Beowulf: A New Translation

by Beowulf Poet

It’s a somewhat unlikely object of obsession, this thousand-ish-year-old epic. Beowulf bears the distinction of appearing to be basic—one man, three battles, lots of gold—while actually being an intricate treatise on morality, masculinity, flexibility, and failure. It’s 3,182 lines of alliterative wildness, a sequence of monsters and would-be heroes. In it, multiple old men try to plot out how to retire in a world that offers no retirement.

Beowulf is a living text in a dead language, the kind of thing meant to be shouted over a crowd of drunk celebrants. Even though it was probably written down in the quiet confines of a scriptorium, Beowulf is not a quiet poem. It’s a dazzling, furious, funny, vicious, desperate, hungry, beautiful, mutinous, maudlin, supernatural, rapturous shout.

The original reads, at least in some places, like Old English freestyle, and in others like the wedding toast of a drunk uncle who’s suddenly remembered a poem he memorized at boarding school.

There are other translations if you’re looking for the language of courtly romance and knights. This one has “life-tilt” and “rode hard … stayed thirsty” in it.

The entire poem, and especially the monologues of the men in it, feels to me like the sort of competitive conversations I’ve often heard between men, one insisting on his right to the floor while simultaneously insisting that he’s friendly.

Beowulf is a manual for how to live as a man, if you are, in fact, more like the monsters than the men.

We all know a boy can’t daddy 20 until his daddy’s dead. A smart son gives gifts to his father’s friends in peacetime. When war woos him, as war will, he’ll need those troops to follow the leader. Privilege is the way men prime power, the world over.

Bro, lemme say how fucked they were, in times of worst woe throwing themselves on luck rather than on faith, fire-walkers swearing their feet uncharred, while smoke-stepping. Why not face the Boss, and at death seek salves, not scars?

Anyone who fucks with the Geats? Bro, they have to fuck with me.

If warfare revokes my pass to Earth’s kingdom, just send this mail-shirt made by Weland— willed to me by my grandfather Hrethel—to Hygelac. Horrors happen, I’m grown, I know it. Bro, Fate can fuck you up.”