When I first began, not long ago at all, to study the original Old English text of Beowulf, I was content to defer to the undoubtedly greater knowledge of scholars on the meaning of the cruces (disputed passages). Later on I found myself disagreeing more and more frequently with the scholarly consensus, and seeking alternative solutions. As I now make my way through the text for what will almost certainly be the last time, in order to write up the final draft of a full translation, I think I have at last nailed down the reason why I cannot simply defer to the experts on this poem.

It has to do with the question of poetic ambiguity. Is Beowulf an essentially straightforward work, which happens to baffle modern readers at some points because it was written in a dead language and a dead idiom? Or is it – at least in certain passages – intentionally woven through with puns, double meanings and allusions, some of which would have baffled the original audience as well? Most of the top Beowulf scholars seem to have decided on the former view, but let’s just say that opinion is divided on the subject.

Let’s demonstrate the case for the latter view with a relatively simple example. Early on in the poem, when the cannibal giant Grendel starts to terrorize the hall of the Danish king Hrothgar, the previously monotheistic Danes backslide into paganism by sacrificing at altars. They are seeking the help of some god, but the Christian poet tells us that they will find nothing but disappointment and eventual hellfire. The god in question is probably Thunor, a.k.a. Thor, whose main role in Norse mythology was to assassinate giants and other demonic creatures on behalf of humanity; but the poet declines to speak his name1, and instead describes him only as a gastbona.

This word consists of two parts. The first is gast or gæst, which ordinarily means the soul or spirit; but at this point the word has been used repeatedly to describe Grendel, who can presumably be classed as a ‘demon’ or ‘evil spirit’, albeit one more solid and humanoid than the sort of thing conjured up in modern minds by these terms. The second – bona or bana – means a killer or murderer, but is also applied in Old English literature to the Devil. So gastbona could mean on the one hand a beneficent killer of demons, or on the other hand a demonish slayer of human souls.

Hmm, that’s a tricky one. Let’s see what the best scholarly edition on the market has to say about this word:

177. gāstbona most likely does not mean ‘slayer of demons (trolls)’ (Weber Neuphilol. Monatsschrift 2 [1931] 293–5) but ‘slayer of souls’ (see Gloss.). In conjunction with helle ġemundon 179 and sāwle bescūfan / in fýres fæþm 184–5 it thus equates pagan deities with devils. Indeed, this is how they are routinely described by Anglo-Saxon churchmen: see Johnson in Pagans & Christians, ed. T. Hofstra et al. (Groningen, 1995) 35–69.

Thus speaks the Summa Beowulfologica, a.k.a. Klaeber’s Beowulf Fourth Edition, a formidable work indeed (and, in all seriousness, a very impressive and useful one). Moreover, upon consulting two of the most accurate scholarly translations out there – those of Tom Shippey and Howell D. Chickering – I see that both have opted to translate gastbona as ‘soul-slayer’. Well, looks like that’s settled, then. ‘Soul-slayer’ it is, not ‘demon-slayer’.

And yet, I can’t help thinking…

At this point in the story there is a disconnection between narrator and characters. The Danes are hoping for help from the god; the poet, hovering omniscient over the action, knows that they will not find it and will only compound their plight. And it is at this moment that he drops in the word gastbona: in the minds of the Danes, a ‘slayer of demons’ who may help them against Grendel, but from his own point of view a ‘slayer of souls’ who can only do them even worse damage. The word is in my view intentionally ambiguous, and should be translated ambiguously in modern English as something like slayer of spirits.

And yet this is complicated by the possibility that gæst ‘spirit’, used in the context of Grendel’s nightly visits to the Danish hall, is also intended as a pun on gæst (giest) ‘guest’! These two words are distinguished by vowel length, and may not have seemed similar in speech; note that modern Englishmen do not make puns on ‘wit’ and ‘wheat’. But since vowel length was not marked in writing, the written word gæst could be read either way, with a long vowel as ‘spirit’ or with a short vowel as ‘guest’; and perhaps the intention was to let readers choose freely between these two words. We, of course, must decide between them; but we can preserve something of the ambiguity by using visitant, or translating as spirit in some instances and guest in others.

As the saying goes, once you start seeing this sort of textual ambiguity, you can’t unsee it. And you can’t help but wonder why it is so rigorously excluded from most editions and translations.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that scholars have a tin ear for wordplay. Some of them, not far from this field, have been ingenious enough to track down the correct referents of Old Danish puns preserved in medieval Latin. Many of the ambiguities in Beowulf, such as the spirit/guest one, have not gone unnoticed either. Yet the prevailing tendency2 is always to minimize them, and to work on the basis that every crux has a single ‘true’ meaning, which need only be puzzled out with reference to the most common Old English usages. The obvious problem with this is that poets do not always stick to single meanings or common usages of words.

