2. Methods
To give you a sense of what this book contains, I look briefly in this Introduction at some Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Norwegian articles and books from 1817 to 1987. Besides being in the Scandinavian languages, these items have one other thing in common (and this is the main point of this book): they participate to varying degrees in two traditions of Scandinavian scholarship on OE literature – nationalism, beginning with Romantic Nationalism in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and an appreciation of the aesthetics of OE poetry that precedes J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1936 breakthrough on Beowulf by decades. Grundtvig once again takes the lead in this regard in his 1815 review of the first edition of Beowulf. In it, he states that the poem
is so unique of its kind that I dare not classify it with any of the poems we have from the North’s ancient times, for in its plan and execution one traces genuine artistry … It is a beautiful, tastefully ordered and ornamented whole … in every way Beowulf’s spiritual monument of molten gold which shines from headland far away over the sea and announces to the watchful eye of the steersman the glory of the Sea-Goth …
1 Busbee, “A Few Words,” p. 29.~
Figure 1. Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, 1820.
We can see both of these traditions in full bloom in Grundtvig’s earliest excursion into OE literature apart from
Beowulf in his 1817 article on “The Battle of Brunanburh,” a poem from
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that may owe much to the skaldic court poetry tradition of Viking Age England.
2 Townend, “Pre-Cnut Praise-Poetry.” The battle itself was of sufficient interest to Scandinavians that it takes up chapters 52 to 55 of
Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar.
3 Livingston, The Battle of Brunanburh, pp. 68–81. Grundtvig’s article begins with a scholarly essay on the OE poem, then moves to Grundtvig’s heroic ballad in its honor, then ends with an “Echo” or “Reverberation” poem reflecting on the OE poet, on Grundtvig, and on the Danish ballad composed by Grundtvig. In the essay, Grundtvig describes the importance of the battle to the English, the nature and content of the poem, and the inadequacies of Henry of Huntingdon’s ca. 1133 and Edmund Gibson’s 1692 Latin translations of it. He also lambasts the English for neglecting poetry blessed with a glorious spirit and infused with a spiritually alive mother tongue, concluding by saying:
were my voice powerful enough to travel across the sea and penetrate the ears of the English, then I would shout at, implore, beseech them, both for the human race’s and their own sake, to look seriously back, discern the tongue of their fathers, learn to understand it, and strive to appropriate for themselves the spirit, the soul, from those distant days.
4 “var min Røst mægtig til at dønne over Havet og trænge ind i Anglernes Øren, da vilde jeg raabe, bede, besværge dem, dog for Menneske-Slægtens og deres egen Skyld alvorlig at see sig tilbage, løse Fædrenes Tunger, lære at forstaae dem, og stræbe at tilegne sig Aanden fra de gamle Dage.” “Om Bruneborg-Slaget,” p. 72.He then rounds off his essay with a scholarly, accurate, and literal prose translation of the poem together with numerous textual notes correcting Henry of Huntingdon and Gibson. Before offering his own rendition of “Brunanburh,” however, Grundtvig states the following about the scholarly accuracy of his literal rendition:
Thus may the poem’s words be interpreted, but the poem is not translated or “Danished” in that way at all. It just lies there like a corpse for raven and wolf, its spirit gone. I will try now to recapture that spirit and let it speak as well as it can in my Danish tongue without uttering anything other than what the old scald would have. And that, as you know, is what I call translating poetry.
5 “Saaledes maa da Rimets Ord udtydes, men dermed er i mine Tanker Rimet ingenlunde oversat eller fordansket, det ligger som et Liig til Ravn og Ulv, og Aanden er borte, denne vil jeg nu søge at gribe og lade tale saa godt den kan med min danske Tunge, uden at udsige Andet end den gamle Skjald, og det er, som man veed, hvad jeg kalder at oversætte Digte.” “Om Bruneborg-Slaget,” p. 78.To make the poem better than it was, to release its soul and allow it to live again in Danish, Grundtvig offers us a 29-line stanza poem in one of the three main forms of the medieval Nordic ballad, that of a four-line stanza followed by a refrain (the other two are two-line stanzas, one with terminal refrain, one with medial and terminal refrain).
