Classics and the Western Canon discussion

Please post comments on background information, translations, and other miscellaneous information here. I will post the reading schedule on May 26. The weekly group discussions will begin June 2.

I have four translations of Beowulf and will be dipping in and out of all of them. But I will rely primarily on the Seamus Heaney and Stephen Mitchell.

The Seamus Heaney translation: Beowulf

The Stephen Mitchell translation: Beowulf.

The Howell D. Chickering, Jr. translation: Beowulf

The Maria Dahvana Headley translation: Beowulf: A New Translation.

The Maria Dahvana Headley translation is an absolute riot. Hers is not so much a translation as a re-creation. She reclaims a thousand-year-old manuscript with raucous rhymes and refreshing language pulsating with contemporary idioms. It is definitely not your father’s Beowulf. If you plan to read it, I suggest you do so alongside a more traditional translation so you can see how she plays with language.

Incidentally, Headley’s novel, The Mere Wife is a retelling of Beowulf set in a contemporary gated community. It's an interesting approach to the poem and a worthwhile read.

Several translations of Beowulf are available online. Project Gutenberg’s translation is by Lesslie Hall.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16328...

Beowulf is the longest poem in Old English. It survives in a single manuscript housed at the British Library in London. Images of the manuscript:
https://www.google.com/search?q=cotto...

And in case any of you feel the urge to tackle the poem in Old English, this is a video of the opening lines to help you get started:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_G...

I read Seamus Heaney’s translation in February and enjoyed it, so I will be attending discussions and I would like to read the Rilke book if conditions permit.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the Leslie Hall translation: its chief merit is that it is out of copyright.

To resume some of my comments in the original discussion thread:

The Chickering translation-with-facing-text is quite good, and has been favored by scholars teaching Beowulf (for the umpteenth time).

Seamus Heaney's celebrated translation is also available in a bilingual edition, from the Wrenn-Bolton edition he used as his base text. Beowulf.

The translation by itself is also used in one of the Norton Critical Editions of the poem: Beowulf: A Verse Translation (Second Edition), which includes a lot of supporting material of considerable value, including most of J.R.R. Tolkien's 1936 British Academy lecture, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," the most important single piece of critical writing on the poem. (By general agreement of the contentious community of "Beowulf" scholars.)

Its impact has not been uniformly beneficial, but it transferred attention to the poem as a poem, not an encyclopedia of Germanic antiquities, a history of the Danes and Swedes, a source for Anglo-Saxon paganism, or any of the other things scholars had wanted it to be. (And complained when it wasn't what they hoped for.) For the serious student only, approaches prior to Tolkien can be found in T.A. Shippey and Andreas Haarder, Beowulf: The Critical Heritage. now in paperback https://www.amazon.com/Beowulf-Critic...
Unfortunately, the paperback edition has more than doubled in price since I bought it a couple of weeks ago.

Tolkien's whole lecture, with an essay on translating "Beowulf," can be found in the collection The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. This is quite reasonably priced.

A companion volume is Tolkien's Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode, also in paperback https://www.amazon.com/Finn-Hengest-O...
However, this is a pretty specialized work, dealing with a sort of flash-back episode in "Beowulf" and the related fragment known as "The Fight at Finnsburg," which often accompanies "Beowulf" in editions and translations.

Much too expensive, and probably too long and detailed to recommend is a massive version of the lecture material, based on two book-length drafts, Michael D.C. Drout's annotated edition of "Beowulf and the Critics" by J. R. R. Tolkien (Revised Second Edition) (Volume 402) (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies). Goodreads only lists the first edition: see https://www.amazon.com/Beowulf-Critic...

Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell contains Tolkien's c.1926 (with some later revisions) prose translation, with materials drawn from his decades of lectures on the poem for Oxford undergraduates. Tolkien had considered publishing it, so it is not one of the works he simply abandoned because he didn't think it good enough. (He was a notable perfectionist.) It is available in paperback, but the Kindle edition seems to have been dropped.

To be continued.

For those who would like to hear Beowulf in Old English, a 1967 reading by Kemp Malone, a distinguished American scholar during a good part of the twentieth century, is available as a free download on Archive.org. It is a massive file in any of the audio formats in which it is offered, but fortunately is broken down in eight sections (corresponding, I think, to the eight sides of the original album). See https://archive.org/details/lp_beowul...

(Malone's reading was based on a text he prepared himself: this came in a booklet with the original vinyl album, but is no longer available. So what he reads aloud may not quite match in some details any other Old English text you have available, but it mostly follows a consensus reading, with emendations primarily to make the verses scan properly, so this shouldn't be a big problem. Some readings of the manuscript, and emendations, are contended, and he chose those he had contended for in print for the recording.)

Nidhi wrote: "I read Seamus Heaney’s translation in February and enjoyed it, so I will be attending discussions and I would like to read the Rilke book if conditions permit."

Great! Glad you can join us, Nidhi.

Ian wrote: "Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the Leslie Hall translation: its chief merit is that it is out of copyright.

To resume some of my comments in the original discussion thread:

The Chickering tran..."

Lots of valuable information, Ian. Thank you.

I will use three different translations for this read:

Beowulf - Seamus Heaney's verse translation ( bilingual edition, English & Old English) is my favorite so far, I highly recommend it.

Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell - This is a newly published prose translation by Tolkien. It is accompanied by a 200-page commentary by the translator himself. It also contains the "Sellic Spell", Tolkien reconstruction of the folk-tale which the author of Beowulf would have used to write the epic poem - both in English and Old English. I just got this copy yesterday and I've only read a few lines of the translation, but I like it a lot so far.

Anglo-Saxon Poetry this is an anthology of Old English poems in prose translation (including Beowulf) by Sid Bradley . @Ian recommended it a few days ago. I just ordered it so I can't say anything about the translation, but I think it might be a great tool for spotting patterns in Anglo-Saxon poetry & mythology.

I don't know exactly what's so fascinating about reading Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon poetry in general. Jorge Luis Borges tried to answer this question in a brilliant poem:


"Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf"
by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by Alastair Reid)

"At various times, I have asked myself what reasons
moved me to study, while my night came down,
without particular hope of satisfaction,
the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.

Used up by the years, my memory
loses its grip on words that I have vainly
repeated and repeated. My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.

Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul
has some secret, sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing
circle can take in all, can accomplish all.

Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting."

I plan to read the Tolkien edition.

I am enjoying dipping my toes into these so far.

English Text
Daniel Donoghue (editor), Seamus Heaney (Translator). Beowulf: A Verse Translation (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.The first 25 lines are side by side Old English and English Translation which is a little wonky on the kindle if the margins are too narrow, but the rest consists of just the Heaney translation and is acceptably formatted with line numbers.

Audible.com
Beowulf, By: Seamus Heaney - translator, Narrated by: George GuidallGuidall sounds great as usual and his tone and voice seems well matched to this work.

I’ve got the Seamus Heaney translation on hand (somewhere) so will go with that, but love the idea of hearing it read so will add an audio version, too.

Emil wrote: "I don't know exactly what's so fascinating about reading Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon poetry in general. Jorge Luis Borges tried to answer this question in a brilliant poem:
.."

I love the poem, Emil. Thank you for sharing it.

I had to read the poem in its original Anglo-Saxon many decades ago in a seminar on Anglo Saxon lit. It was required reading. Regrettably, I've forgotten how to do it now. I console myself by occasionally reading an English translation aloud in one sitting, especially at night, and especially if there is a storm raging outside. Not quite as powerful as reading it in Old English, but it's the best I can do.

I will also be using A Beowulf Handbook, edited by Robert E. Björk and John D. Niles (1987), with contributions from distinguished scholars, and, by Andy Orchard (his preferred form of his name), (2003) A Critical Companion to Beowulf.

Also by Orchard is Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript (1995, revised 2002), which contains translations, along with Old English (and Latin, from other sources) texts of two other works in the "Beowulf" Manuscript, "The Wonders of the East" and "The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle." It throws in the Latin and modern English of the Liber Monstrorum, or Books of Monsters, which is clearly related to the other two in contents (see Orchards's table of correspondences), and even mentions a character and event in the poem.

These are for the fairly deeply committed: all-too-many years ago I took a Beowulf-in-Old-English seminar in which (now) Professor Björk was a fellow graduate student. The seminar was taught by Stanley B. Greefield, who at the time was working on what became A Readable Beowulf: The Old English Epic Newly Translated (1982). This is in syllabic verse (not previously used for translations of the poem), and attempts (I think successfully) to convey some of the word-play and rhetorical devices visible in the Old English text. (The late Professor Greenfield had a reputation for recognizing literary features in Old English texts.)

I've previously mentioned two prose translations, by S.A.J. Bradley in Anglo-Saxon Poetry, also noted above. It is probably easier going than many of the verse translations, but, despite a tendency toward modern terms where the Old English gets technical, it gives a good impression of the poem, and, I think, reads pretty smoothly.

So, although it more closely reflects Old English grammar, does G.N. Garmonsway's prose translation in Beowulf and Its Analogues (1968, US 1971), with other texts translated (mostly) by Jacqueline Simpson. It also has a now-dated essay on archeology, by Hilda (Roderick) Ellis Davidson (whose The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England: Its Archaeology and Literature opened up layers of meaning in the poetic terms for "sword" in Old English (and there are a lot of them).

Also in prose is a bilingual edition edited and translated by R.D. Fulk for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (2010), The Beowulf Manuscript, the full subtitle of which is "Complete Texts and The Fight at Finnsburg." This includes the additional material from the manuscript in Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript, plus a fragment of a "Passion of St. Christopher" and a verse retelling of the (apocryphal) book "Judith."

Fulk, Björk, and Niles were co-editors of the most recent full technical editon of the poem, Klaeber's Beowulf, based on Fr. Klaeber's classic version (last fully revised in 1936, with two supplements, 1950). Again, this is for the committed, but it is nice to know that Fulk can back up his translation with full documentation, if needed.

Imitative (i.e., four-stressed lines with alliteration) translations include Charles W. Kennedy's Beowulf: The Oldest English Epic (1940), probably the first to take note of Tolkien's contribution -- but not enough to get Oxford University Press to changed the title to "The Oldest English Heroic-Elegiac Poem" (Tolkien having argued that calling it an Epic, like Homer and Vergil, set up false expectations.) There are critics, but Marijane Osborn, in an article on translations in the "Handbook," recalls it as her first "Beowulf," and reports "I remember being swept along through the narrative" (p. 358). Her memory matches mine.
(The current cover comes from an illustration in another Oxford University Press version of Beowulf, which is a little confusing to those who know both.

I would like to be able to wholeheartedly recommend Ruth P.M. Lehmann's Beowulf: An Imitative Translation (1988). However, as Osborn notes, "While succeeding in a faithful rendition of the text and more precise attention to meter than any previous translation, the book abounds in misprints and errors of fact surprising both from this scholar and from this publisher" [University of Texas Press]. I concur. (Although the cover has a nice dragon.)

Finally (for the moment), Michael Alexander did a verse translation in 1973 for Penguin Classics, which has been very popular -- apparently the standard version -- in the UK. It must not be confused with a later edition which he edited in 1995 (revised 2000 and 2005) for the same publisher,, which I can't find on Goodreads: "Beowulf: A Glossed Text."

