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compounded of self-vindication as he looks back and concern as he looks forward, of a care for his own name and honour (with Wiglaf as his Horatio, ‘to tell my story’) and an even deeper care – the childless, solitary man’s care – for the future of his kingless people. Finally one must mention the quiet nobility of the close of the poem (lines 3165–82), which in its restraint, justness, and dignity, leaves the perfect ultimate impression of the hero’s significance. These are some of the challenges Beowulf throws out to the avowed translator, who must make whatever attempt he can to collaborate with the greatness of the original when it is great, and to allow it to speak with its varied voices. If the reader can be persuaded at those points that the poem is good, he will more willingly venture into the obscurer and digressionary reaches of it – the worlds of Finn, Ongentheow, and Thryth: and even these, structurally alarming though they may seem, as episodes, analogies, prophecies, and elaborated narrative interjections of praise or blame, should not for long daunt any reader who thinks of the methods of the contemporary novel, or, for that matter, of the methods of epic and drama in general. Although Beowulf is a narrative, its author was no more ‘simply telling a story’ than Virgil or Milton or Joyce was, and the interruptive and illustrative material is seldom if ever irrelevant to the broader purposes of the poet. Narrative and episodes are equally concerned with the workings of providence (whether ‘God’ or ‘wyrd’) and with both the psychology and the morality of human actions. If a distant or even legendary incident seemed to throw light on the character of the hero, whether by contrast or by reinforcement, it would be made use of at some point, as the story of Heremod is brought into Hrothgar’s ‘sermon’. Lyric relief; sentiment; didactic comment; historical vistas; exclamations of surprise and awe; ironies and by-laconisms – all find a part in a poem that has already succeeded in interlocking (with one or two frayed patches) pagan and Christian, local and universal, factual and imaginary. Seriousness, the poet’s most obvious characteristic and the unifying and dignifying force behind the diverse material, was clearly not incompatible with sallies into other modes, though pervasive enough to suggest more often than not the playfulness of the bear or the jocularity of the hangman. That seriousness and that unification and that dignity are embodied in the figure of Beowulf, who bestrides the two parts of xxxiv
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the poem and can leave only the severest critic with a complaint of its disjointedness which is based on feeling as well as on an intellectual awareness of the split at line 2200. If, in Chapman’s striking phrase, we can still see Homer’s ‘naked Ulysses clad in eternal fiction’,1 so too we can see Beowulf. Out of the trappings of the Heroic Age, out of the conventions of a military aristocracy and the transitional refinements of its Christianization, out of the monstrous fictive quasi-satanic evil materialized in Grendel-brood and dragonkind, he starts up as man and as example: naked, he is courage, magnanimity, service to the point of sacrifice, ‘not passion’s slave’; and yet the fiction too is a dignity and something more than relative and historical, because the poet has been concerned to make a living issue of the good ordering of lord-and-retainer society and has presented its attractiveness as he has presented its tragedy, so that its tangled loyalties and dilemmas are as real to us as the situations in Greek or Elizabethan drama, and Beowulf clad, Beowulf the folkking, Beowulf as Hrothgar’s all-but-son and Wiglaf’s all-but-father, makes the gross fictive ambience flash and resound and persist. In that ambience, an adversary like Grendel shares with him the fusion of fiction and truth: on the one hand Grendel is a superstitious embodiment of danger among peoples whose struggling civilization and amenity are only a stockade in a hostile or unexplored environment, on the other hand he is a lasting figure of the diabolical, anti-human and anti-divine; as he prowls in misery and hatred round the lighted clamorous festivity of Heorot hall, ‘the outcast spirit haunting darkness’, he is Iago at Cyprus, Satan in Milton’s Eden with his ‘sight hateful, sight tormenting!’, Claggart watching Billy Budd, Quint turning the screw in the soul of Miles. If the poem was only a record of sixth-century Scandinavian calamities, deliverances, and forebodings; or if it was only a palimpsest of distorted and rebarbative mythology: we could still speculate well on its historical curiosity, as we do with the whetstone of Sutton Hoo. It is, however, something more than an object of speculation. Its narrative is the story of a dedicated hero whom we rejoice to sympathize with as heroic; its battles are battles of good and evil; its moral commentary is an unsupplantable lyricism: swylc sceolde secg wesan, ‘if all men 1 Epistle Dedicatory to his translation of the Odyssey. xxxv

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compounded of self-vindication as he looks back and concern as he looks forward, of a care for his own name and honour (with Wiglaf as his Horatio, ‘to tell my story’) and an even deeper care – the childless, solitary man’s care – for the future of his kingless people. Finally one must mention the quiet nobility of the close of the poem (lines 3165–82), which in its restraint, justness, and dignity, leaves the perfect ultimate impression of the hero’s significance.

These are some of the challenges Beowulf throws out to the avowed translator, who must make whatever attempt he can to collaborate with the greatness of the original when it is great, and to allow it to speak with its varied voices. If the reader can be persuaded at those points that the poem is good, he will more willingly venture into the obscurer and digressionary reaches of it – the worlds of Finn, Ongentheow, and Thryth: and even these, structurally alarming though they may seem, as episodes, analogies, prophecies, and elaborated narrative interjections of praise or blame, should not for long daunt any reader who thinks of the methods of the contemporary novel, or, for that matter, of the methods of epic and drama in general. Although Beowulf is a narrative, its author was no more ‘simply telling a story’ than Virgil or Milton or Joyce was, and the interruptive and illustrative material is seldom if ever irrelevant to the broader purposes of the poet. Narrative and episodes are equally concerned with the workings of providence (whether ‘God’ or ‘wyrd’) and with both the psychology and the morality of human actions. If a distant or even legendary incident seemed to throw light on the character of the hero, whether by contrast or by reinforcement, it would be made use of at some point, as the story of Heremod is brought into Hrothgar’s ‘sermon’. Lyric relief; sentiment; didactic comment; historical vistas; exclamations of surprise and awe; ironies and by-laconisms – all find a part in a poem that has already succeeded in interlocking (with one or two frayed patches) pagan and Christian, local and universal, factual and imaginary. Seriousness, the poet’s most obvious characteristic and the unifying and dignifying force behind the diverse material, was clearly not incompatible with sallies into other modes, though pervasive enough to suggest more often than not the playfulness of the bear or the jocularity of the hangman.

That seriousness and that unification and that dignity are embodied in the figure of Beowulf, who bestrides the two parts of xxxiv

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