The Old English epic Beowulf must be one of the most-translated poems in world literature. Some years ago more than a hundred complete versions were listed, and the flow shows no sign of stopping. The one which currently dominates the market is Seamus Heaney's of 1999, but since then we have seen Roy Liuzza's (2000), Thomas Kennedy's (2001), Dick Ringler's (2007), Craig Williamson's (2011), and now Douglas Wilson's, under review here. A natural question must be, why take the trouble to repeat a project done many times already?

Wilson's motive is clear. He thinks the poem was trying to tell its original and far-off audience something which they needed to know, and something which we still need to know: and his translation, with its accompanying introduction and appended essays, is there to make that obvious to us. The reason it has not been obvious from the start is the poem's bafflingly enigmatic nature. Not only is the poem one of the most-translated in world literature, it is also—to judge from the number of scholarly books and articles about it—quite definitely the most-studied work in English literature. But still there is no consensus about it.

Problems were always there, even on the most basic level of what was happening. The poem's first editor, Grimur Thorkelin, operated on the assumption that his own native Icelandic was a good enough guide for reading archaic English, but this turned out to be completely wrong. The most famous of his misunderstandings was not to realize that the poem opens with a ship-burial: he thought it was describing the preparations for a Viking raid. Two hundred years of study have cleared up that and many other issues, but in a way, better understanding of surface difficulties has only revealed enigmas deeper down.

Of these the greatest is the issue of total contradiction between the poem's internal and external contexts. Nothing is certain in Beowulf studies, but on the whole most scholars would agree that the poem was written (not orally composed like the Homeric epics); and written by an Englishman, in markedly pure Old English, with very little trace of borrowing from other languages; and written furthermore by a Christian Englishman, who could refer to Cain and Abel and Noah's Flood and expect his audience to know what he meant without further explanation.

And yet all three of these conclusions are challenged by the poem itself. In it no one mentions reading or writing, and when the poet uses the verbs writan and scrifan (cp. Modern German schreiben), they seem to mean "cut" or "engrave," their original rather than their developed meaning. As for the issue of nationality, Beowulf has been from the start a total failure as national epic, for it never mentions England, or Britain, and the only characters in it who might conceivably be regarded as English (Hengest and Offa) are still securely located on the European mainland, pre-migration. Beowulf himself is a Geat, from what is now southern Sweden (Götaland), and the people he deals with as friends or enemies are Danes, Swedes, and members of other Northern European tribes about whom the poet seems uniquely well-informed.

This second contradiction has led to a great deal of critical maneuvering, as scholars try to fit the poem one way or another into the national narrative of the Anglo-Viking wars, but it is the third one which has caught Douglas Wilson's attention. What does it mean to have a Christian poet writing about pagan times, pagan heroes, pagan legends, and doing so apparently sympathetically—but without ever once mentioning the name of Christ, or the ideas of conversion, redemption, salvation? To bring the question down to a fine point, at the very end of the poem, when the old hero Beowulf is dead, killed by the dragon, and about to be interred in what is unquestionably a pagan funeral, what did the poet mean by writing that his soul went off (my very literal translation) "to seek the judgment of those firm in truth"?

Does that mean that the old pagan would receive the judgment given to the righteous—which is what Old English soð-fæst usually means—that is, for all his paganism he would be saved? Or does it mean that he would be judged by the righteous, who might give a different verdict? And is such speculation legitimate in any case? As Wilson notes, the great English churchman Alcuin did not think so, condemning in strong terms anyone who took an interest in pagan legends and making it unequivocally clear that all such figures, however heroic, had no destiny but hell. The idea that Beowulf, for all his self-sacrifice, his descent into the underworld, and his career as a protector of the people, might be seen as a Christ-figure (as many have argued since) would have been intolerable to Alcuin, and to all Christian hard-liners.

Wilson's conviction, which motivates his entire work, is that Beowulf the hero is not a Christ-figure but an "unChrist" figure; and that Beowulf the poem is "an evangelistic and apologetic tour de force." To understand this, we need to look at dates, and to think of our own experience. Wilson himself is now sixty years old. When he was in his fifties, he tells us, he was able to hear first-hand about the battle of Guadalcanal (1942), where his father-in-law was wounded. An event seventy years ago is still personal to him. In the early 8th century, he points out, over much of England the conversion to Christianity was no further away. The poet's parents could have been pagans, his grandparents even more likely. So Alcuin's (later) rejection of all pagans as irretrievably damned would have been hard to take. Yet Christian belief must include some sense of pagan inadequacy, if no more—and that, Wilson argues, is exactly what we have in the poem, and we have it on two levels.

One, the one which has caught the attention of modern novelists and movie-makers, is the sense that the monsters which Beowulf fights and overcomes, and which in the end overcome him, represent something permanent, something in the human psyche. But on another level they foreground a cultural issue, "a problem which this people as a people knew they had." That problem was endemic violence. And endemic violence, built into the whole heroic system with its feuds and raids and tribal wars, was the problem Beowulf could not overcome. It was this from which the Christian message came to save—slowly, incompletely, temporarily—the Anglo-Saxon world in which the poet wrote.

It may seem strange, Wilson concedes, to see a heroic poem as betraying a sense of "Viking angst," but the whole poem is overshadowed by an awareness that things are going to get much worse. The Danes will all kill each other in civil wars, the Geats will destroy themselves in military adventures. Setting a poem in such a context, Wilson points out, is like writing a novel set in late Czarist Russia: the reader can't help knowing all these people are doomed, feeling sorry for them, and especially for the unfortunate queens and princesses who crowd the margins of Beowulf, but also wondering why they did not save themselves before it was too late.

What the poet is saying, then, is that people like Beowulf's uncle Hygelac were men as good as they could be in an evil system: that is, and we also need to recognize this, not good enough. Maybe Beowulf reached a little higher. Wilson forgivingly translates the last verdict on him as "His soul was sent out, a saint's reward to find." (But the poet's verb, see my translation above, is not "find" but "seek.")

I would sum up by saying that Wilson's view is that the poem looks back, sadly but thankfully, at the great change of conversion to Christianity—a conversion carried out, among the Anglo-Saxons, without a single martyrdom, as if the Anglo-Saxons were glad to be saved. I'd add that the poet also seems to me to remember a historical trauma in the old Scandinavian world, from which many of the early invaders of Britain, like the poem's Hengest, were probably refugees. The fall of the Roman Empire also brought down, in the end, the pirate economies which had lived off it, as they turned on each other for lack of richer prey. How long these cultural memories last is harder to say, but most would agree that we ourselves have not yet gotten over 1914.

As for the translation itself, Wilson shows a certain deference to Heaney, admitting that he himself worked by taking a number of translations and creating a kind of composite. Many scholars suspect that is just what Heaney did—the late Nicholas Howe remarked that his version was "no worse than half a dozen others"—and in my judgement Wilson's lines read more naturally than Heaney's, and no less forcefully. His is a labor of love, but also a work of conviction. Yet unlike many he is not trying to appropriate the poem for his own purposes, but to see it the way it was, a poem with a great depth of mixed emotions: grief, regret, sympathy, gratitude. "There, but for the grace of God, go we."

Tom Shippey edited and translated (with Andreas Haarder) Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (Routledge).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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