– ‘And ill I ween, though prov’d thy Might In Onslaught dire and deadly Fight, ’Twill go with thee, if thou this Night
Dar’st wait for Grendel bold.’
(ll. 525–8 )
Lumsden in 1881, and Leonard in 1923, tried to write at one remove from strophic or ballad verse (with its romantic, lyric, or short-poem associations) by disguising the 4-line stanzas as rhyming couplets and thereby creating a long and supposedly ‘heroic’ line, of seven iambic feet with floating caesura in Lumsden, and of six iambic feet with a clear medial caesura (marked by an extra light syllable) in Leonard. Strong (1925) wrote in 6-stress rhyming couplets with medial caesura and what he called a ‘swinging’ (i.e. it hovers between anapaestic and iambic) metre. And Bone’s 1945 version, irregular in line-length and uncertain in rhythm, used a mainly ‘stanzaic’ (abab) form of rhyme and assonance.
In these translations rhyme is employed as the modern equivalent of the old alliteration, to ‘shape’ the verse structure, and the metre attempts to assuage modern ears distrustful of an ‘alien’ stresstradition. We read them with facility, confidence, speed: the couplets jingle, and we flash along. But is this fluency Beowulfian? Gavin Bone was surely right when he declared in his Introduction that it was ‘necessary to get away from the couplet’; and in his rhymepatterns he has avoided the trite, trivial, lighthearted and even rollicking effect inherent in the methods of Lumsden, Leonard, and Strong. But if the couplet introduces a false levity, rhyme itself encourages distortion and is indeed only thinkable in conjunction with its many hostages – the tag or the cliché, the archaic word, the inverted order, the expletive: all of which mar these versions. At the opening of Leonard’s translation –
What ho! We’ve heard the glory of Spear-Danes, clansmen Kings, Their deeds of olden story, how fought the aethelings!
– rhyme-exigency has displaced ‘fought’ from the position of strength it should and would have in its natural word-order, nor is this a good equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon, for the emphasis is less on the princes than on their fighting prowess (hu tha æthelingas ellen xix
