Did everyone get the first line of Beowulf wrong.. or did Seamus Heaney get it right? by Claire Kelley

UPDATE: Dr. George Walkden responds below.

Earlier this week, The Independent reported that the first line of Beowulf has been incorrectly translated for hundreds of years. According to research by Dr. George Walkden, a University of Manchester lecturer, the Old English word hwæt, which begins the English language’s oldest epic poem (“Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!”), should not be read as an interjection separate from the rest of the first line (“Listen! we have heard of the might of the kings”), but rather as part of a complete exclamatory sentence—something like “How we have heard of the might of the kings.”

Citing research that “there’s no record of the Anglo-Saxons using exclamation marks, or any other form of punctuation, besides the full stop (or ‘point’) and the occasional semicolon” Walkden declares all previous interpretations—“‘What ho!’ (Earle 1892), ‘Hear me!’ (Raffel 1963), ‘Attend!’ (Alexander 1973), ‘Indeed!’ (Jack 1994), and ‘So!’ (Heaney 2000)”—to be wrong.

But while Walkden and the University of Manchester quote Seamus Heaney as having using an exclamation point mark (The Independent repeats the error), Heaney actually just used a period, choosing to use the word “So.” as more of a transition word that is meant to mimic Anglo-Saxton diction and indicate the continuation of the conversation. Heaney explains more in a note on his translation.

“…when the men of the family spoke, the words they uttered came across with a weighty distinctness, phonetic units as separate and defined as delph platters displayed on a dresser shelf… They had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of those relatives. I therefore tried to frame the famous opening lines in cadences that would have suited their voices, but that still echoed with the sound and sense of the Anglo-Saxon. Conventional renderings of hwæt, the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with ‘lo’, ‘hark’, ‘behold’, ‘attend’ and – more colloquially – ‘listen’ being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullion-speak, the particle ‘so’ came naturally to the rescue, because in that idiom ‘so’ operates as an expression that obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, ‘so’ it was: So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by

and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.

We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.”

Walkden indicates that he thinks that Heaney’s translation is close—he calls it a “substantial achievement” but “ultimately misleading… Like the others, he had no reason to doubt the accepted scholarship on the meaning of the word, so he translated it – brilliantly – with ‘So.’ But that translation now has to be rethought.”

If Heaney’s translation is read with the tone he describes—instead of an interjection with an exclamation point, it’s to be read as a way of expressing the oral tradition of the epic poem, uttered in dark candlelit halls—perhaps the Nobel laureate’s translation is correct after all.

I wrote to Stephen Mitchell, translator of classics like Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and The Iliad, to find out what he thinks of the new developments. He offered this note:

Not being a linguist, I’m not qualified to give an opinion. But if Dr. Walkden is correct, his understanding would indeed make a subtle but appreciable difference in how a translator deals with the line. I took a few minutes to try it out, and came up with this: How mighty the Danes were in days gone by

we have heard, and their heroes, the ancient kings:

what prodigious deeds those princes performed!

UPDATE:

In response to my inquiry about the misquoting of Seamus Heaney’s translation, Dr. George Walkden wrote this note: