Beowulf: A Translation Into Modern English

by Samuel Hahn

This is a translation of the Old English poem Beowulf, written in Anglo-Saxon England likely sometime between the 7th and 10th centuries. It was originally composed in Old English, and likely on runes, before it was copied down onto a single manuscript with more or less the alphabet we use today. This manuscript is the only one we know of, and it is authorless, dateless, titleless, and partly singed from a fire in the Ashburnham House in London in 1731. It was not until 1815 that the first translation was produced, and not until 1837 that the first Modern English translation was produced. While today Beowulf is listed among the greatest works of English literature along with Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton, a couple centuries ago it was nearly unheard of. For over a hundred years after the first translation was produced, reading of Beowulf was mostly done in the classroom rather than the armchair, with the poem mostly being used as a learning tool for Old English enthusiasts. Few, if any, people treated it as an imaginative epic to be enjoyed like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid until J.R.R Tolkien published an essay in 1936 titled “ The Monsters and the Critics.” In this essay Tolkien argued that Beowulf lacked criticism, and has been “used as a quarry of fact and fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art,” (Norton, 103). He argued that the Beowulf poet was an imaginative writer, and that the story should be read like a poem, not a historical document (Norton, 103). This essay led to a surge of interest in the poem, changing the way it was read, and led to the publication of hundreds of translations, including the immensely popular Seamus Heaney New Verse Translation in 2000. Had the Ashburnham House Fire of 1731 consumed that precious manuscript, today we would likely never have heard of Hrothgar, Grendel, Heorot, and all the other timeless characters with those fragile pages (from Introduction).

124 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 24, 2020