Let’s take a look at a longer passage that has not, to my knowledge, been properly analysed before. It belongs to the VIth fitt (chapter or canto) of the poem, in which Beowulf meets King Hrothgar at his court and announces his intention to fight Grendel in a duel to the death. After regaling the king with some of his earlier exploits against monsters, and further proclaiming that he intends to fight unarmed and unarmoured, he muses for a few lines on the possibility that Grendel will slay and devour him as he has so many good men before him.

This is what he says (lines 445a-451):

Na þu minne þearft

hafalan hydan, ac me he habban wile

d[r]eore fahne, gif mec deað nimeð;

byreð blodig wæl, byrgan þenceð;

eteð angenga, unmurnlice,

mearcað morhopu. No ðu ymb mines ne þearft

lices feorme leng sorgian.

Didn’t quite catch that? Here are the same lines in modern English, according to the imitative translation of Francis Gummere:

Nor need'st thou then

to hide my head; for his shall I be,

dyed in gore, if death must take me;

and my blood-covered body he'll bear as prey,

ruthless devour it, the roamer-lonely,

with my life-blood redden his lair in the fen:

no further for me need'st food prepare!

Now, I am a Gummere fan, but his translation was written more than a hundred years ago and is badly in need of an update. Yet as far as the meaning of this passage is concerned, Klaeber’s Beowulf Fourth Edition doesn’t have all that much to add. Its verdict is that “the general sense of this passage is plain: there will be no need for funeral rites.” On the contrary, I would say, the passage contains a long succession of puns and double meanings, the consistent theme of which is Grendel would subject Beowulf to a parody of Germanic funeral rites by eating him.

The most obvious clue to this is the word byrgan in the fourth line. Look this up in the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, and you get two main entries: byrgan with a long vowel, meaning ‘to taste’, and byrgan with a short vowel which means ‘to bury’ or more precisely ‘to inter in a barrow’. The word byrgan, then, like gæst, had two meanings that were distinguished in speech but had to be divined from context when reading. In the present context, the meaning of byrgan þenceð is that Grendel ‘will think to taste’ Beowulf; but the possibility of reading the phrase as ‘will think to bury’, in a passage that is clearly connected with funeral rites, should arouse our suspicion as to whether the rest of the passage is all that it seems to be.

Let’s look at each line one by one, and suggest some new translations that take this ambiguity into account, before rounding off the post with a retranslation of the whole passage. (We’ll keep the chyming verse from Gummere, but lose the theeing and thouing – Old English didn’t have a T-V distinction, at least not before its speakers started to imitate Norman French, so this is at least as anachronistic as it is faithful.)

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Na þu minne þearft // hafalan hydan / ac me he habban wile

Literally, with some syntactical rearrangement, this reads “you will not need to hide my head, but [instead] he will have me”.

Hydan ‘to hide’ can mean ‘to bury in the ground’, so na þu minne þearft hafelan hydan could be translated as ‘you will have no need to inhume my head’. Presumably, anyone burying a dead body after having retrieved it from a battlefield would have made sure above all that the head was present and correct. Yet there seems to have been some overlap3 between hydan and hedan, ‘to heed’, which could also be used in the sense of ‘to secure’ or ‘to get hold of’ (thus the jealous retainer Unferth, later on in the poem, is loath to admit that Beowulf might gehedde ‘gain’ or ‘secure’ greater glory than he has).

And it seems likely to me that this sense was also intended here. Since Grendel typically swallows retainers whole or drags them bodily to his lair, King Hrothgar would have to undertake the difficult and dangerous task of retrieving Beowulf’s head before even thinking to inhume it. Thus already we encounter a possible double meaning, and have to consider translating hydan not as inhume but as inearth – a slightly rarer word that also means ‘to bury’ or ‘to inter’, but also sounds like the much more common unearth, which is what you typically do with something that is lost after hunting about for it.

Now let us move onto habban wile. The fact that habban and willan are the direct ancestors of modern English have and will makes it all the more important to nail down their true Old English usage, lest they act as false friends. Looking at the examples given in the Bosworth-Toller entry for habban, it seems to have been used in many instances where we might rather say hold, possess or take;4 and the surface meaning of ac me he habban wile is clearly that there will be no need for Hrothgar to worry about finding or burying Beowulf’s head, because Grendel will take possession of him and spirit him away. In other parts of the poem, Grendel’s victims are described as huð ‘spoil’, carried away to be eaten like treasures won in battle – so the implication is that Beowulf’s dead body will be taken by right of conquest.

