Too hot-hearted or too hasty with words,
Too timid, too rash, too greedy for goods,
Nor too quick to boast, unless he knows best.
Before he promises, let him pause
Until he knows the turn
Of other men's hearts.

I cheat sometimes with the alliteration. Here are the rules of alliteration, in brief:

The first sounds of stressed syllables are the only candidates for it. In the first half-line one or both of the two most heavily stressed syllables must begin with the same sound; in the second half-line the first heavily stressed syllable must begin with that sound, and the second must not. My rules have been more lax: I have only required that at least one heavily stressed syllable in each half-line alliterate, and I often alliterate on the second stressed syllable of the second half-line.

What is "the same sound"? In old english, 'sp' and 'st' are their own sounds, and can only rhyme with themselves, not with any old initial 's'. Otherwise things are pretty much as you'd expect, except that any initial vowel rhymes with any other initial vowel -- the absence of a consonant, at the start of a stressed syllable, is perceived, you might say, as a particular sound. Hence my lines such as "He is attended by exile, not golden armrings," where the alliteration is on Exile and Armrings. I have extended this un-consonant to include 'h', since the Modern English 'h' has dwindled from its former throat-clearing rasp to a barely-there aspiration; hence "Of other men's hearts," where I mean Other to alliterate with Hearts. I've taken a few other liberties that an Old English poet would not have allowed himself -- in "He imagines he embraces his lord," for instance, I allowed iMagine to alliterate with emBrace, because to my ear the 'b' in embrace, smothered between its 'm' and 'r', is nearly the same sound as the strong 'm' of imagine. And for me 's' alliterates with 'sp' and 'st', if it has to. Cynewulf would shudder.

The Wanderer (I)

At the beach I got maybe halfway through translating The Wanderer, an Old English poem from the 10th Century or thereabouts. Since I reckon most people would prefer to get it in bite-size pieces, if at all, I'll post as I go along, with comments as I please. It's about five pages long. Below is first installment.

Translating Old English alliterative poetry into Modern English alliterative poetry is relatively easy. Sometimes the alliteration can be lifted wholesale from the original: vowels shift around a lot more than consonants, over the centuries, and usually one or more of the heavily-stressed, alliterating words that carry the heaviest charge of meaning in a line has a direct descendant to build a Modern English line around. Alliteration in any case is far easier than rhyme in any Germanic language.

The difficulty is in capturing the rhythm. Modern English, having lost most of its inflections, is afflicted with a swelling rash of articles and prepositions, little unstressed words that we can't do without -- and keep a remotely natural-sounding diction -- but which wreck the pattern of Old English sound. The usual rhythm of Old English goes BOM bom BOM bom BOM bom BOM bom; the usual rhythm of Modern English is more like bom BOM bom bom BOM bom bom BOM bom. The brilliant effects of iambic pentameter are founded on the interplay between the theoretical five stressed syllables of a line and the actual two or three that Modern English supplies. I have found it difficult to break the pentameter habit, but it seems critical to me, to catch even a ghost of the Old English, to have two strong stresses in each half-line, with a strong caesura in between. The problem is that this bloats the line. I've switched back and forth several times between breaking my "long alliterative line" into two lines -- which feels a little juvenile and jerky -- and keeping lines that feel a little too long. (The solution that immediately occurred to me, of course, was to adopt William Blake's magnificent fourteeners; but this was a disaster. Its rhythm is even further away from that of Old English verse, very Miltonic, very latinate. No go.)

What I found myself doing was occasionally falling into a "hypometric" couplet or two -- lines with only two major stresses -- but keeping for the most part the basic form of "four stresses with a hole in the middle" that Seamus Heaney used for his translation of Beowulf. I have a feeble excuse for this variation: something like it occurs, if not very often, in Old English poetry -- isolated so-called "half-lines," with double alliteration. More common are "hypermetric" lines -- in which each half-line has three heavy stresses, rather than two -- when it wants to slow down and become graver: the last five lines of The Wanderer are in "hypermetric" verse. That's not really a valid precedent. Really I'm just following George Orwell's rhetorical dictum, that one should break any rule rather than say something downright barbarous.