6 For a discussion of the medieval Scandinavian ballad, see Colbert, “The Medieval Ballad.” Pp. 61–63 focus on kæmpeviser, “heroic ballads.” The “Danishing” in this folk ballad is again accurate insofar as Grundtvig deletes little from and adds little to the narrative content of the OE. But the ballad form he employs reincarnates the poem (
verbum cantus factum est) in an ancient yet contemporary guise, a popular and familiar guise. So thoroughly Nordic and balladic is this poem, in fact, that it can actually be sung. James Massengale, Emeritus Professor of Scandinavian Studies and a musicologist at UCLA, analyzed the meter and form of the original Danish for me and fit the ballad to a known balladic tune, that of one of the “King Diderik” ballads. We cannot prove that this tune is what Grundtvig had in mind for Brunanburh, but we know that it could have been. Volume 5 of the collected Danish ballads from the Middle Ages in which it appears was published in 1814. Stanza 1 with music is reproduced below,
7 Possible music to accompany N. F. S. Grundtvig’s “Kæmpevise om Bruneborg-Slaget” (Heroic Ballad about the Battle of Brunanburh) from his “Om Bruneborg-Slaget og et Riim i den Anledning.” Lightly adapted and simplified melody courtesy of James Massengale, UCLA, from Nyerup and Rahbek, Udvalgte Danske Viser fra Middelalderen, p. 18, no. 3. as are stanzas one to three with English translations.
~
Example 1.“Det var Kongen i Engelland.”
Det var Kongen i Engelland,
Paa guldet saa gad han ej spare,
Det var Herren, Kong Adelstan,
Ham fulgte de Grever i Skare.
Udødelig Ære ved Bruneborg de Ædlinger have
sig vundet.
Edmund Ædling og Adelstan,
De Sønner af Edvard saa kjække,
Hjelm og Skjolde de skar som Vand,
Thi helte saa vare de begge.
Udødelig Ære ved Bruneborg de Ædlinger have
sig vundet.
Herlig var deres Høvdingsfærd,
De Æbler af ædelig Stamme,
Mur om Land deres Heltesværd,
Saa Fjenderne bleve til Skamme.
Udødelig Ære ved Bruneborg de Ædlinger have
sig vundet.
There was a king in England,
with gold he chose not to be spare,
that was the lord, King Adelstan,
the earls followed him in a troop.
Undying honor at Brunanburh for themselves
the nobles have won.
Edmund the noble and Adelstan,
those sons of Edward so brave,
helmet and shield like water they hewed,
for heroes both were they.
Undying honor at Brunanburh for themselves
the nobles have won.
Glorious was their chieftain’s raid,
those apples from noble tree,
a wall around land their heroic sword,
so their enemies were put to shame.
Undying honor at Brunanburh for themselves
the nobles have won.
The style here is Danish Baroque and is directed at the common man, at anyone who reads and can sing Danish. Grundtvig clearly popularizes the poem in the best sense of that word, infusing it with a Danish spirit brought further to life by the incessant pounding of the balladic refrain (twenty-nine iterations of “Udødelig Ære ved Bruneborg de Ædlinger have sig vundet” have their effect). In the “Efterklang” (After Ring or Echo Poem) that follows the “Danishing” of the poem, Grundtvig, as a Nordic scald comparable to the OE scop, reflects on the OE poem and his balladic rendition of it. The “Echo Poem” is Grundtvig’s creation, the first instance of which appeared in 1815 in his Heimdall. There, “Efterklang” follows “Norne-Giæst,” a fairly faithful translation of a selection from Olav Tryggveson’s Saga, and represents Grundtvig’s poetic and personal response to a text from the past, which has specific historical and typological relevance to the present.8 http://www.grundtvigsværker.dk/tekstvisning/14200/0#{%220%22:0,%22v0%22:0,%22k%22:4} and Holm, Historie og efterklang, especially p. 31. In the “Echo Poem” for “The Battle of Brunanburh,” the central metaphor is of Grundtvig as a bell founder, digging up precious ore to be melted down and shaped into a bell to ring throughout Denmark. The OE alliterative poem thus moves from the ancient pages of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to the contemporary pages of Grundtvig’s journal Dannevirke, first in a rough-hewn, lifeless prose translation – the precious ore from the past – and then in a modern Danish folk ballad. From there, it moves to the living society of Grundtvig’s Denmark, where it can be sung in its new, living form in Danish.
