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employed in Beowulf translation. It gives us in Scott Moncrieff’s version1 such grotesqueries as ‘their sarks rattled’ and ‘I knew him as a little knave’; and almost damns at the outset the translation of Leonard with its hearty opening ‘What ho!’ The archaizing temptation frequently conquers the author’s expressly or implicitly disavowing it, as a few examples of this curiously prevalent wishfulthinking will show. Archibald Strong’s rendering (1925) into ‘modern English rhyming verse’ tells us in the Introduction that ‘wherever a bold or vivid phrase occurs in the original, I have tried to render it as literally as possible, and for this purpose I have occasionally employed archaisms . . .’. It may be that the Anglo-Saxon poet’s love of litotes has influenced the choice of this ‘occasionally’; the fact remains that there is hardly a line of the translation without some more or less bizarrely uncurrent term, turn of phrase, or word-order, and the use of archaism is not confined to the rendering of something ‘bold or vivid’ in the original. – Then Beowulf the bairn of Ecgtheow his tiding thus ’gan tell: ‘In my youth full many a mellay and foray grim I tholed, And of all at this hour I mind me. I was seven winters old When the lord of largesse, e’en Hrethel, the monarch of bounty free, From my father took me and kept me, and gave me feasting and fee . . .’ (ll. 2425–31.) In 1940 appeared Charles W. Kennedy’s translation, in what he described as ‘authentic modern verse’. Would that phrase at that date, if it meant anything at all, cover such words and expressions as: Lo!, I ween, smote him sore, what time . . ., blithesome band, ’twas a weary while, wretched wight, wove his words in a winsome pattern, 1 Sniped at even when it appeared in 1921: . . . another surly Scot – Moncrieff Who brings the early Saxon songs to grief, Who translates Beowulf, and then (oh epitaph!) Has on the cover his own photograph . . . (Augustine Rivers, in Wheels 1921.) xiv

’neath, o’er, guerdon, oft, sire, no whit, bills and byrnies, when his soul must forth . . .? Such diction is certainly alien to ‘modern’ verse practice, and what ‘authenticity’ can there be in the use of terms which were trite and passé by 1600? (A very occasional obsolete word, or obsolete meaning of a word, may be used in poetry with striking effect, but that effect is possible only when the surrounding words are not obsolete; you cannot keep smelling mignonette.) Even more confident is the claim made by Mary E. Waterhouse in her translation of the poem (1949), that she is providing ‘a clear and straightforward version of the poem, free from archaisms, real or spurious, alike of word, phrase, or verse form’. The amount of selfdeception underlying this assertion may be judged from the following select list: Lo!, thou/thee/ye, ’neath, ’gainst, o’er, ’twixt, ’tis/’twas/’twill, no wise, full oft, whoso, hath/doth, venture grim, the twain, suffered sore, had much liefer, erst, royal dame, ere he wrought, cleave unto, fared forth, most like to, do thou make haste, if courage him avail, whoe’er she be, mine own son, lack for aught, wondrous strong, the death feud hath she wreaked, methinks it is not seemly . . . Methinks it is not; nor is the claim of the poem to be a version in ‘Modern English’ a true one, whatever the translator’s intentions may have been. Some translators, however, have had a more accurate picture in their minds of what they were doing, and in the Introduction of Gavin Bone’s version (1945) – hectic, sprawling, incomplete, paraphrastic, but vigorous and conscious – the translator tells us candidly ‘There are some archaisms, but I hope the meaning is plain . . . At any rate there are no “eftsoonses” . . .’ Since none of the verse translations to date has been written in anything like twentieth-century English diction, the reader no doubt feels it is time for me to produce the argument on the other side: the case for the long-hallowed ballad-cum-Spenser-cum-AuthorizedVersion fixative from which Beowulf during the last century has been faintly gleaming like a dragonfly under an inch of amber. This is put clearly and definitely by J.R.R. Tolkien in his prefatory remarks to Clark Hall’s prose translation (revised, 1950). ‘If you wish to translate, not rewrite, Beowulf, your language must be literary and traditional . . . because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day that the poem was made.’ Now it is perfectly true that Anglo-Saxon poetry used words and phrases which were traditionally ‘reserved for verse’ and which had been xv

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employed in Beowulf translation. It gives us in Scott Moncrieff’s version1 such grotesqueries as ‘their sarks rattled’ and ‘I knew him as a little knave’; and almost damns at the outset the translation of Leonard with its hearty opening ‘What ho!’ The archaizing temptation frequently conquers the author’s expressly or implicitly disavowing it, as a few examples of this curiously prevalent wishfulthinking will show.

Archibald Strong’s rendering (1925) into ‘modern English rhyming verse’ tells us in the Introduction that ‘wherever a bold or vivid phrase occurs in the original, I have tried to render it as literally as possible, and for this purpose I have occasionally employed archaisms . . .’. It may be that the Anglo-Saxon poet’s love of litotes has influenced the choice of this ‘occasionally’; the fact remains that there is hardly a line of the translation without some more or less bizarrely uncurrent term, turn of phrase, or word-order, and the use of archaism is not confined to the rendering of something ‘bold or vivid’ in the original.

– Then Beowulf the bairn of Ecgtheow his tiding thus ’gan tell: ‘In my youth full many a mellay and foray grim I tholed, And of all at this hour I mind me. I was seven winters old When the lord of largesse, e’en Hrethel, the monarch of bounty free, From my father took me and kept me, and gave me feasting and fee . . .’

(ll. 2425–31.)

In 1940 appeared Charles W. Kennedy’s translation, in what he described as ‘authentic modern verse’. Would that phrase at that date, if it meant anything at all, cover such words and expressions as: Lo!, I ween, smote him sore, what time . . ., blithesome band, ’twas a weary while, wretched wight, wove his words in a winsome pattern,

1 Sniped at even when it appeared in 1921:

. . . another surly Scot – Moncrieff Who brings the early Saxon songs to grief, Who translates Beowulf, and then (oh epitaph!) Has on the cover his own photograph . . .

(Augustine Rivers, in Wheels 1921.)

xiv

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