Beowulf: A New Translation

by Beowulf Poet

As much as Beowulf is a poem about Then, it’s also (and always has been) a poem about Now, and how we got here. The poem is, after all, a poem about willfully blinkered privilege, about the shock and horror of experiencing discomfort when one feels entitled to luxury.

Beowulf is a living text in a dead language, the kind of thing meant to be shouted over a crowd of drunk celebrants.

There are noble characters in Beowulf, but the poem itself is not noble.

Language is a living thing, and when it dies, it leaves bones.

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

I don’t know that Grendel’s mother should be perceived in binary terms—monster versus human. My own experiences as a woman tell me it’s very possible to be mistaken for monstrous when one is only doing as men do: providing for and defending oneself.

Possessions bring no peace.

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.

Grendel hurt, and so he hunted.

Fate can fuck you up.”

The attacker became the attacked— racked with pain,

Death, no matter our desires, can’t be distracted. We know this much is true, and it’s true for all souls: each of us will one day find the feast finished and, fattened or famished, step slowly backward into their own dark hall for that final night of sleep.

One man’s mettle kept the rest from massacre.

Fire comes from the same family as famine. It can feast, unfulfilled, forever.

if you want to win, you have to forget you’re afraid to die.

The sky sipped the smoke and smiled.