This has facing-page definitions of each word, but does not indicate important details of grammar, nor is there a comprehensive glossary to display ranges of meaning. It can be used with any decent translation, however.

See https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks...

Tamara wrote: "I had to read the poem in its original Anglo-Saxon many decades ago in a seminar on Anglo Saxon lit. It was required reading. Regrettably, I've forgotten how to do it now...."

I keep trying to refresh my knowledge every couple of years, but it is hard, and I've lost a great deal: I use Drout's Quick and Easy Old English as a refresher, but it doesn't last without constant practice.

I have a problem with "Beowulf" in Old English: I have read so many translations (and made my own) that I can recognize some passages immediately, and the meaning supplies itself, without considering the Old English text in any detail.

If someone asks me, I'll discuss the difference between "Old English" and "Anglo-Saxon" as names for the same language, and the political as well as linguistic reasons why the former is now generally preferred. (At least in the US: so far as I can tell, British usage soon seems interchangeable in many contexts.)

Ian wrote: "I keep trying to refresh my knowledge every couple of years, but it is hard, and I've lost a great deal: I use Drout's Quick and Easy Old English as a refresher, but it doesn't last without constant practice..."

Thanks for the tip of Drout's refresher, Ian. But it seems like such an arduous task. And as you say, if you don't use it, you lose it! For right now I'm going to have to relegate my Old English reading skills to the mountain of skills I've lost along the merry road to aging, not least of which is my long lost ability of doing headstands and back flips.

Maintaining a language means using it, and this is a problem with dead languages without a community of users (as used to be the case with Latin, and is the case with Hebrew, although there are differences between the modern and Biblical versions).

When I was first out of graduate school, I tried keeping myself fresh by translating unfamiliar texts from the "Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records," but I didn't keep it up. (For one thing, without ready access to UCLA's library to consult editions of the poems, and see if my results were anything close to correct -- not to say use the grammatical notes -- the whole process became harder.)

Ian wrote: "If someone asks me, I'll discuss the difference between "Old English" and "Anglo-Saxon" as names for the same language, and the political as well as linguistic reasons why the former is now generally preferred. .."

"Anglo-Saxon" is the term used in most history books I've read. I'm interested why "Old English" is becoming the preferred term, it would be great if you could tell us more about it.

If you ask me, "Anglo-Saxon" is less confusing because it was the language of the Anglo-Saxons. It has very little resemblance to modern English as the term "Old English" would suggest.

"Anglo-Saxon" is generally being used for the people, the political structures, and the period before 1066 -- "Old Englishmen" just doesn't work. But Anglo-Saxon was much abused as a racial term in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, with broad assertions of "Anglo-Saxon" (English and white old-stock American) superiority in just about anything and everything.

This association later made it something of a hot potato in the US, and, for example, "Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader" of 1893 became "Bright's Old English Grammar and Reader" when it was revised and enlarged in the Third Edition of 1971 (or perhaps earlier). (This was the textbook from which I learned Old English, and a few years ago I bought a used copy, just to have it on hand for reference or even study, so I remember it.)

There was an older struggle over the two terms which is relevant, too. Back in the early nineteenth century, there was serious dispute over whether English was really a Scandinavian language, like Danish, or a German language (i.e., part of the North Germanic or the West Germanic groups). Both sides liked to refer to Anglo-Saxon as "a dialect" of their own ancient language.

The Germans had the linguistic facts, and acumen, to back up their assertions, although they seemed to miss the point that although the language was West Germanic, the culture it expressed showed more familiarity with Scandinavian traditions than with the central Germanic tribes. In fact, the legends they held in common with the Low and High German speakers mostly weren't West Germanic at all, but Gothic (and the Goths spoke East Germanic language, a now extinct branch).

The announcement that "Beowulf" was "a Danish poem in the Anglo-Saxon dialect" also annoyed some English scholars, but what really bothered them was such pronouncements as that "an Anglo-Saxon is already half a Saxon"-- i.e., a German, and so "by rights" sympathetic to the Kaiser, as when the Prussians attacked Denmark in the 1860s.

Some of these English scholars insisted on calling it Old English instead, which had the advantage of being followed in a neat fashion (in categories borrowed from the great German philologists of the nineteenth century) by Middle English, and then Modern (or New) English. Just like Old High German, Middle High German, and New High German.

(By the way, Old High German is pretty much unintelligible to modern Germans without some considerable help. And Yiddish is, peculiarly, a direct descendant of Middle High German, because, except for later loan words, it didn't undergo the systematic sound shifts that turned "Middle" into "New," post-medieval Jewish populations have been pushed east, in the Slavic lands, where their archaic German was preserved (with changes) better than in Germany itself.

(This changeover mainly involved consonants, so far as I remember, but was a parallel process to the Great Vowel Shift that marks an important difference between late Middle English and early Modern English and the current language: and which is the reason for the muddle of English spelling which is very conservative; it dates back to the fifteenth century, when printers like Caxton came to use a particular variety of it in their books. So English written vowels don't match those in, say, Italian, French, or other continental languages.)

The First World War helped make "Old English" a much more palatable name in the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, etc., although Anglo-Saxon has never completely gone away as a name for the language.

There was even a weird movement to define "Anglo-Saxon" as referring to the language in certain times and places, and "Old English" to others. This distinction made it into some of the Oxford English Dictionary, but was pretty quickly abandoned as too fussy, and utterly confusing to students.

As for the Danes, they had some evidence on their side. Middle English is rich in Scandinavian words, including some of the personal pronouns, which are normally the most stable parts of an Indo-European language. And a considerable number of others are still in common use. The borrowing most likely took place following the Danish settlements during the Viking Age, but didn't show up much in Old English, perhaps being considered a barbarous jargon, or slang, by the literate.

