Norwegian Translations

First came the Nynorsk version. Henrik Rytter (1877–1950) published his Beowulf og striden um Finnsborg frå angelsaksisk (Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg from the Anglo-Saxon) in 1929. Rytter was a poet, playwright, and translator and is considered one of the most important writers of Nynorsk literature published between the world wars. It is primarily his poetry, however, that has earned him a place in the history of Norwegian literature, although he thought of his translation work as equally important. His versions of Shakespeare’s plays (1932–33) and Dante’s Divine Comedy (revised edition with Sigmund Skard, 1965) are still highly regarded. As a poet, Rytter was known as one of the first Norwegian modernists, mixing high and low styles and employing various traditional poetic forms, such as the ottava rima and sonnet, and free verse.2 Spaans, “Henrik Rytter.”

Rytter’s Nynorsk translation of Beowulf, begun in 1907, completed in 1921, and published in 1929, is in alliterative verse with a foreword, notes, and a brief bibliography. Rytter has taken pains to follow the poem line by line and further explains his methodology in his foreword: he found it most appropriate to give the translation as old a sense as he dared without presenting too many difficulties. He accordingly used a number of archaic words, mostly those for weapons, weapon usage, treasure, chieftains, and other terms relating to life in the poem. He also relieved the tedium of repetition in the poem by supplying synonyms where the original text does not, and he was not afraid to retain the inversions, insertions, and other aspects of the original. “On the whole, what was important to me, I thought, was to reproduce the old poem itself, with all its idiosyncracies, so to speak, to reflect the Anglo-Saxon form in the Norwegian language. A difficult task! – An impossible task!”3 “I det heile galdt det for meg, tykte eg, å attergjeve sjølve det gamle kvædet, med alle sine sermerke, so å segje spegle den angelsaksiske form av i norsk mål. Eit vanskeleg arbeid! – Eit umogleg arbeid!” Rytter, Beowulf, pp. 13–14.

As he sometimes uses archaic words, this necessitates the use of glosses, which he supplies, and the care he takes to make his translation faithful to the original extends to the scholarly reading he did in preparing it. He consulted the Heyne, Holthausen, and Sedgefield editions as his source texts, and he benefited from the advice of scholars such as Axel Olrik, to whose memory he dedicates his book. Here is Rytter’s masterful rendition of Beowulf’s troop’s approach to Heorot:

Close to fifty years after Rytter’s verse translation, a prose Riksmål translation of Beowulf appeared by Jan W. Dietrichson (1927–2019), a philologist and Professor of Literature at the University of Oslo, 1993–97. Educated at Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Oslo, Dietrichson published his dissertation, The Image of Money in the American Novel of the Gilded Age, in 1969.7 Anon., “Jan Waldemar Dietrichson.” He followed that with several books, including translations of important medieval texts, such as Tondal’s visions in 1984, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in 1988, Troilus and Creseyde in 2010, and Christine de Pizan in 2013. His Beowulf-kvadet (The Poem of Beowulf, 1976) begins with a foreword and introduction in which he first outlines his translation strategy. In contradistinction to Rytter, who writes in Nynorsk, translates into verse, and embraces archaic words, syntactic complexity, inversions, and other peculiarities of the original OE, Dietrichson eschews them all. His translation, in Riksmål, is in prose. Where Rytter saw the impossibility of a verse translation of Beowulf and attempted one anyway, Dietrichson saw the impossibility and chose another path. He chose a middle way between an archaic verse translation and a mundane prose one in everyday Norwegian.8 Dietrichson, Beowulf-kvadet, pp. 7–9. Rytter, for example, translated lines 1501–07 about Grendel’s mother dragging Beowulf into her lair as follows. I have italicized words that would be the most problematic for readers:

Dietrichson makes his translation even more accessible to modern Norwegians by writing a detailed, contextualizing introduction, which he urges his audience to read before the translation, and explanatory notes where appropriate.11 Ibid., p. 11. Despite its manifest virtues, however, the book attracted a smaller audience than expected. In a personal communication, Dietrichson wrote, “The book did not attract much attention when it appeared on the Norwegian market, but from time to time I happen to meet people who – surprisingly enough! – have read it and thank me for it.”12 Dietrichson, personal letter to Bjork. The gratitude is warranted.

A third Norwegian version of Beowulf appeared in 1999, when Tor Åge Bringsværd (1939–) published his Beowulf: han som ville bli husket (Beowulf: He Who Wanted to Be Remembered) with illustrations by Arne Samuelsen (1950–), a well-known artist and book illustrator. Bringsværd is an award-winning author of science and fantasy fiction and children’s books as well as a dramatist and translator.13 Sjöberg, “Bringsværd.” His Riksmål prose retelling for young adults is a carefully researched and executed production, as reflected in his afterword to the book, which contains information about the poem, its manuscript and background as well as helpful notes to the text and a list of works, with commentary, that Bringsværd consulted to write the book. He benefited from the Dietrichsen, Rytter, and Collinder translations of the poem, for example, and used George Jack’s edition of Beowulf as his base text.14 Bringsværd, Beowulf, pp. 76–77. In telling Beowulf’s story, Bringsværd straightens out its chronology so that we meet Beowulf first as a child. We meet his mother and father then, too: