Word: beowulf
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Heaney's Beowulf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 219 pages; $25) has now been published in the U.S., giving American readers the chance to take the measure of this Harry Potter slayer, the deadest white European male in the politically incorrect literary canon. Judging by the electronic-sales ratings updated constantly by Amazon.com Beowulf is becoming boffo on this side of the Atlantic as well...
...language that Heaney has found to set this old warhorse of a saga running again. All translations, especially of poetry, involve constant compromises between sense and sound, between the literal meanings of the original words and the unique music to which they were set. The Anglo-Saxon idiom of Beowulf sounds particularly alien to modern ears: four stresses per line, separated in the middle by a strong pause, or caesura, with the third stress in each line alliterating with one or both of the first two. Heaney follows these rules to the letter in such lines as "No one could...
Much that seemed off-putting about Beowulf to modern readers becomes, in Heaney's retelling, eerily intriguing instead. Yes, the Scandinavian hero kills three monsters: a scaly maneater called Grendel (Beowulf rips off the creature's right arm at the shoulder); Grendel's aggrieved mother; and, 50 years later, a fire-breathing dragon that mortally wounds Beowulf before expiring. But these bloody deeds actually occupy fairly few of the epic's 3,182 lines. The Beowulf poet, who is recounting legends that were passed down orally from several centuries earlier, is interested less in violence, which appears to be inescapable...
...alludes to the Old Testament and expresses a monotheistic religious faith: "Almighty God rules over mankind/and always has." But the characters in the poem behave according to a moral code in which loving one's enemies and hoping to be redeemed in heaven figure not at all. As Beowulf prepares to fight his second monster, he announces his credo: "It is always better/to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning./For every one of us, living in this world/means waiting for our end. Let whoever can/win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,/that will be his best...
...Beowulf may, by modern standards, seem bloodthirsty and deluded, but Heaney's poetry makes eloquently persuasive the hero's tragic stature. And when he dies, his people mourn not just in sorrow but in fear of the enemies who will surely descend on them...