It took the breakdown of English as an educated language following the Norman Conquest to admit all of that new vocabulary into official recognition when English began to be widely written again. But the use of particular Old Norse loans was often limited to particular dialects, as seen in, among other places, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."

And then there are parodies: Grendel's Dog, from Beocat, which begins thusly:

Brave Beocat, brood-kit of Ecgthmeow,
Hearth-pet of Hrothgar in whose high halls
He mauled without mercy many fat mice,
Night did not find napping nor snack-feasting.
The wary war-cat, whiskered paw-wielder,
Bearer of the burnished neck-belt, gold-braided collar band,
Feller of fleas fatal, too, to ticks,
The work of wonder-smiths, woven with witches' charms,
Sat upon the throne-seat his ears like sword-points
Upraised, sharp-tipped, listening for peril-sounds,
When he heard from the moor-hill howls of the hell-hound...

"Ian wrote: "Anglo-Saxon" is generally being used for the people, the political structures, and the period before 1066 -- "Old Englishmen" just doesn't work. But Anglo-Saxon was much abused as a racial term in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, ..."

Thank you for sharing this valuable information, Ian.

I am currently studying comparative religion and I will use this opportunity to take a closer look at Beowulf from this perspective. I'm not only looking for Christian and pagan elements but also for early instances of syncretism between Anglo-Saxon paganism and Christianity.
Is Beowulf a Christian work infused with pagan elements and myths OR was Beowulf an already mature story circulating in oral form long before the Christianisation of England? If the latter is true then all the Christian elements were added afterward and the story would make sense even without them.

This is another data-dump: I'm composing it while waiting for an important phone call, and I'm simply adding, instead of trying to make the discussion flow better.

I've mentioned Beowulf and Its Analogues here earlier, and on the previous nominations thread, mostly because of its (prose) translation of "Beowulf." But this handy volume, of about 375 pages, contains excerpts, topically arranged, of the various Old English, Old Norse, and medieval Latin texts which relate in some way to "Beowulf," or at least mention characters or events referenced in it. This is extremely helpful, but there are alternatives, which make for less choppy reading of the more extended stories.

One of the most important sources is the "Gesta Danorum" of the Danish cleric (of some sort, probably a monk) Saxo, surnamed "Grammaticus" in tribute to his florid Latin style, written around 1200. It is explicitly based on Icelandic as well as native Danish sources. Saxo splits up originally unitary stories to assign parts of them different generations of the main Danish dynasty, although many of the stories originally referred to other tribes in conflict with the Danes. "Analogues" doesn't give Saxo's complete text, which is interwoven with the very long story of one of his main heroes, Starcatherus (Starkad, Old Norse Starkaðr), who lived three lifetimes of ordinary men.

The old Oliver Elton translation of "The First Nine Books of the Danish History" is used in "Beowulf and Its Analogues," and is available free as a PG/Kindle book, and through the Internet Archive (which offers the full, annotated, version: use the PDF version for reliability), but there is a more recent, and more expensive, translation by Peter Fisher, with commentary by Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson, as "Saxo Grammaticus: The History of the Danes, Books I-IX." See https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks...

The other main source, which also features some of the same aggregating of other stories, e.g., of the by-then-obscure Heathobards, to the Danes proper, is the Icelandic "Hrolfs saga kraka," or, "The Story of Hrolf Kraki" -- Hrolf being Hrothgar's nephew Hrothulf in "Beowulf," and "Kraki" being his later epithet or nickname, explained in the story.

"Analogues" offers only selections of this. There are several complete versions available. It is one of the sagas translated by Gwyn Jones in Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas, currently available in paperback, and appears independently in Jesse Byock's also very reliable, and readable, The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, the latter being available in Kindle. A new entry, which I have not examined at any length, is Gavin Chappell's The Saga of Hrolf Kraki and his Champions, which has the merit of being very inexpensive (not to say cheap), and free from Kindle Unlimited.

None of these should be confused with Poul Anderson's saga-style novelization, Hrolf Kraki's Saga. The Goodreads link shows the original Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperback edition of 1973. It was reissued, with a different (inferior) cover in the successor imprint, Del Rey Fantasy, and later (1988) by Baen Books, also in paperback. It is currently available as a not-too-expensive Kindle Book, https://www.amazon.com/Hrolf-Krakis-S...

This draws on Saxo, the Saga, and some minor sources, and even works in Beowulf himself as an incidental character. I may someday suggest this as a buddy read.

Analyses of the the several other stories embedded in Beowulf, in allusions and flashbacks and tales-within-the-tale, are explained and analyzed in several places. One of them, which is free, is the first edition of R.W. Chambers' great Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn, which is available as free Kindle book (via Project Gutenberg). It can also be found on the Internet Archive. Like Elton's Saxo, this is best downloaded in PDF format.

This is a little dry, and somewhat antiquated: there were two later editions, one with a considerable supplement, and even that is bibliographically very dated, as well as behind the times in terms of critical discussion. But it does sort out a lot of tangled references, and explains what they probably mean in the context of "Beowulf," whereas the original sources, and "Analogues," leave one to figure some things out for yourself.

Emil wrote: "I am currently studying comparative religion and I will use this opportunity to take a closer look at Beowulf from this perspective. I'm not only looking for Christian and pagan elements but also f..."

This is a hotly contested issue. Views range from the nineteenth-century article "On the Christian Colouring of Beowulf" to the mid-twentieth-century rejoinder, "On the Pagan Coloring...."

The introduction of the Oral Formualic Theory of the re-composition of poems in performance has clouded the issue: fixed formulas of different original dates may show up in a given poem because they happen to fit the meter of a particular line, and not because the poet has an ideological standpoint. Whether "Beowulf" was ever such a composition, or was re-composed by a literate poet entirely for its original written form, is an open question (and hotly disputed).

Emil wrote: ""Thank you for sharing this valuable information.."

A part of the story is told in John D. Niles' fairly recent The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066 - 1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past He points out how easily theories about an Anglo-Saxon "race" degenerated into mere prejudice when applied to modern contexts.

Earlier, less toxic versions, going back to the sevententh century, just emphasized "Anglo-Saxon Liberties" versus "the Norman Yoke" in explaining England's social and political history. This view, immortalized for students for decades by its inclusion in Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe," gradually evolved (or devolved) into the theory that the "inferior races" were incapable of democracy, or any form of self-government, and needed Anglo-Saxon control (e.g, the British Empire) if they were ever to make anything of themselves.

Ian wrote: "The introduction of the Oral Formualic Theory of the re-composition of poems in performance has clouded the issue: fixed formulas of different original dates may show up in a given poem because they happen to fit the meter of a particular line, and not because the poet has an ideological standpoint.."

I recently stumbled upon the Oral Formualic Theory while reading some works regarding the authorship of the Odyssey. These formulas seem to be a universal byproduct of oral transmission. There are instances of uneducated shepherds in Transylvania or Serbia able to memorize and transmit huge epic poems using formulas like "rosy-fingered dawn".

As you said, this does not clear up the matter. There are also instances of newer written epic poems using formulas just to emulate the style of an oral transmitted poem.

Ian wrote: "The Germans had the linguistic facts, and acumen, to back up their assertions, although they seemed to miss the point that although the language was West Germanic, the culture it expressed showed more familiarity with Scandinavian traditions than with the central Germanic tribes. In fact, the legends they held in common with the Low and High German speakers mostly weren't West Germanic at all, but Gothic (and the Goths spoke East Germanic language, a now extinct branch)."

The Germanic languages are Indo-European, and it is thought that the original Germanic tribes originated from as far east as the Black and Caspian Seas. I don't know what the latest is on this, but I do know there were several waves of Germanic tribes settling into Europe at the end of the Roman Empire. It is a very complicated history, as the tribes moved all over the place and intermingled. They had different languages, and in Northern Germany the dialects, such as today's Friesan is closer to Scandinavian languages than any of the other German dialects, and the way I understand it, this whole Northern/Scandinavian geographic area was settled by - at least linguistically - the same people. So it would make sense that they also shared a cultural heritage. What I'm trying to say, there never was one cohesive Germanic language or heritage.

My heritage is Allemanic German, roughly Southwestern Germany (Swabia) into Switzerland geographically. The deeper you get into Switzerland the more pronounced the Allemanic is. These dialects are High German, and I don't really understand true Low German, such as Friesan. The Brothers Grimm recorded some of their Fairy Tales in Low German, and I've skipped them in my anthology, I don't understand a word.

And for the fun of it, I'll be reading Beowulf in German :-)

For anyone using Alexander's Beowulf: A Glossed Text, which gives verbs in the "uninflected infinitive," with no clear to the meaning of the word in the particular form in the facing line, there is a source of help, which displays hundreds of verbs in all their forms.

Old English Verbs, by T. Patrick Snyder.
I wish it had been available when I was a student, and had to figure out verb paradigms based on examples. I could have tried to memorize a larger selection than was in my textbook.

It would come in handy if you are considering studying Old English by yourself, or want to refresh yourself.
It is available in hardcopy and in Kindle, including Kindle Unlimited. I already like it enough to pay for it, clearing the space in my Kindle Unlimited list.

Kerstin wrote: "Ian wrote: "The Germans had the linguistic facts, and acumen, to back up their assertions, although they seemed to miss the point that although the language was West Germanic, the culture it expres..."

I skipped over the whole Indo-European origins and proto-Germanic details, let alone the existence of dialects of Modern German, which I never could keep straight, not having much German to begin with. Also the curious fact that the utterly obscure Frisian is classified as the nearest relative to English.

I do recall that in the early nineteenth century a lot of Middle High German poets were confidently identified as Bavarians, no matter where they were writing poetry. Another round of study, by some brilliant scholars, with whom the Germans were blessed, determined that the supposedly typically "Bavarian" characteristics happened to linger into modern times in that region, while most of the other High German dialects dropped or modified them -- but those sometimes retained other old-fashioned features which just hadn't been noticed before. (However, some of the poets in question really were Bavarians, or their near neighbors.)

Exactly when the early Germanic dialects became distinct branches (East, West, and North) is up for (heated) discussion. One confounding piece of evidence is that the totally unrelated, but very conservative, Finnish language preserves some obvious loan words in forms that had to be current in Roman times, although some were slightly modified to fit Finno-Ugrian phonology. Where the proto-Finnish speakers picked them up, and when, is a puzzle, but it is unlikely to have been in early historical or medieval times, from the neighboring North-Germanic-speaking Scandinavians (Swedes, Norwegians, Danes), whose languages had already differentiated from a common base.

Kerstin wrote: "These dialects are High German, and I don't really understand true Low German, such as Friesan..."

Ian wrote: Also the curious fact that the utterly obscure Frisian is classified as the nearest relative to English..."

You are talking about two completely different languages - not your fault, the terminology is confusing.

Ian is referring to the Frisian language spoken mainly in the Netherlands and considered the closest living relative of the Anglic languages.

