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It so happened that the same day a literate and cultured friend told me that Seamus Heaney's translation of 'Beowulf' was "the most widely unread best-seller in America" I found myself watchin g John Lafia's spoof horror movie "Monster!". The coincidence - two sets of down home folks menaced by creatures from the black lagoon - amused me. For the first time since my student days, taking the Heaney route, I revisited the Anglo-Saxon poet. Bar an appeal to something in the psyche of our species, "monsters" is all the two have in common.
Lafia's 1999 film is a knowing put-on of '50'sB-movie drech - a post-modern, I suppose we could vaguely say, el cheapo take less on Godzilla than the movie-business. It is doubtless best seen in a drive-in. 'Beowulf' anonymously written some thirteen hundred years earlier is anything but a B offering. A mini-epic poem of some thirty-two hundred lines it stands towering as the departure point landmark of English Literature.
Written in (Old) English, 'Beowulf' is set in Scandinavia. Its eponymous hero, the Hector-cum-Shane of his tribe is his liege-lord king's top gun. When a vast, bestial, troll-like man-eating creature takes to menacing a neighbouring lord's territory, Beowulf rides into town - sails in, actually - and takes the monster on. Single-handedly he despatches it - only to provoke the wrath of its even more loathsomely menacing mother. Once again Beowulf prevails. Loaded with gifts and praise he rides away into the sunset - sails back across the "whales' way" - to his home. Now the narrative fast-forwards on by fifty years. After a quickly summarised cycle of tribal victories and setbacks, Beowulf's own land is menaced by a Wagnerianesque dragon that guards a fabulous treasure hoard. Incensed at the theft of an item from this stash the dragon has taken to revengefully stalking the land. Albeit distinctly foreseeing his own death Beowulf does what a man's gotta do. He confronts the dragon and, himself mortally wounded, slays it. Like 'The Iliad' the Anglo-Saxon poem ends with funeral rites.
As with any 'grown-up' work of literature, it is not 'Beowulf's' story line but the sub-text, its theme that gives the poem its lasting weight and impact. It is set in a bleak world. Long, sub-zero winter nights prevail. Man is camped around a small fire that is at the center of an icy vastness where food is short and monotonous, rival tribes and clans threatening. Life is short too. It is a world where to quote the best line in "Monster!" (delivered by the great M. Emmett Walsh) "Sometimes stuff happens and you have to deal with it".
But what stuff? Well, two kinds, I guess. First there are the insults and inroads of 'Them and Us' clan warfare. The sole way to deal with this age-old fact of life is retaliation in kind. Atonement and honor only come through eye-for-eye revenge. It is the ethos that, a millennium and a half later, still pervades Heaney's own native territory. The Scandinavian sagas are shot through with heroes looking for men who shot their pa.
But human menace most often seems less than the half of it. Huddled around the fire, these early Viking tribesmen, rather like contemporary Californians, must have ceaselessly wondered what was out there in the encircling dark.
Our worst expectations, of course.
The dark, inchoate monsters are the embodiment of all our primordial fears. In this respect academics have argued for at least a century as to whether 'Beowulf' is a Christian poem. It is certainly replete with Old Testament references. My own hunch is that writing about days of yore in a relatively civilised England, the poet, in his head, was a Christian. But a pagan at heart.
The brave message of 'Beowulf' is that our lives are but short flashes of light between eternal oblivions and that if you've got any class you don't sell yourself short when stuff needs dealing with. 'Beowulf' was not written in rhyme but in the heavily accented, alliterative form of early Northern European verse. Heaney adopts
essentially the same mode.
The fortunes of war favored Hrothgar.
Friend and kinsmen flashed to his ranks,
Young followers, a force that grew
To a mighty army.
This is itself good stuff. Whether Heaney is a major poet or, as my friend uncharitably believes, "another professional Irishman", he is too erudite, far too good a technician, not to translate accurately and with colloquial vigor. I have only one raised eyebrow. Putting main emphasis on the verbs - as is our way today - Heaney drives the narrative along. But the original poet was not too concerned with narrative. 'Beowulf' is full of digressions (Homeric genealogies; battles long ago) flashbacks and fast-forwarding. Long before he sends them off to the O.K. Corral, so to speak, the poet quite casually tells us that the smart money is not on the Clantons.
Action - the big fights are perfunctorily dealt with - is not what the poem is about. Rather, it is about things.
Beowulf and his people lived lives of considerable deprivation. They could never be sure of enough warmth, light, food, creature comforts. Such acquisitions as they did have - weapons, jewellery, furs, gold - thus took on huge significance. Bestowed by the liege-lord for services rendered such rich things conferred honor and status way beyond today's company Lexus. And as a consequence the 'Beowulf' poet's chief verbal concern is with nouns and adjectives as he describes objects. 'Beowulf' is not a movie but a richly brocaded tapestry. It is as much a picture as a story book. The ornamental sword-hilt triggers a snapshot cameo and the poet implies that in a hostile environment, in the closed circle of eye-for-eye retaliation, the best we can come by is the transitory consolation of a 'lasting' object, a memory of duty met square on.
Heaney should not be much knocked for upping the poem's momentum in his new version. He is translating not only into our idiom but for our times and sensibilities. He is right in his introduction to point up the direct connection between a clanswoman keening over Beowulf's funeral pyre and, not to mention Omagh, of today's TV image of her latter-day sister in Kosovo or Tibet.
Judging it against the highest levels - 'The Iliad', Our Mutual Friend', 'Catch 22' - I personally have reservations about 'Beowulf'. In particular I find the super-hero ability of its hero militates against the 'man's got to do' ethos the poem promulgates. I find the disjointed narrative too broken-backed: to the point, indeed, of wondering whether a wise after the conversion Christian slant has been awkwardly grafted on to a fiercely uncharitable original.
For all that, coming off a standing start, 'Beowulf' was one hell of a benchmark for our language. Heaney's version, streets ahead of anything else on offer, makes a fair stab at indicating such quality. Read it before you head out for the drive-in.
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