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Does fame keep you good? No. Does gold keep you good? No. Does your good wife keep you good? No. What keeps you good? Vigilance.
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.
When I use “bro” elsewhere in the poem, whether in the voice of Beowulf, Hrothgar, or the narrator, it’s to keep us thinking of the ways that family can be sealed by formulation, the ways that men can afford (or deny) one another power and safety by using coded language, and erase women from power structures by speaking collegially only to other men.
The humans in Beowulf are communal, battling together, leaders alongside lesser-ranked warriors. Those who are superhuman (or supernatural)—Grendel, his mother, the dragon, and Beowulf—battle solo and are ultimately weakened by their wild solitude.
it seems likely to me that some translators, seeking to make their own sense of this story, have gone out of their way to bolster Beowulf’s human credentials by amplifying the monstrosity of Grendel’s mother, when in truth, the combatants are similar.
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. Whether one’s solitary status is a result of abandonment by a man or because of a choice, the reams of lore about single, self-sustaining women, and particularly about solitary elderly women, suggest that many human women have been, over the centuries, mistaken for supernatural creatures simply because they were alone and capable.
I regularly found myself muttering speeches written a thousand years ago as I watched their contemporary equivalents unfold on the news. This moment, and the moments before it, the centuries of colonialist impulse and kingdom-building, the peoples being built upon, are things that concerned the Beowulf poet and concern this translator, too. The news cycle is filled with men Hrothgar’s age failing utterly at self-awareness, and even going full Heremod. Politics twist paradoxically into ever more isolationist and interventionist corners, increasingly based in hoarding and horde-panic. The world,
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In the United States of 2020, everyone, including small children, has the capacity to be as deadly as the spectacular warriors of this poem. The teeth, swords, and claws of the Old English epic have been converted into automatic possibilities, the power to slay thirty men in a minute no longer the genius of a select few but a purchasable perk of weapon ownership.
Privilege is the way men prime power,
You know how it is: every castle wants invading, and every family has enemies born within it. Old
Grendel was the name of this woe-walker, Unlucky, fucked by Fate.
Hrothgar, most generous, don’t deny them. They’re well-dressed, thus well-born, and thus worthy. And the man who led them here— he looks so right! His chest, broad in girth, his armor blazing, bright! Blatantly of noble birth.”
Horrors happen, I’m grown, I know it. Bro, Fate can fuck you up.”
I’d never brag, but the truth is, my sword slew nine singular scavengers that night. There are no oceangoing stories more awful than mine, no tales of greater terror, no other man so sea-stalked, but I survived, my salvation in my own hands. The waves bore me shoreward, attending me, and left me 580 at long last in the land of the Finns. The End.
anyone who lives long will endure both ecstasy and ugliness.
The horror wasn’t muted by the measure of women’s strength against men’s brawn. Both can hold slaying swords, glazed with gore, and score the boar-crests from war-helmets, warming them with blood.
We’re all going to die, but most of us won’t go out in glory. Here’s what matters, though, for men: not living, but living on in legend.
