Swedish Translations

Rudolf Mauritz Wickberg (1851–1940) was much more successful. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Lund in 1877, briefly served as a reader there in comparative Germanic linguistics, and then became a lecturer in French and English at the state secondary grammar school in Västervik, teaching from 1883 to 1917. According to the 1921 edition of the encyclopedia Nordisk Familjebok (Nordic Family Book), his major achievement was translating Beowulf into Swedish and therefore having “incorporated that unparalleled poetic work into Swedish literature.”3 “införlifvat detta enastående diktverk med svenska litteraturen.” Anon., “Rudolf Mauritz Wickberg.” The translation was originally attached to the annual report on the Västervik school for 1888–89 as a mere appendix. Twenty-five years later in 1914, Beowulf: En fornengelsk hjältedikt (Beowulf: An OE Heroic Poem) was issued in a second edition with an updated introduction as volume five in “Askerbergs populär-vetenskapliga bibliotek” (Askerberg’s Popular Scholarly Library). That series was intended for an educated, but not professional, audience and would approach that audience in a way “that, through lucidity, clarity and precision, makes reading a pleasure and a revitalization.”4 “som genom åskådlighet, klarhet och precision gör läsandet till ett nöje och en vederkvickelse.” Wickberg, Beowulf, 2nd ed., inside front cover. The introduction gives an overview of the poem,5 Ibid., pp. 5–6. its historical and legendary background,6 Ibid., pp. 7–10. its prehistory, age, and manuscript,7 Ibid., pp. 10–13. and its language, style, and meter.8 Ibid., pp. 13–15. Wickberg also supplies a glossary of names, all of which are in the original OE, and breaks the poem into four parts instead of forty-three fitts or songs: the fight with Grendel,9 Ibid., pp. 16–55. the fight with Grendel’s mother,10 Ibid., pp. 56–76. Beowulf’s return,11 Ibid., pp. 77–86. and the fight with the dragon.12 Ibid., pp. 87–118. Over 100 years later in 2022, Bo Gräslund would give Wickberg’s translation and introduction currency yet again. See the discussion below.

Erik Björkman (1872–1919) trained in Nordic philology, German, and English, and held professorships at Lund, Göteborg, and Uppsala, where he was appointed Professor of English Language in 1911. He published much of his work in German and English, his thesis on Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English (1900–02) and treatises on Nordische personennamen in England in alt- und frühmittel-englischer zeit (1910) and Zur englischen namenkunde (1912) being good examples. His major work in Beowulf studies is Studien über die Eigennamen im Beowulf, published posthumously in 1920.13 Ekwall, “Erik Björkman.” Among the several items in Swedish that he published during his lifetime is his translation of the last part of the poem, the fight with the dragon, in 1902. Wickberg mentions this translation in his 1914 introduction to his translation,14 Wickberg, Beowulf, 2nd ed., p. 13. and Sune Lindqvist would later come to prefer it to Wickberg’s as more accurate.15 See, e.g., Lindqvist’s “Sutton Hoo and Beowulf.”

“Beowulf, Fornengelsk Dikt” (Beowulf, OE Poem) was published in Henrik Schück’s Världslitteraturen i urval och öfversättning (Selected World Literature in Translation) in 1902. Björkman offers an extremely detailed and accurate prose summary of lines 1–2207,16 Björkman, Beowulf, pp. 463–70. which is followed by a brief essay on Beowulf by Schück, anticipating his more fully developed 1909 argument in Studier i Beowulfsagan.17 Ibid., pp. 471–74. Björkman’s “prosaic,” line-by-line translation of lines 2207–17, 2232–310, and 2313–3182 with footnotes to the translation mostly by Schück follows Schück’s essay.18 Ibid., pp. 475–501. Lines 2207 through 2217 of Björkman’s translation are below, followed by the OE text. I have given literal English translations of both under each of the first few lines to emphasize how close Björkman’s translation is to the original OE:

Björn Collinder (1894–1983), who published the most widely read and popular Swedish translation of Beowulf in 1954, renders the same lines this way:

Collinder was Professor of Finno-Ugric Philology at the University of Uppsala, 1933 to 1961, and he was a formidable force in the field. His Fenno-Ugric Vocabulary (1955), Survey of the Uralic Languages (1957), and Comparative Grammar of the Uralic Languages (1960), for example, have become classics in Finno-Ugric studies. He also translated important works by authors such as Euripides, Sophocles, and Shakespeare, and his translation of The Kalevala, like his translation of Beowulf, “is considered pithy and brilliant,” especially in its fourth edition published in 1970. He was a fellow of learned societies in Finland, Norway, Denmark, Austria, and Hungary, and in his later years he stood out “as a giant of education who combined profound Swedishness with extensive knowledge of world cultures.”22 “betraktas som kärnfull och snillrik.” “en bildningens jätte som förenade ursvenskheten med omfattande kunskaper om världskulturerna.” Tarkiainen, “Collinder.”

Sune Lindqvist, the distinguished archaeologist discussed in chapter 5, published the extremely complicated and detailed Beowulf Dissectus. Snitt ur fornkvädet jämte svensk tydning (Beowulf Dissected: Excerpts from the Ancient Poem and a Swedish Interpretation) in 1958. He had planned to work with his colleague Björn Collinder in developing the translation for the book, but the freedom Collinder had to take in his translation to make the alliterative verse function in Swedish rendered that translation too loose for Lindqvist’s purposes. He consequently did his own.23 Lindqvist, Beowulf Dissectus, p. 6. His main goal is relatively simple: to excise from the surrounding superfluous tissue of Christian interpolation and digression the original text of the poem and arrange it chronologically so that modern readers (especially modern Swedish readers) could better appreciate it. It could thus take its rightful place as Sweden’s national epic. Denmark has its Saxo Grammaticus, after all (Grundtvig would say that it has its Beowulf), and Norway and Iceland their Snorri Sturluson, so why should Sverige not have its comparable monument?24 Ibid., p. 5. Lundqvist supplies a complex diagram of what the original text and subsequent additions look like on pp. 123–25.

Lindqvist felt that since the main characters of the central narrative of Beowulf are Geatas, and Geatas are generally accepted as the Götar of Västgötaland in mainland Sweden, the basic material of that narrative has to derive from Swedish, especially götisk, tradition.25 Ibid., p. 8. If we accept that premise, then we can also accept the implied premise that the language of the original narrative was East ON or OldSwed. That probability in turn can directly affect the way we interpret the language of the narrative, even in its present incarnation in OE. Thus, although Lindqvist had always read Beowulf as an archaeologist, fixing on funerary customs and material culture, in this book he delves largely into the archaeology of the word, what has become known since the 1990s as “textual archaeology.”26 Herschend, “Striden i Finnsborg.” As T. S. Eliot remarks in “Whispers of Immortality” about the Elizabethan dramatist John Webster, Lindqvist “saw the skull beneath the skin,”27 Eliot, Complete Poems, p. 52. the underlying original text beneath subsequent textual layers.

Supplementing the glosses and commentaries of major editions of the poem such as Klaeber and Clark Hall/Wrenn with reference to dictionaries of old Swedish laws, medieval Swedish, and Swedish etymology,28 Lindqvist, Beowulf Dissectus, p. 9. Lindqvist tackles some hard words. Take just two examples: aldorleas (lines 1587a, 3003a) and garsecg (49a, 515a, 537b). Aldorleas appears three times in Beowulf, where it means “lordless” once and has been taken to mean “lifeless” or “dead” the other two times. In lines 1586–87a in the cave in Grendel’s mere, however, the poet has Beowulf encountering “guðwerigne Grendel licgan, aldorleasne” (battle-weary Grendel lying lifeless). Lindqvist thinks that, here especially, a better meaning for the adjective than traditional OE glossaries provide is found in OSwed, where the comparable word (alster related to ala related to aldor) as a substantive does mean “lifetime, life, or age” but metaphorically also means “offspring,” because offspring are what make us live on. The great weight in ancient Scandinavia that was put on a man’s having a son who could avenge his death and take over his position and responsibilities is well known,29 Ibid., p. 105. writes Lindqvist, and the appropriateness of “battle-weary Grendel lying sonless” is manifest. The adjective “sonless,” in fact, could have been originally used in the two other places where it appears as well and seems especially appropriate when applied to Beowulf in line 3003a. The Swedes are predicted to attack the Geats once they hear that “our lord is sonless, he who once held the hoard and kingdom against all enemies.”

Garsecg (lines 49a, 515a, 537b), which is almost universally interpreted to mean “ocean,” likewise appears three times in the poem and presents an equally interesting problem. Two of those instances occur in the Breca episode, which Lindqvist regards as an interpolation and therefore much later than the original narrative. The first instance of the word, on the other hand, does occur in that original narrative. It concerns Scyld Scefing, whom the Danes “geafon on garsecg.” Lindqvist believes there are two possibilities for interpreting this line in its original Scandinavian context, both having to do with Odin. First, garsecg or “spear man” could simply be an epithet for Odin, not Neptune, the god of the spear. So the Danes gave Scyld Scefing to Odin or the realm of the dead. Or, second, the word could originally have been the OSwed word Geirs-oddr (spear point) and refer to the broader analogous story of Sigurðr Hringr in Skjoldunga saga.30 Ibid., pp. 121–22. In the saga, the aged Swedish king, gravely wounded in battle, climbs onto his own burial ship and stabs himself (or is stabbed) to death to begin his journey to Odin’s realm. Scyld Scefing could also have begun his journey to the afterworld at the point of the spear, a perfectly natural, according to Lindqvist, way to meet your end in the Nordic tradition. And so, digging down to the ur-lexicon in this manner, scalping away superfluous digressive and Christian tissue from the skull, Lindqvist moves Beowulf closer to the heart of Iron Age Sweden.

The Swedes have taken the young audience for Beowulf seriously, just as the Danes and Norwegians have, and produced two appropriate translations of retellings of the poem. The first is of the version for children aged twelve to fifteen by Robert Nye (1939–2016), the best-selling British novelist and poet,31 Worley, “Robert Nye.” who published his retelling of the whole of Beowulf in 1968. He writes in his afterword to the book that he offers an interpretation, not a translation. Myths have great meaning for children, he continues, and he has tried to make his retelling of this one live for children and young adults of future generations.32 Nye, Beowulf, p. 109. Birgitta Gahrton (1935–), a renowned translator of children’s books and Margaret Atwood’s works, has in turn tried to make it live for future generations of Swedes. Here is her version of the scene in which Hrothgar decides to build Heorot:

Rob Lloyd Jones (1977–), an award-winning British children’s author, likewise retold the whole of Beowulf for children but even younger ones than those that Robert Nye chose as his audience. Lloyd Jones retells the whole Beowulf story for readers around age seven. Those readers benefit from a simple text embedded in engaging illustrations. Victor Tavares, a children’s book illustrator who believes that “Beauty seduces! It creates affection links between readers and books,”34 Anon., “Victor Tavares.” has provided rich, provocative, exceedingly bright illustrations on almost every page of this retelling. Grendel’s mother, for example, appears as a giant octopus with a talon at the end of each arm and with huge, devouring fangs. Birgit Lönn, a widely published author and translator of children’s books, transforms the text into modern Swedish. Here is the start of her chapter 1 about Heorot:

Gräslund concludes his volume with a useful synopsis of the major findings from his book Beowulfkvädet as well as maps and pictures of relevant archaeological sites.41 Ibid., pp. 152–92. He also gives his answer to the question of whether Beowulf is an OE or Nordic poem: