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acknowledgements It’s proper to acknowledge the debt I owe to Steve Glosecki, who died far too young. The world of scholarship, of collegiate generosity, is smaller for his passing. The following scholars have had, in different ways, at different times and in different places, a great and invariably kind influence on the present translation and the making of its apparatus: Sanja Bahun and audience members at the Essex Book Festival (2016), Martin Duffell (who in 2017 read the draft in its entirety with both Wrenn and Heaney alongside him), Simon Everett, John Gillies, Patricia Gillies, Kristin Hanson, Martin Harrison, Grevel Lindop, the Research Seminar in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies (University of Essex), Adrian May, Donka Minkova, Renos Papadopoulos, Ad Putter, Jordan Savage, Sean Seeger (who put me again in the way of Jameson’s reading of pastiche), Jeremy Solnick (another full-draft reader, of precision and suggestiveness), Phil Terry and Tony Wood. My classes, too – particularly second-year writing students at the University of Essex – were sometimes exposed to bits of the translation and often had hugely interesting things to say. An audience at Chelmsford Public Library helped me to think about fabulous beasts during a workshop on Essex dragons (Essex Book Festival, 2017). The research seminar on Contemporary Poetry in Translation (University of Essex, 2017) also helped me onwards rejoicing – or if not quite rejoicing, then somewhat reassured. Of course none of these souls are responsible in any way for the errors I have made in the present work. Those errors, and the choices that underlay them, are mine. 9
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Beowulf Of older faces and voices, former colleagues at the University of Manchester should be acknowledged, chief among them my friend and erstwhile supervisor, Richard Hogg. Richard used to joke that I could quote at least the first third of Beowulf by heart, and although he was quite wrong about that, his kindness, patience and skill somehow brought me through a philological encounter with the poem in the later 1980s. And before Richard’s editorial pencil ever got to work on the words of a hugely unpromising PhD student, my teachers at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne first taught me about this uncompromising, difficult Germanic world. I hope they will forgive what I have done here, and in particular, forgive my wrong-headedness and false start(s). I sometimes smile ruefully when I remember that his teachers found even Beowulf ‘a No-good. On the mead-benches Geat commanders gave him no honour. He was of no account. He was slow, they said – slow or lazy. (“Too feeble,” said the chiefs.)…’. And yet, adds the poet, ‘a change happened […]’. There is probably hope, at least, for most of us – until the dragon wakes again. 10

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acknowledgements

It’s proper to acknowledge the debt I owe to Steve Glosecki, who died far too young. The world of scholarship, of collegiate generosity, is smaller for his passing.

The following scholars have had, in different ways, at different times and in different places, a great and invariably kind influence on the present translation and the making of its apparatus: Sanja Bahun and audience members at the Essex Book Festival (2016), Martin Duffell (who in 2017 read the draft in its entirety with both Wrenn and Heaney alongside him), Simon Everett, John Gillies, Patricia Gillies, Kristin Hanson, Martin Harrison, Grevel Lindop, the Research Seminar in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies (University of Essex), Adrian May, Donka Minkova, Renos Papadopoulos, Ad Putter, Jordan Savage, Sean Seeger (who put me again in the way of Jameson’s reading of pastiche), Jeremy Solnick (another full-draft reader, of precision and suggestiveness), Phil Terry and Tony Wood. My classes, too – particularly second-year writing students at the University of Essex – were sometimes exposed to bits of the translation and often had hugely interesting things to say. An audience at Chelmsford Public Library helped me to think about fabulous beasts during a workshop on Essex dragons (Essex Book Festival, 2017). The research seminar on Contemporary Poetry in Translation (University of Essex, 2017) also helped me onwards rejoicing – or if not quite rejoicing, then somewhat reassured. Of course none of these souls are responsible in any way for the errors I have made in the present work. Those errors, and the choices that underlay them, are mine.

9

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