Kerstin is referring to the East Frisian Low Saxon dialect (or Plattdeutsch), a peculiar low german dialect widely spoken in East Frisia, Germany ( I think there are over 100.000 active speakers)

English and German have the same roots, but their genesis couldn't be more different, so I wouldn't compare them. German language is a lot less homogeneous. A person from the region I live (Baden) might have real issues understanding someone talking in a swabian dialect, even if their villages are just 20 km apart and both are speaking a different version of the same Alemanic dialect. By the way, if you are visiting south Germany and you want to hear a list of colorful regional profanities, just tell a person from Baden that he's a Swabian.

For a rundown on Frisian, see, with the usual cautions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian...

This includes the information, of which I was quite unaware, that, besides "real" Frisian dialects, which I see cited in books on the history of English, there are others called Frisian because they are geographically adjacent, and different from their other linguistic neighbors. (My summary of a complex situation I'm not sure I followed in all its details.)

Even discounting these, the number of speakers given there, presumably from census data or some official survey, is far larger than I remember as cited elsewhere: so they are not as "obscure" as I thought.

Emil wrote: "You are talking about two completely different languages - not your fault, the terminology is confusing.

Ian is referring to the Frisian language spoken mainly in the Netherlands and considered the closest living relative of the Anglic languages."

I wasn't aware that they were different. I thought that the Friesian of northern Germany, especially on the islands, continued into the Netherlands, and that Plattdeutsch was spoken more around Hamburg. Am I wrong?

By the way, if you are visiting south Germany and you want to hear a list of colorful regional profanities, just tell a person from Baden that he's a Swabian.

LOL! so true!
Now here is a story for you, I haven't thought of this in years: We were at the Grand Canyon and I overheard some German tourist talking, and me thinking they were perhaps from around Stuttgart or maybe Ludwigsburg, started up a conversation... Oh boy! they didn't like being called Swabian, they were from Karlsruhe.

The Friesian spoken in the Netherlands is actually offcially recognised as a language.
I guess this offcial recognition also has done a lot to keep the language itself actually alive.
I always find it funny that, however small the Netherlands are, there's also a wide range of dialects spoken

I am not sure there is a scientific reason to do so, but I have chosen to read the poem in Danish. I always read English books in English. But what we read is a translation, either way.

The translation is excellent and has received high praises,
Beowulf: En gendigtning

I enjoy seeing the special words and names that we still have in our language.

Since the story takes place in Denmark (and the south of Sweden), we have a special connection to this literary work in Denmark. From our point of view, we were the first to translate it. :-)

The Danish king asked the Icelander Thorkelin to transcribe it and he translated it to latin in 1815. The Danish poet Grundtvig translated it into Danish in 1820 and the first English translation was done in 1837, according to my sources.

I've been going through some on-line or downloadable resources for Old English -- a lot of my saved links no longer work, and I've had to find replacement sites, or new URLs.

There is a major lexical project for Old English (600-1150), the University of Toronto's Dictionary of Old English (DOE, not to be confused with the Oxford English Dictionary, OED). Unfortunately, this is a work-in-progess, and has been or quite some time. It can be consulted directly online (A-I), at https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/

See the Home page at https://www.doe.utoronto.ca/pages/ind... for other resources, including a complete electronic corpus of Old English texts, at https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe...

With the Toronto Dictionary still in progress, the standard compendious dictionary is still Bosworth and Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, with a supplement, essentially a product of the nineteenth century (although there was an additional supplement in, I think, 1972). It can be found online at https://bosworthtoller.com/
and
https://www.lexilogos.com/english/eng...
This latter gives access to a great many other resources, and I strongly urge anyone interested to take a look at it.

There is also a version for iOS, available, very cheaply, through Apple's App Store -- I don't know about Android versions. I have not tested it.

Next up: hard-copy dictionaries.

Charlotte wrote: "I am not sure there is a scientific reason to do so, but I have chosen to read the poem in Danish. I always read English books in English. But what we read is a translation, either way.

The trans..."

Welcome, Charlotte! We are delighted you decided to join us. It will be interesting to compare the English translation with the Danish version you'll be reading. I'll be posting the reading schedule on May 26 and the discussion will begin on June 2.
We look forward to your participation.

Thank you, Tamara!

From 1894 on, with revisions as late as 1960, the handy, indeed indispensable, resource for the student (and scholar) of Old English has been J.R. Clark Hall (or Clark-Hall, according to some), A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. This edition in link, which is reprinted in the Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching series (number 14), is unfortunately very expensive new: but used copies at more reasonable prices are readily available. (I suspect that a lot of students didn't hold on to their copies after the course was over.)
See https://www.amazon.com/Anglo-Saxon-Di...

Do NOT buy the less expensive version, a badly-printed copy of one of the earlier, out-of-copyright, forms, which can be found at https://www.amazon.com/Concise-Anglo-...
This is simply not worth the money, no matter how cheap. (I know because I ordered a copy, just to make sure it was as bad as reputed. It is worse.....)

The main problem with Clark-Hall is that it is simply a glossary, a list of words, with definitions, and usually indications of which works they can be found in, sometimes with line numbers if they are hapax legomena (only appearing once in the whole literature). It does include brief references to the OED (under the old title of New English Dictionary, NED), where more information can be found, if you have a copy, (or, now, subscribe to the on-line digital version). It also indicates which words are found only, or at least mainly, in poetic texts.

What it lacks are actual citations, and etymological information: some words are usually interpreted from their better-attested cognates in other early Germanic languages, and it can be importance to know about this level of uncertainty.

Next up: a specialized vocabulary.

Charlotte wrote: "I am not sure there is a scientific reason to do so, but I have chosen to read the poem in Danish.
The trans..."

Looks like we have members reading Beowulf in the most important surviving Germanic languages: English, Danish, German and maybe Dutch. I'm really looking forward to this discussion...

Charlotte wrote: "I am not sure there is a scientific reason to do so, but I have chosen to read the poem in Danish. I always read English books in English. But what we read is a translation, either way.

The trans..."

Unfortunately, Thorkelin, although in some ways an heroic figure, doesn't seem to have bothered to familiarize himself very much with then-existing studies of Old English, some of which dated back to the seventeenth century. Some of these pioneering scholars were pretty good on understanding OE prose, although less so with the verse, which has a whole lot of unique vocabulary, and compound words which weren't always recognizable to them. But their work would have helped. Thorkelin may have felt that, with his thorough knowledge of Icelandic and Danish, they weren't worth bothering with.

As a result of these factors, Thorkelin's Latin translation is largely guesswork -- although the same must be said for the first direct translation (of excerpts only) into English, in 1826. (Preceded by select translations from Thorkelin's Latin in 1818).

According the reception-histories I've seen, Grundtvig's verse translation was not only the first into any modern vernacular, it was, although periphrastic, a huge advance in understanding over Thorkelin. To begin with, Grundtvig* may have been smarter: and in any case he had actually studied Old English, and with Erasmus Rask, an excellent philologist. (And a fellow-Dane. But Thorkelin doesn't seem to have bothered to consult with him.)

According to some modern scholars, though, the big breakthrough in understanding the poem came with the work of the Anglo-Irish John Mitchell Kemble, who published an edition in 1833, with a revised version in 1835, and a prose translation in 1837. (I've read an article comparing his translation to that of another Irishman, Seamus Heaney, which gave the old poem a tremendous boost in publicity.)

Kemble's translation, which served as a sort of second volume of the text edition, was particularly notable for its "copious glossary," which is considered a major advance in the study of Old English poetry in general. It served as a foundation for later lexical studies of Old English verse, primarily in Germany, which rather quickly came to dominate the field.

(The initial English academic failure to appreciate the new -- i.e., German -- philology was regarded as a scandal by later Victorian scholars, and it remained a live issue into the twentieth century, as Tolkien acidly noted on several occasions. But German philologists' open contempt for some excellent English classical scholarship did little to soothe hurt feelings.)

*There has been a revival of interest in N.F.S. Grundtvig in English Beowulf scholarship. He deservedly figures prominently in Shippey and Haarder's Beowulf: The Critical Heritage, as was to be expected, making some of his work readily accessible -- although expensive -- in English. And his importance has been emphasized by S.A.J. Bradley, including in the introduction to his Anglo-Saxon Poetry.

Grundtvig does not appear by name in Tolkien's 1936 "Beowulf: The Monsters and Critics," which absence produced some subdued comments at the time. Drout's edition of the original drafts of the material, Beowulf and the Critics, shows that he was simply cut out for lack of space in the lecture version -- and perhaps because Tolkien was mainly interested there in getting across, rather urgently, what was *wrong* with received Beowulf criticism, not with praising neglected works that he agreed with.

Getting back on track: as mentioned, Old English poetic vocabulary has long been a problem. Among other things, there are a whole lot of synonyms for items that appear frequency, to allow for alliteration. A handy guide, organizing words by frequency and sense, instead of alphabetically, is Word Hoard: An Introduction to Old English Vocabulary "Wordhoard," by Stephen A. Barney, now in its second edition: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030...

I found the first edition quite helpful in trying to recover my Old English skills, and have often wished I still had a copy: I wound up buying the second edition.

Unfortunately, this is now rather expensive, especially since it is a rather short book (88 pages): but used copies are available for considerably less.

As some of the reviewers have noted, the book was re-produced from a typed copy, and this now looks rather primitive. The first edition preceded modern software for handling fonts, and resetting the book from the typescript would have introduced endless possibilities for typographical errors. So the publisher (The Yale Language Series) seems to have stuck with Barney's own text, including his later revisions.

Charlotte wrote: "But what we read is a translation, either way."

I've been doing the same thing. If the original is not in English I might as well go with my native language as a translation. For me living in the US it also keeps my language skills up. It is amazing how much you lose if you don't use it.

On the subject of translations:

This is, I suspect, strictly for the curious (but I may be wrong): there is a Modern Icelandic translation, as Bjolfskviða. It is now out of print: but there is a version available online.

I find it interesting to compare to the Old English text, and see what words come through fairly directly, and what has to be replaced by other words.

https://notendur.hi.is/~peturk/3T/bjo...

Ian wrote: "A handy guide, organizing words by frequency and sense, instead of alphabetically..."

This reminds me of something: If I was to learn a new language rapidly, I wish course material was put in order in that way: organized by frequency and sense. I find that a lot of course material has no such structure, but teaches several uncommon, uninteresting words first. (Sorry if I am digressing from our topic.)

Charlotte wrote: "(Sorry if I am digressing from our topic.) .."

I don't think you are digressing.

However, Old English presents a problem. There is a VERY small Old English literary corpus, even including the prose, and throwing in laws, wills, deeds, and grants. Some words, inevitably, only appear in one or two places.

Unfortunately, some of those places may happen to be in documents that are otherwise fairly easy for beginners, once they get beyond made-up exercises, or excerpted sentences. So these words have to be defined and learned along with the more common words surrounding them.

(Or students can be asked to learn from inaccurate texts -- a problem I ran into in Latin, because my High School textbook "corrected" Julius Caesar's Latin, and the passages I had to memorize were correspondingly wrong in some details.....)

There are sometimes grammatical issues as well. What is the difference between a really rare construction and a mistake?

And, as with all ancient and medieval languages, sometimes cultural context is missing.

I originally gave some examples of these problems, but decided that it was, in fact, a long digression, and deleted them. I may bring up a couple of the points if we get to comparing translations, and why some of them differ.

