The Tale of Beowulf, Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats

Differences between the First and Second Editions.

In the second edition a title-page is added. The running commentary, printed in rubric on the margin of the first edition, is omitted.

Text Used.

The translation is, in general, conformed to Wyatt’s text of 1894, departing from it in only a few unimportant details.

Part Taken in the Work by Morris and Wyatt respectively.

The matter is fortunately made perfectly clear in Mackail’s Life of William Morris, vol. ii. p. 284:—

‘(Morris) was not an Anglo-Saxon scholar, and to help him in following the original, he used the aid of a prose translation made for him by Mr. A. J. Wyatt, of Christ’s College, Cambridge, with whom he had also read through the original. The plan of their joint labours had been settled in the autumn of 1892. Mr. Wyatt began to supply Morris with his prose paraphrase in February, 1893, and he at once began to “rhyme up,” as he said, “very eager to be at it, finding it the most delightful work.” He was working at it all through the year, and used to read it to Burne-Jones regularly on Sunday mornings in summer.’

The plan of joining with his own the name of his principal teacher was one which Morris had used before when translating from a foreign tongue. He published his rendering of the Volsunga Saga as the work of ‘Eirikr Magnússon and William Morris.’ There is no evidence that Mr. Wyatt had any hand in forming the final draft of the translation. In defending it, Morris took all the responsibility for the book upon himself, and he always spoke of it as his own work. In writing to a German student toward the end of his life Morris spoke of the translation as his own without mentioning Mr. Wyatt1. Nor has Mr. Wyatt shown a disposition to claim a share in the work. In the preface to his edition of the text of Beowulf (Cambridge, 1894), he says:—

‘Mr. William Morris has taken the text of this edition as the basis of his modern metrical rendering of the lay.’ —Page xiii.

Finally, it may be added that the specimens of Mr. Wyatt’s translation printed in the glossary and notes of his book bear no resemblance to the work of Morris.

Morris’s Theory of Translation.

None despised the merely literal rendering of an epic poem more than William Morris. In writing of his version of the Odyssey to Ellis, Morris said: ‘My translation is a real one so far, not a mere periphrase of the original as all the others are.’ In translating an ancient poem, he tried to reproduce the simplicity and remoteness of phrase which he found in his original. He believed it possible, e.g., to suggest the archaic flavor of Homer by adopting a diction that bore the same relation to modern English that the language of Homer bore to that of the age of Pericles. The archaism of the English would represent the archaism of the Greek. This method he used in rendering Vergil and Homer.

But when he approached the translation of Beowulf, he was confronted by a new problem. It was evident that fifteenth-century English was ill-adapted to convey any just notion of eighth-century English. Beowulf required a diction older than that of Sir Thomas Malory or Chaucer. Hence it became necessary to discard the theory altogether, or else to produce another style which should in some true sense be imitative of Beowulf. This latter Morris tried to accomplish by increasing the archaism of his style by every means in his power. This feature is discussed in the following section.

Nature of the Translation.

The translation of Beowulf is written in extremely archaic language. An imitative measure of four principal stresses is used. Wherever possible, the Old English syntax has been preserved (see line 1242); the word-order of the original is retained. The archaic language is wrought of several different kinds of words. In the first place, there is the ‘legitimate archaism,’ such as ‘mickle,’ ‘burg,’ ‘bairn’; there are forms which are more closely associated with the translation of Old English, such as ‘middle-garth,’ ‘ring-stem.’ There are modern words used with the old signification, such as ‘kindly’ (in the sense ‘of the same kind’), ‘won war’ (in the sense ‘wage war’), ‘fret’ (in the sense ‘eat’). Finally, there are forms which are literally translated from Old English: ‘the sight seen once only’ from ansȳn, face, 251; ‘spearman’ from garsecg, ocean (see extract), ‘gift-scat’ from gif-sceatt, gift of money, 378; ‘the Maker’s own making’ from metod-sceaft, doom, 1180. Romance words are excluded whenever possible. A glossary of ‘some words not commonly used now’ is included in the book, but none of the words cited above, save ‘burg,’ is found in it.

IX. Unferth contendeth in words with Beowulf.

The Morris-Wyatt translation is thoroughly accurate, and is, so to speak, an official commentary on the text of Wyatt’s edition. It is therefore of importance to the student of the Beowulf.

As a literary rendering the translation is disappointing. In the first place, it must be frankly avowed that the diction is frequently so strange that it seems to modern readers well-nigh ridiculous. There are certain sentences which cannot but evoke a smile. Such are: ‘(he) spoke a word backward,’ line 315; ‘them that in Scaney dealt out the scat,’ line 1686.

Secondly, the translation is unreadable. There is an avalanche of archaisms. One example of the extreme obscurity may be given:—

l. 1975–76.

It would seem that the burden of ‘rathe,’ ‘beroomed,’ and ‘withinward,’ were sufficient for any sentence to carry, but we are left to discover for ourselves that ‘rich one’ does not mean rich one, but ruler, that the ‘floor’ is not a floor but a hall, and that the guests are not guests, but the ruler’s own men.

Morris himself was conscious of the obscurity of the work:—

‘For the language of his version Morris once felt it necessary to make an apology. Except a few words, he said, the words used in it were such as he would not hesitate to use in an original poem of his own. He did not add, however, that their effect, if slipped sparingly in amid his own pellucid construction and facile narrative method, would be very different from their habitual use in a translation. . . . As the work advanced, he seems to have felt this himself, and his pleasure in the doing of it fell off.’ —Mackail’s Life, ii. 284–5.

Finally, the version does not translate. Words like ‘Spearman’ for Ocean, and combinations like ‘the sight seen once only’ for the face, can be understood only by the intimate student of Old English poetry, and there is no reason why such a person should not peruse Beowulf in the original tongue rather than in a translation occasionally as obscure as the poem itself.

If one can peer through the darkness of Morris’s diction, he will discover a fairly pleasing use of the so-called imitative measure. The verse is not nearly so rough as the original; many of the characteristic substitutions are avoided. There is evident a tendency toward the ‘rising verse’ and the anapestic foot. The feminine ending is frequently used. The verse is, therefore, not strictly imitative in that it retains the Old English system of versification, but rather in that it attempts to suggest the Old English movement by the use of four principal stresses and a varying number of unstressed syllables. Morris’s verse is the best of all the ‘imitative’ measures.

1. See Mackail’s Life, i. 198.