Purely, relentlessly nationalistic, to be sure, but this ballad also demonstrates the second tradition and an essential premise that Grundtvig was to voice definitively twenty-three years later in his preface to his edition of the OE Phoenix (see chapter 3). There he articulates the credo that the philological is secondary and much inferior to the aesthetic appreciation of a given text: for Grundtvig philology, the study of the word, should give way to pneumatology, the study of the spirit. This belief by one of the giants of nineteenth-century philology had its definite impact, I believe, on Scandinavian scholarship on OE and ensured that it reached the insights that Tolkien would reach, more than sixty years before Tolkien. Ludvig Schrøder’s symbolic reading of Beowulf, which does precisely that, appeared in 1875 (see chapter 5).
Aesthetic interest in OE poetry appears in two other examples from the nineteenth century. I begin with a rapid glance at the first translation into any language of
Judith. Lars Gabriel Nilsson (1833–99) was the Swede responsible for this act when he studied under three friends of Grundtvig (George Stephens [1813–95], Peder Munch [1810–63], and C. R. Unger [1817–97]) at the University of Copenhagen. In 1858, Nilsson’s master’s thesis, “Judith, Fragment af ett fornengelskt Qväde” (Judith: Fragment of an Old English Poem), was published. In it, he uses the text of the poem by Benjamin Thorpe (1782–1870) from his
Analecta Anglo-Saxonica of 1834 to create a literary translation that is implicitly based on the Grundtvigian notion that the spirit of the original is more important than its surface. His method is to render the text freely instead of literally into Swedish in a facing-page translation, and he employs “rhythmic prose” instead of alliteration because prose has exerted great power over the language for a long time and is therefore more appropriate than poetry for a contemporary audience.
9 Judith, p. 3. In addition to the OE text opposite his translation, he appends a glossary to allow readers to decide for themselves how well he has accomplished his task. Here are the first few lines of
Judith with my English translation of them followed by Nilsson’s Swedish translation with my English translation of them. You will see that Nilsson creates a modern Swedish prose narrative out of the OE original:
… tweode gifena,
in ðis ginnan grunde;
heo þær þa gearwe funde
mund byrd æt þam mæran þeoðne,
þa heo ahte mæste þearfe
hyldo þæs hehstan Deman.
10 Ibid., p. 4Hon ej tviflade på framgång
i denna vida värld;
hon skulle lätt finna hjelp
hos den allsmägtige Försten,
då hon hade största behof
af den högste Domarna nåd.
11 Ibid., p. 5.… doubted gifts
in this spacious earth;
she there then easily found
protection from the famous prince
when she most had need
of grace from the highest Judge.
She didn’t doubt success
in this wide world;
she would easily find help
from the all-powerful Prince
when she had the greatest need
of the high Judge’s favor.
It is worth noting here that Nilsson also had a philological interest in OE as manifested in his publishing an OE Grammar in 1866–70
12 Anglosaxisk (fornengelsk) grammatika, parts 1 and 2. and an OE reader in 1871
13 Anglosaxisk (fornengelsk) läsebok för Nybegynnare. that few if any OE specialists know exist.
The Dane Frederik Hammerich (1809–77) gives even louder and more explicit voice to Grundtvigianism in his
De episk-kristelige Oldquad hos de gothiske Folk (Christian Narrative Poetry among the Gothic People) published in 1873. A theologian and historian at the University of Copenhagen whose childhood home was marked by Moravian piety and Danish patriotism, Hammerich often listened as a schoolboy to Grundtvig preach and eventually became a close friend. He also took a long trip abroad in the 1830s, beginning with Sweden and Norway, and returned a keen Scandinavian because of the close relationship he observed among the Scandinavian languages and cultures.
14 Lindhardt, “Frederik Hammerich.” Grundtvig’s spirit clearly lived on in his friend’s work.
Hammerich’s book is Grundtvigian in scope, first of all. It embraces OE, Old Saxon, Old High German, and ON literature; it puts those literatures into a European context (i.e., Syrian, Greek, Latin, and French); and it contains the text and an alliterative verse translation of parts of “The Dream of the Rood,” a translation of “The Grave,” and selected translations from everything from “Cædmon’s Hymn” and the biblical verse paraphrases and elegies to the “Meters of Boethius,” “The Ruthwell Cross,”
Genesis A and B,
Exodus,
Daniel,
Christ and Satan,
Judith,
Christ I,
Andreas,
Guthlac B,
The Phoenix, “Soul and Body II,” “The Seafarer,” and “The Wife’s Lament” interspersed throughout a discussion of the poems. The book is Grundtvigian in spirit, second of all. Like Grundtvig, Hammerich believed that scholarly work on ancient history and languages opens the door to a new spiritual world in the present.
15 De episk-kristelige Oldquad, p. 1. But scholarship was not enough. He also saw an inextricable link between a literary text’s form and its soul, and lavished great care on his translations to make them vibrant and relevant to his contemporaries. These translations, he states, absorbed more of his time than any other aspect of his book, and he explains in some detail what problems one faces in creating literary translations of the OE poems.
16 Ibid., pp. 7–10.From 1927 to 1962, Stefán Einarsson (1897–1972) was Professor of Icelandic at Johns Hopkins University, where he distinguished himself as one of the premier scholars in the world of Icelandic language and literature. He authored over 500 books and articles, including a comprehensive, authoritative history of Icelandic literature for the American-Scandinavian Foundation and a substantial introduction to modern Icelandic.
17 A History of Icelandic Literature and Icelandic: Grammar, Texts, Glossary. For an overview of Einarsson’s life, see Liberman, Studies in Germanic Philology, pp. iii–vi and ix–xlii. In 1936, he published an article on “Widsith” motivated at least in part by love of country “[i]n these patriotic times” ([
á]
þessum þjóðræknistímum)
18 Einarsson, “Wídsíð = Víðförull,” p. 184. before the advent of WWII. In that article, he briefly deals with “Waldere,” “Deor,” “The Finnsburg Fragment,” and
Beowulf before turning at length to “Widsith” and offering a complete Icelandic translation of that poem at the end of the article. All five OE heroic poems are important, but, more than any other, “Widsith” shows just how popular heroic tales were in the period during which it was composed. Einarsson intends to demonstrate its value, “especially its connection to ON and Icelandic stories and poems.”
19 “einkum samhengi þess við norrænar eða íslenzkar sagnir og kvæði.” Ibid., p. 170. The first is the poem’s resemblance to the ON
kappatöl (“list of heroes”), the popular genre of poetry in which the poet lists characters from Icelandic literature, chiefly the
Íslendingasögur; the second is the poem’s being a catalogue poem resembling the name catalogues in Snorri’s
Edda; and the third is the poem’s beginning with words reminiscent of Odin’s in “The Lay of Vafðrúðnir,” stanza 52:
20 Ibid., p. 171.Much have I travelled,
much have I tried,
much have I put the gods to the test.
21 Calder et al., Sources and Analogues, p. 172.A fourth connection first noticed by Grundtvig is Widsith-Víðförull’s resemblance to Norna-Gestr, who “had been with all the famous kings from Völsung to King Ólafr Tryggvason and eventually dies there at 300 years old.”
22 “hafði verið með öllum frægum konungum frá Völsungum til Ólafs konungs Tryggvasonar og deyr þar að lokum 300 ára gamall.” “Widsið = Víðförull,” p. 172. Víðförull, too, has been with numerous heads of state (the poems list 71 kings and 81 nations or ethnic groups) who lived between the third and sixth centuries.
23 Ibid., p. 172. Einarsson continues his study of the connections between “Widsith” and the Nordic tradition mainly by referring to Kemp Malone’s 1936 edition of the poem and by recommending readers to other noteworthy work: R. W. Chambers’ 1912 edition, Rudolf Much’s 1925 contributions to a commentary on the poem, Karl Sundén’s 1929 Swedish translation of the poem, and Gudmund Schütte’s
Oldsagn om Godtjod (1907) and
Vor Folkegruppe: Gottjod (1926), translated into English as
Our Forefathers I–II (1929–33).
24 Ibid., p. 184. Finally, before offering his own Icelandic translation of “Widsith,” Einarsson expresses the hope that Icelanders will translate the four other OE heroic poems, especially
Beowulf.
