This essay will examine two of those translations – Michael Alexander’s and Burton Raffel’s – and consider stylistic, semantic, lexical, and structural choices, covering the first fifty-two lines of the poem (the introduction, the Scyld Scefing episode, and Scyld’s death). Everything from then on is in some way a reconstruction, and it is an intriguing exercise to examine how different translations have interpreted it in different ways.

Thus, every copy has been made from this sole source, and further complicating matters, the manuscript was damaged by fire in 1731. xv (sometimes known as the Nowell Codex) which is usually estimated to date from around AD 1000. While the events of the poem have been estimated to date from approximately the sixth century, the poem as an oral narrative dates from anywhere between the eighth and eleventh centuries, and the poem as manuscript survives in only one folio: the Cotton Vitellius A. :Dīeowulf is an Old English epic poem, a tale that comes down to us through many intermediaries. My obligation to Scholarly Saturday shall be fulfilled, as it is the ancient and noble custom of times gone by ( not really since this blog is a week old but you know.) Then if you see me on Tumblr again today, tell me to GTFO, crank up the Giant-Ass Captain Swan Playlist of Feels, and get cracking on those fics. What did the world of Beowulf look like? What were the memories and experiences of its audience? How do Alexander and Raffel convey or fail to convey those nuances? While obviously the text can’t speak for itself, there are nonetheless some fascinating insights to be drawn.įollow me over the jump. Since obviously it’s difficult to cover the entire poem, we’ll use the first fifty-two lines as an example. Instead, we’re going to take a look at two popular translations, Michael Alexander’s and Burton Raffel’s, in order to study how the spirit, themes, and content of the original Old English have been transmitted to modern readers. While there’s an interesting commentary to be written on how this piece of ancient Anglo-Saxon heroic literature treats women, with the dutiful wife Queen Wealtheow on one side and Grendel’s mother on the other, the formidable and mysterious antagonist who almost gets the better of the hero, that isn’t my present concern. Odds are, you had to read it in high school, or perhaps you’ve seen one of the recent film adaptations, Beowulf & Grendel (2005) or Beowulf (2007) both of which felt the need to sex up their versions with, respectively, a sassy fanfiction witch and Angelina Jolie Grendel’s mother.

Beowulf by burton raffel