As a lover of Anglo-Saxon literature and history, Beowulf is very near and dear to my heart. So when our book club decided to tackle it, I was happy as dragon on gold. I decided that it was time to take a serious look at multiple translations and to try my hand at reading as much as I could in the original Anglo-Saxon as well. Here’s a breakdown of all the versions I read this time around:
ISBN13: 9780393320978
This version is functional as far as capturing the words in a fairly rote way, but feels clumsy and fails to evoke much in the way of mood. It does have the advantage of facing-page original Anglo-Saxon, so it’s what I used for my attempts at reading the original text.
ISBN13: 9780615612652
This one approaches Beowulf as modern poetry and makes some bold decisions about how to present the content. Line breaks, indentation, alignment, and white space are all vital to its interpretation. And the text is less concerned with literal accuracy on a word-by-word level and more concerned with creating an impactful effect, which it does very well. In many ways, I prefer this version to the Heaney, though there are some outright omissions of passages, which I disapprove.
ISBN13: 9780763630232
For fun, I threw in this great graphic novel adaptation I picked up at Half Price Books a while back. It makes no attempt to be a complete representation of the text. But the art and visual storytelling are great.
My grasp of Anglo-Saxon language is very far from fluent. Mostly, I can bring to bear my knowledge of middle and early modern English, German cognates and grammar, a smattering of Icelandic and Old Norse pronunciation and concepts, and my study of Anglo-Saxon and Norse cultures.
There is a great deal I missed in my reading, but it was worth it for hearing the sound and rhythm of the original poetry and for the linguistic thrill of discovering words that unlocked some linguistic puzzle in my mind.