The real rhythm of Old English verse is simply not reproducible in Modern English: it has to do with how two long, stressed syllables crowd each other or back away from each other within the half-line. Maybe I'll take Rachel's suggestion and try to produce an audio file of The Wanderer in the original, so you can hear it. I know of nothing like it in the modern poetry of romance or germanic languages.

Here is the beginning of The Wanderer:

Often a friendless man must wait it out for favor,
The Measurer's mercy, although, troubled in mind,
He must for a long while, over the water,
Stir with his hands the frost-cold sea,
Wander in exile: Wyrd has all been spoken.

Metod, "the Measurer," is the old Pagan name for personified Fate (Old English "Wyrd"), adopted easily, here, into an epithet for the Christian God. Anglo-Saxon England was remarkable for the smoothness of its transition to Christianity -- it was fortunate in its missionaries, who were broadminded, tactful men, more inclined to assimilate Pagan thought and practice than to challenge it. Early scholars of Old English, who were eager to reconstruct a Pagan past, and who had a Protestant prejudice against the medieval Church, tended to see, in poems such as this one, Pagans pretending to be Christian. In the last generation or two a more sophisticated understanding has developed, which sees this Christianity as deep and sincere, though certainly colored by the Pagan understanding of fate.

So said the earth-stepper, remembering hardships,
And the fall of his family
In savage slaughter.

Often I have told my trouble to the dawn;
There is no living creature now
That I can talk to freely. I know for a fact
It is a better habit to keep your heart's cage locked --
To keep your mind's wallet closed -- think what you will.
A worn out heart cannot withstand Wyrd
And a disordered mind mends nothing.
Someone who wants to be thought well of
Binds his unhappiness up tight in his breast.

The shift from third person into first person is as unexpected in the original as it looks here. Translators sometimes deal with it by putting quotation marks at the beginning of the poem, but then you have to decide where they end, and where they begin again, and so on; the first person speaker seems to come in and out of focus throughout the poem. The effect to me is dreamlike and satisfying; I feel no particular need to sort out narrators and tidily assign speeches to them.

So I have hidden my heart-spirit
Miserable with care, cut off from home,
Far from my family, bound in fetters;
Since I wrapped my gold-friend, years ago,
In the darkness of earth, and I, abject,
Went from there, winter-troubled,
Over the lacing waves, looking, hall-sick,
For where I might find, far or near,
A master in a mead hall
Who knew of me and mine,
Or who would comfort a man of no kindred,
Welcome him warmly. Wise men know
How cruel a companion sorrow is
For a man meager in patrons.
He is attended by exile, not golden armrings;
A frozen heart-cage, not the flowering earth.
He remembers hall-friends and receiving treasure;
How in his young days his gold-friend
Accustomed him to feasting: all joy fails.

"Gold-friend" means king, liege-lord -- an Anglo-Saxon king traditionally rewarded his thanes according to their bravery in battle, typically with gold arm-rings (though it might be anything -- horses, land, anything valuable). The relationship between lord and thane was an intense one, even a passionate one. Becoming lordless is generally the worst calamity an Old English poet can imagine.

More anon...

Deor

Several things recently have conspired to send me back to this Old English poem. Yesterday I dusted off my old Pope edition, and read it again; and today I tried to render it in Modern English in the same form of verse that Seamus Heaney used for Beowulf (though without those caesuras I so dislike). Whether the poem makes sense, without lots of notes explaining the legends it refers to, I don't know. It might help to know that Weland was a famous artificer, in the Daedalus line, and that Nithhad was an evil king who cut his hamstrings so as to keep him captive; part of Weland's revenge was raping Nithhad's daughter, Beaduhild. Time presents ironies to layer on top of the poem's -- no one knows now who Theodric was, or where the city of the Maerings might have been, where his "well-known" reign took place. You can find a text, with someone else's translation, here

Weland, limping, learned the rack of exile;
A one-minded man, he endured hardship;
He had as his friends fear and longing,
Cold winter and want.
He found out miseries: Nithhad laid on him
Supple fetters, sinew-bonds.
That is over and done with; this may be too.

Her brothers' deaths were not so great a burden
On Beaduhild's spirit as her own business --
She perceived quickly that she was pregnant
But she could not resolve on a way around it.
That is over and done with; this may be too.

We are given to know that the grieving of Maethilde,
Dear to Yayot, became endlessly deeper;
Separated from sleep by her love's sorrow.
That is over and done with; this may be too.

Theodric mastered the city of the Maerings
For thirty winters, as is well known.
That is over and done with; this may be too.

And we have heard of Eormanric's
Wolfish thoughts; he ruled a wide
Land of the Goths, a bloody lord:
Many men sat bound in sorrow
Wishing his power were overcome.
That is over and done with; this may be too.

When a man is cast down, cut off from delight,
His mind darkens, and he thinks his measure
Of affliction will be endless.
Let him think then that a lord who knows
Turns his way often through this world
Showing gentleness to some, and flowering joy,
As well as, to some, their share of woe.

I will say so much of myself --
I held the post of the Hedenings poet,
And was dear to their lord. My name was Deor.
I composed, many winters, for a kind master;
But a song-skilled newcomer now enjoys the estate
The guardian of men once gave to me.
That is over and done with; this may be too.

Koshtra's Retraction

Okay. Time for me to eat crow. I'm as far as Beowulf's arrival at Heorot, in Seamus Heaney's translation. I'm blown away. This is a magnificent translation. Read it. He gets Beowulf. No other translator has ever succeeded so well, particularly in capturing the Beowulf-Poet's tone, his modulations from formality to pathos, his passion and his sly, straight-faced humor.

Read it. But be aware that it does not (as some of the rave reviews imply) reproduce the Old English verse-form. This is not a "modernization" -- as some translations of Chaucer or Shakespeare, for instance, are. The words and syntax and verse form are quite different. Which is as it should be. (At this point I'm going to get technical; if you're not interested in metrics, it's probably time to move on. Just get Heaney's translation and enjoy the ride.)

In Old English manuscripts poetry is not broken into lines: it is usually "pointed," looking something like this:

there at the pier stood . the ringed prow . icy and out-eager . a prince's vessel . they laid . their dear king . giver of rings . on the ship's bosom . famous by the mast . there were many treasures . from far ways . ornaments loaded . I never heard of a comelier . keel furnished . with battle weapons . and war dress . swords and hauberks . on his breast lay . many treasures . to go with him . into the tide's sway .

(I've tried to be very literal here, but I've added a sprinkling of articles -- "a" and "the" -- that already vitiate the strength of the original.)

Some of the very earliest editors of Old English verse treated the "points" as line-breaks, printing it thus:

There at the pier stood
The ringed prow
Icy and out-eager
A prince's vessel

(The lines are bound into "couplets" by alliteration: both heavily stressed syllables in line one would alliterate with the first heavily stressed syllable of line two.)

Others -- whose practice prevailed -- borrowed the lineation of the later Middle English alliterative tradition, which printed both "half-lines" (as they came to be called) as a single line with a space, a caesura, in between, thus:

There at the pier stoodsssthe ringed prow,
Icy and out-eager,sssa prince's vessel.

All of Old English verse is now printed this way, in a form that no Old English poet ever saw. Translators, to a man, ape this format, which saves space and "looks like poetry" to people trained in pentameter. But usually they dump even the caesura, destroying the last remaining indication of half of the line-breaks in the poem. Thus Heaney has:

A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,
ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.

Now this is a beautiful rendering, and it alliterates (as my own does not), though on different words than the original. But notice what's happened. The alliteration has stopped being functional. It no longer ties two lines together; it just decorates one line, and it seems like possibly a bit too much of a good thing, even though Heaney sensibly drops one of the alliterations from each first "half-line." The other thing that has happened is that the verse has sped up. It's verse to be spoken, not chanted, now.

Another thing that is injured -- Heaney is sensitive to this, but it can't be helped -- is that the Beowulf-poet alliterates on the words that are most important to him. There is a deep sense to what alliterates. In the first line, or couplet if you like, the words that alliterate in the Old English are "pier" and "ring"; in the second it's "icy," "out-eager," and "prince." Compare that with Heaney's "ring" and "rode," and "clad" and "craft." The Old English alliterations emphasize the meaning of the verse; Heaney's just ornaments it. This example is maybe a little unfair on Heaney, who is very aware of this property of alliteration and tries to reproduce it, often with brilliant success. But even he loses more of this than he manages to save.

The details of Old Germanic metrics are too complicated for me to get into here. It's far more complex and satisfying than "a four-beat line" (or two-beat, depending on how you count.) It simply can't be reproduced in modern English, which usually has only two (not three) degrees of stress and no variation in vowel "quantity" (a "long a" is not a longer version of a "short a," in modern English -- it's just a completely different vowel.) Suffice it to say that Heaney has not, and would never claim to have, reproduced the Old English meter. He's translated it into a variation on its nearest cousin, the Middle English alliterative line, which is simpler and more forgiving.

Three Reasons Why You Should Not Read Beowulf

Patry Francis recently listed Beowulf under the heading of Great Books that I Personally Hated. I flinched when I read that, and it immediately launched this diatribe (aimed at the creators of Surveys of English Literature) in my head -- which boils down, basically, to three reasons why you should not read the poem at all.

1. People say you should read it because it is the beginning of English Literature. This is not true. It has nothing to do with the formation of English Literature. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton never heard of it. After its rediscovery and translation in the 19th Century it had some minor influence on English poetry. Not much. There'd be a much better case for reading Virgil at the beginning of an English syllabus than for reading Beowulf.

2. People say you should read it because it tells you about the Old Germanic peoples that the English arose from. Well, sure. So does Old High German. So does Old Frisian. So does Old Norse. Why pick this one difficult, idiosyncratic poem -- which exists in only one manuscript, and is referred to by no other medieval writer -- and pretend it's the national epic of the English? I'll tell you why. Because the English dearly wanted to have a national epic, in the 19th Century, when nationalism was trendy, so they made one up. It will teach you precisely nothing about the English nation (whatever that is.)

3. People say it's a great poem. Well, it is, but it translates horribly. Its metrics are foreign and complicated, its images violently compressed, its stock of metaphors is alien to us. Its literary, legendary, and historical allusions are almost all to things we don't know about. Either you flatten it into dreadful broken-backed prose, or wrench it completely away from its poetic roots and stick it in a pot of blank verse or (even worse!) rhymed quatrains or heroic couplets, where it will die a ghastly death, or you create a brand new modern English verse-form that no one but a few scholars will have any idea how to pronounce.

Actually, of course, these are not reasons not to read Beowulf. They are just reasons not to read Beowulf in translation. If you have the time to learn Old English and find your bearings in Old Germanic culture -- it is one of the most beautiful long poems ever written. You'll be just a hop skip & jump also, then from being able to read Old Norse poetry, which is wonderful stuff too. But don't read it as English Literature. Read it as the most beautiful, intricately-wrought artifact of a dead civilization. Which is what it is. If you don't have time to learn old English, don't insult the poem by reading a translation. Just pick up a recording of it, in Old English, by someone who understands Old English metrics, and listen to the music of the words. It's like listening to the sea.

First Parenthesis (tired of earnestness at the moment)

I just saw an ad for a toy DNA sequencer in Wired magazine. (This maybe isn't news. I'm pretty seriously unplugged, and I'm always discovering cool "new" things that everyone else has been tired of for six months.)

Second Parenthesis (needing to boast, because I was so nervous about it)

I just got done chanting Beowulf in Old English, and talking about gold, dragons, and linguistic change to a class at my kids' highschool. There's always a couple of kids you can see getting the bug. ("wyrm is worm and it's the same word except it sounds really cool, and it's a thousand years old, and back then it meant serpent!" and "so that's why knight is spelled so weird!") About half of them were eager for me to come teach an Old English class next quarter. It was so damn much fun to read Old English again and they're such wonderful kids that maybe I'll do it, even if I don't have time for it.

Okay. Back soon to our regularly scheduled programming.