25 Ibid., p. 184. That hope was never fulfilled, except in the case of
Beowulf. Halldóra B. Björnsson’s illustrated
Bjólfskviða was published posthumously in 1983.
We move finally in this brief survey to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries with a glance at a collection of OE poetry in translation, the only such collection ever to come out of Norway:
Vers fra vest: gammelengelske dikt i utvalg (Verse from West: A selection of OE poetry, 1987) by Arthur O. Sandved (1931–2021). Professor of English at the University of Oslo (1963–96) and a skilled linguist and translator, Sandved dedicated much of his career to translating important medieval and Early Modern English literary works into Norwegian:
26 Elsness, “Minnetal om Arthur Olav Sandved.” the selection of OE poetry (1987),
27 Vers fra vest. Langland’s
Piers Plowman (1990),
28 Peter Plogman. Milton’s
Paradise Lost (1993 and 2005),
29 Det tapte paradis. Shakespeare’s
Henry VI (1996),
30 Kong Henrik VI. Julian of Norwich’s
Revelations of Divine Love (2000),
31 Visjoner av Guds kjærlighet. selections from Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales (2002),
32 Canterbury-fortellingene: i utdrag. Milton’s
Paradise Regained (2005),
33 Det gjenvundne paradis. selections from Malory (2007),
34 Kong Arthur og hans riddere. and Shakespeare’s
Henry VIII (2013)
35 Kong Henrik VIII. and
King Lear (2013).
36 Kong Lear. Sandved also translated Fielding’s Joseph Andrews into Norwegian. Sandved’s 1981 article
37 Sandved, “Drømmen om Kristi Kors.” containing his translation of “The Dream of the Rood” started his interest in assembling a collection of OE poetry when he was surprised to find that the only OE poem that had been translated into Norwegian was
Beowulf, once into Nynorsk (New Norwegian) in 1929 by Henrik Rytter (1877–1950) and once into
Riksmål (Dano-Norwegian written language) in 1976 by Jan W. Dietrichson (1927–2019).
38 Vers fra vest, p. 5. Because Danes and Swedes already had access to a good deal of OE poetry via translations into their mother tongues, it was time for Norwegians to have access to those treasures as well.
39 Ibid., p. 5. Vers fra vest begins with a foreword (pp. 5–8) in which Sandved states his reasons for selecting the poems he does (literary merit, historical importance, and having come from contact between the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians)
40 Ibid., pp. 4–5. and a general introduction (pp. 11–27) in which he writes a good overview of the history, extent, themes, and characteristics of OE poetry and then offers a few words (pp. 27–30) about his theory of translation. He then offers introductions to and
Riksmål translations of “Cædmon’s Hymn,” “Bede’s Death Song,” “The Ruin,” “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer,” “The Dream of the Rood,” and “The Battle of Brunanburh” as well as introductions to and prose translations of
Genesis B,
Judith, and “The Battle of Maldon” (in addition, he appends to the book an introduction to and translations of fourteen Middle English lyrics). The main goal of a translation, Sandved states, is to create reactions in the reader of a translation that are comparable to the reactions of the original audience. That sometimes means replicating some of the poetic features of the original text such as alliteration, archaic diction, and variation but without making the translation sound too foreign or strange. In his translation, for example, Sandved uses alliteration extensively but not in the same systematic way as in the original texts. He also uses somewhat archaic diction and style as well as variation. “But there are strict limits to what can be tolerated of that by modern Norwegian before the style will feel long-winded and ponderous.”
41 “[M]end et er trange grenser for hva som kan tales av dette i moderne norsk uten at stilen vil føles omstendelig og overlesset.” Ibid., p. 29. As for form, Sandved chooses what seems most appropriate to the text at hand. “The Battle of Maldon” and
Judith, for example, have freer forms in prose than do more lyrical or elegiac items such as “The Ruin” or “The Seafarer.”
42 Ibid., pp. 29–30. “Maldon” in Sandved’s rendition begins thus:
Han bød så de unge hærmenn å sende hestene bort, drive dem avsted, og rykke frem til fots, stole på sin styrke, sin manndom og sitt mot.