Emil wrote: ""Thank you for sharing this valuable information, Ian...."

I gave a rather bald summary, which you will have to take on faith: there is a fairly large literature on the idea of the "Anglo-Saxon Race," and its superiority to, e.g., the Welsh and the Irish, as well as more distant peoples. For a look at where this fit into Victorian intellectual life, and how it influenced perceptions of the past as well as the present, I would suggest "Anglo-Saxonism and Victorian archaeology: William Wylie’s Fairford Graves," by Howard Williams, in Early Medieval Europe 16:1 (2008), 49-88
https://www.academia.edu/211011/Anglo...

Out of print, and likely to be found only in large libraries, is
Anglo-Saxons and Celts: Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England, by L P Curtis (1969) (The English were already biased against the Irish, who refused to settle down and become their subjects, and the Reformation only exacerbated matters. The addition of racial theory was an extension of a long story.)

For anyone interested in following up, an enlightening survey of how the image of the noble Anglo-Saxon originated, and some of how it mutated over time, can be found in J. G. A. Pocock's The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (second edition).

Supposedly Anglo-Saxon origins played a part in the development of Republican doctrines during the English Civil War, with the King and the nobility cast as the wicked Normans.

This had a sort of parallel in France, at a later date, where "Our ancestors the Gauls" were invoked to justify the French people's overthrow of the "Frankish" (i.e., Germanic) monarchy and aristocracy, which had quite overtly claimed superiority due to Frankish descent. This radical Republican doctrine morphed into romantic Gallo-mania, with interesting if ill-founded ideas about druids and menhirs, only to become part of the background of racism in modern France.....

Ian wrote: "there is a fairly large literature on the idea of the "Anglo-Saxon Race," and its superiority to, e.g., the Welsh and the Irish.."

I don't know if the term is still used in Ireland, but I remember that in James Joyce's Ulysses the English people are often derisory called "Saxon", most likely because of what you've stated above:

"A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you’re not a gentleman. God, these bloody English!"

"Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon" - referring to the most dangerous things in the world.

I'm not sure whether Joyce's use of "Saxon" is of Victorian origin, or is supposed to be a carry-over into English of Gaelic "Sassenach," which means the same thing. Possibly a mixture of the two elements in English-speaking Ireland, a few generations after Gaelic began dying out in large regions, but leaving a strong mark on the vocabulary and grammar of "Irish English."

Yeats' friend (and colleague in the Abbey Theatre), Lady Gregory, published a number of books employing a rural version, known, after her immediate environs, as "Kiltartan English." Lots of people have tried to imitate her, but they generally pick up only a little of the underlying principles, and get things wrong by copying superficial differences.

I was under the impression that "The Electronic Beowulf" was no longer available on-line (and the CD version is long "out of print"), because all my links to it have rotted away.

However, I finally remembered to do a Google search for it, and, after a couple of defunct hits, there it was, in its "Fourth Edition," at http://ebeowulf.uky.edu/#

This has tons of resources, although mostly for the serious student, including digital versions of the unique manuscript, and all the early transcriptions, including those of selections which have not always been consulted by editors.

Kiernan, the editor/head of the project, has taken some unusual stands, based on his computer-assisted study of the manuscript: for example, he thinks that the poem was being composed at the time the manuscript was being made (not copied), which puts it in the eleventh century.

(I can't accept his reasoning here -- the two scribes had a great deal of trouble with unfamiliar proper names -- and even familiar, Biblical, ones, like "Cain" -- the fratricidal brother of Abel, and the ancestor of the evil giants, etc. -- becoming "Camp" in the manuscript.)

Ian wrote: "I was under the impression that "The Electronic Beowulf" was no longer available on-line (and the CD version is long "out of print"), because all my links to it have rotted away.

However, I finally remembered to do a Google search for it, ..."

Ian -- LOL! I did something similar this past week -- on a totally different topic! It was like ... where is your head?

But I've also recently had a few "what the ... were the search words you used last time to get that? It was only a few days ago."

Beowulf, a very good book of about 200 pages by George Clark in the "Twayne English Authors Series" (1990) is out of print, but I now see that it is currently available used though Amazon, at reasonable prices, sometimes with free shipping.

See https://www.amazon.com/Beowulf-Twayne...

The "Selective Bibliography" is short, but annotated, and there are subject and author indexes, which makes it easy to find out if something is covered (or to relocate a reference) without skimming the whole book to find it.

It has a now rather old-fashioned* attempt at an internal chronology of the poem, with dates based on the one historically documented event in it, in about 524. This may be helpful in making sense of the poem, in which much of the information is supplied in 'flashbacks."

But Clark warns that the events and their dates are otherwise "legendary, conjectural, or even fictitious," in that it is not clear what the poet inherited from his tradition, possibly with some grounding in sixth-century facts, what can be extrapolated from the text to allow a reasonable lapse of time between events, which may never have happened,, and what the poet very well have made up entirely, like the length of Beowulf's life.

*This used to be more common, especially before Tolkien emphasized that the impression of historical depth may be the result of the poet's art. The most elaborate I know of (which is in English), is from the 1920s, Kemp Malone's "The Literary History of Hamlet," Volume I -- the only part published. Malone begins his "history" of the story (not the play) by trying to work out the "real" Dark Age background to the tale of Amlethus, prince of Jutland, in Saxo's "Gesta Danorum."

Because of the title, review copies sent to the learned journals were referred to Shakespearean experts, who mostly had only the vaguest idea of what Malone was talking about, and reviewed accordingly. The (academic) publisher apparently decided not to go ahead with the project.

I reserved Beopulf = Beowulf: a version which has the old English text alongside a Dutch translation.