Review: Beowulf –Translation and Commentary, trans. Tom Shippey, edited by Leonard Neidorf
Review by Brúnwulf Leornere
Published by Uppsala Books. 2023, 428 pages, $24.99/£16.99. Available on Amazon
They say that a successful Beowulf translation can be judged by its opening lines and how it reflects the original language. I cannot recall where I heard this, perhaps it was in Tolkien’s 1940 essay on translating Beowulf, but it holds true for the many translations of my favorite book which I have read over the years. While archaic and unreadable to many, I hold in great esteem the more ‘literal’ translations of the 19th century by John Kemble and William Morris, where vocabulary descended from the Anglo-Saxon tongue could well capture the alliteration of the original language. However trends have changed greatly over the last century, and the question of ‘foreignizing’ (bringing the reader to the original) versus ‘domesticating’ (bringing the original to the reader) has changed things greatly. Modern translations seem more preoccupied by the issue of accessibility, while maintaining poetic features such as alliteration. This unfortunately creates further problems for how the nuances of the inner world of Beowulf may be captured. So where does this bilingual translation from Tom Shippey, Anglo-Saxon translator and Tolkien scholar, sit in this ever-shifting sea?
Shippey’s poem begins with “Well, we have heard of the power of the Spear-Dane kings, how in days gone by they did great deeds.” Upon first read, this did not hit my heart as my readings of Morris, Kemble, Wackerbarth and especially Kennedy, but as I worked my way through the poem, not only did its cleverly concise and laconic form became more apparent, showing subtle use of alliteration, but it highlighted careful attention to cultural context and intentions of the poet, acknowledging alliteration in the original poem which have since been translated with wildly divergent and sometimes contradictory readings. While events of the original poem can be quite difficult to follow with its frequent use of variation, its flow sometimes separated between multiple lines of deviation and tangents, this edition presents a very readable and coherent narrative, as if poetry and prose had merged together. For Tolkien’s prose translation, appreciated for its form, has a fitting poetic counterpart in Shippey’s work.
One thing which sets this edition apart from many others is that it not only stands on the shoulders of the wealth of scholarship in the Fourth Edition of Klaeber’s Beowulf, but upon the expert scholarship of Professor Leonard Neidorf and Shippey himself. Another conflict within Beowulf scholarship is between fidelity to the manuscript, seeing the flawed text as authoritative to its own content, and fidelity to what the manuscript should say, fixing scribal errors in the manuscript such as spelling, word omissions hinted at by the meter, and internal inconsistencies. What we have here then is the extreme end of the latter, an idealized form of the Beowulf poem; cleansed, polished and fixed, giving emphasis to these problems with both in the translation and in Neidorf’s extensive commentary (with ‘further reading’ for each note). The Old English text is also annotated with vowel lengths and palatalization pronunciation, giving a useful edition for public reading. This means that the book may appeal to two different audiences simultaneously, the casual reader looking for an accessible version of the poem and the academic historian.
But there is also a third audience to whom this edition may appeal, and that is the heathen who seeks to recover the worldview contained within the poem. Shippey writes in his introduction on the translation, “we emphasize novelty, originality, surprise: and accordingly we fail to feel the power of enforcement, familiarity, recognition. And it is this which satisfied the poet’s second major aim: to express the ethos of a social group.” At the crossroads between modern pithy wordsmiths and the archaisms of 19th century nationalists, Shippey’s translation offers a new, untrodden path – Beowulf as a gateway to the world which it describes. This may come at the cost of more appealing vocabulary choices, creating a simpler prosaic translation, but what it offers in place of novel words is a greater emphasis on the world which those words describe, and for the Théodsman and serious heathen who seeks to draw something from Beowulf, this has much to offer us.
This is the first publication by Neidorf’s and Shippey’s Uppsala Books, which also looks set to publish an exciting book on Wóden in 2024. This is definitely a publisher to which one should pay attention.