43 Ibid., p. 109.He then bade the young warriors to send the horses away, drive them off, and move forward on foot, trust in their strength, their manhood and their courage.
The style is chronicle-like, moving forcefully ahead but still adorned by alliteration on “h” in “Han bød så de unge hærmenn å sende hestene bort” and by alliteration on “s” in “stole på sin styrke, sin manndom og sitt mot.” Sandved also uses the archaic “hærmenn” for “warriors” instead of the modern “krigere.” “The Ruin,” on the other hand, reads like this:
Storslagne disse byggverk av sten,
men nu lagt i grus av den mektige skjebne;
byens bygningere ligger i ruiner,
kjempers byggverk brytes ned og smuldrer bort.
44 Ibid., p. 41.Impressive these structures of stone,
but now reduced to rubble by mighty fate;
the city’s buildings lie in ruins,
the giants’ structures are broken down and crumble away.
“S” alliteration graces the first line and ties it to the second (“grus” and “skjebne”) as well as “b” alliteration in the third and fourth lines. And Sandved has introduced a more focused variation (“byggverk,” “byens bygningere,” “kjempers byggverk”) than obtains in the original OE, which reads:
Wrætlic is þes weal-stan, wyrde gebræcon;
burg-stede burston, brosnað enta geweorc.
Wondrous is this wall stone; disastrous events have shattered it;
the fortified cities have broken apart, the work of giants decays.
45 Bjork, Old English Shorter Poems, pp. 118–19.Recreating the aesthetic experience of the original audience for the modern one is not the same as transforming the original into a modern Danish poem in native balladic form. In line with translation theory in the West, in fact, Grundtvig’s “Danishing” of poems would be classified as the “extraneous” approach to form “usually associated with radical stylistic alteration.”
46 Kelly, The True Interpreter, p. 188. Sandved’s would be classified as the “analogical” approach, which “seeks to frame the translation in a form whose function is the same as that of the original.”
47 Ibid., p. 198. In the first instance, nationalism predominates; in the second, it is negligible. The secondary literature supporting Sandved’s introductions and translations is all in English, without a single item of Scandinavian scholarship except his own article on “The Dream of the Rood” being referenced,
48 Vers fra vest, pp. 6–7. and the brief intra-Scandinavian reference to the competition among Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes noted above is quaint at most.
All of the scholars and translators touched on here, as well as others such as Niels Lund,
49 Ottar og Wulfstan. To rejsebeskrivelser fra vikingatiden. Andreas Haarder,
50 Sangen om Bjovulf. Halldóra Björnsson,
51 Bjólfskviða. Frands Herschend,
52 Herschend, “Striden i Finnsborg.” Keld Zeruneith,
53 De sidste tider. and Suzanne Brøgger,
54 Translations in Zeruneith, De sidste tider, pp. 317–32. are keeping OE literature alive in Scandinavia through their work on and their translations into their native languages of OE texts. Since 1976 there have been three collections of OE poetry in Danish translation (1983, 1991, 1996);
55 Noack, Menneskevordelse og korsdød and Helvedstorm og Himmelfart, and Lund, Sangen om slaget ved Maldon. one each in Norwegian (1987) and Swedish (1991);
56 Sandved, Vers fra vest and Hansson, Slaget ved Maldon. three Danish translations of
Beowulf (1983, 1984 [reprint 2001], 2018);
57 Wilmont, Bjowulf; Haarder, Sangen om Bjovulf; Zeruneith, Beowulf. two Norwegian translations of
Beowulf (1976, 1999);
58 Dietrichson, Beowulf-kvadet, and Bringsværd, Beowulf. one Swedish revision of a translation first published in 1889 (2022);
59 Gräslund, Beowulf. one Icelandic (1983);
60 Björnsson, Bjólfskviða. one Finnish (1999);
61 Pekonen and Tolley, Beowulf. and one Sámi translation of a prose retelling of
Beowulf for children (2019).
62 McGuinne, Beowulf. What this work and these translations mean in the aggregate seems clear. The nationalistic motivation for studying and promoting OE poetry has diminished in Scandinavia in the twenty-first century, but both it and the aesthetic motivation – the pneumatological or spiritual motivation – definitely linger on. Both motivations have a history, to which we will now turn.