It is a bit more difficult to ascertain whether habban was ever used in the modern sense of having something to eat or drink, in which it stands for the act of consumption. If this usage existed, it cannot have been common, since Old English had other words for the act of consumption (such as þicgan and brucan) that were eclipsed only later. Yet the Bosworth-Toller entries for of wist and bileofa (both meaning ‘food’ or ‘victuals’), show that habban could be used with food items, albeit perhaps in the sense of having one’s cake rather than eating it.

This brings us to willan. Although this word could already be used like modern will, as a mere auxiliary indicating future action, its essential meaning is more like wish or want. So if there is a duality of meaning in the phrase he me habban wile, it is between “he will take me (away)” and “he will wish to have me (as food).” Either way, Hrothgar can forget about trying to retrieve and bury Beowulf’s head.

Quite clearly, ac he me habban wile requires a subtler translation than that of Gummere. Ideally the ambiguity should be analogous – to translate as “he will have me to rights (rites)” or “he’ll have me as is meet (as his meat)” would be a bit much, in that it would be a bit more than the original text. On consideration, I would translate loosely as he will haste to take me or in haste he’ll take me. This implies on the one hand that Grendel will take Beowulf away from the hall before there is time to bury him, and on the other than he will not wait to ‘partake’ of him.

D[r]eore fahne / gif mec deað nimeð

Literally, “bloodily bedecked, if death takes me”. The manuscript actually has deore fahne ‘dearly bedecked’, but most scholars emend to dreore ‘bloodily’ (etymologically, ‘drearily’), and I follow this because the consistent surface meaning of this passage is Beowulf’s devourment by Grendel.

Yet even with emendation, dreore fahne closely resembles deore fahne, and the former phrase is most likely a pun on the latter. To judge from the costly goods excavated from Anglo-Saxon graves, as well as the descriptions elsewhere in Beowulf of bodies being cremated in armour with weapons and gold, it would seem that the proper thing in a decent heroic age burial was for the body to be deore fah ‘bedecked dearly’. The use of dreore in place of deore, then, echoes this traditional expectation while making a grisly parody of it, and ought to be translated more or less analogously; my own choice of phrasing would be bedecked in all my gore.

Byreð blodig wæl / byrgan þenceð

This line, already mentioned above, literally reads “will bear my bloody corpse, thinking to taste [entomb] me”. To try to match the phrase byrgan þenceð with a similar pun on long and short vowels in modern English would be too ambitious; it could technically be done by translating loosely as bound for the tum, with punning on tomb, but this is not a phrase for epic poetry and the crucial element of homography is lost. It seems wiser, then, to displace the pun on ‘bury’ to the word bear, and translate loosely: my bloody corpse bearing, to his better taste. In its surface reading, this construction is of course incomplete without the next half-line, but the sub-reading stands up as my bloody corpse burying to his better taste.

Eteð angenga / unmurnlice // mearcað morhopu

Literally: “[he will] eat, the lone-walker, ruthlessly, marking the moor-pits [or mounds].” Here we come to a difficult section of this passage and its underlying analogy. The sub-reading is harder to discern here, but the word unmurnlice stands out at first glance. Scholars are quite right to gloss it as ‘ruthlessly’ or ‘without compunction’, not ‘unmourningly’, since Old English murnan could mean ‘to worry about’ as well as ‘to mourn’; but I would argue that the use of an adverb derived from a word appropriate to funerals and mourning (and which is actually used twice in these contexts elsewhere in Beowulf) in this passage of all places is no accident.

The use of etan ‘to eat’ looks at first glance to be unambiguous. But at this point the original audience (or vidience) would have picked up on at least some of the double meanings in the last couple of lines, and thus been primed to view this word in a different way. A wide range of usage examples in Bosworth-Toller shows us that etan could mean not only eat but also consume, devour, destroy, and that it could be applied to the action of fire as well as other agents (such as water and cancer) that consume the flesh of the dead. I suspect that it was acceptable, if perhaps rare, to use this word for the flesh-consuming blaze of a funeral pyre – something described elsewhere in this poem as the gæsta gifrost ‘greediest of spirits’, which ‘swallows up’ (forswelgan) the bodies of the dead.

This seems a good time to mention that there are three other accounts of funerals given in Beowulf5, two of which feature scenes of women lamenting during the burning of bodies. If this was indeed the customary time for expressions of ritual mourning, the use of etan with unmurnlice would reinforce the image of Grendel consuming Beowulf’s flesh like a funeral pyre. This would also explain why, in the last line, Grendel merely byrgan þenceð ‘thinks to taste/entomb’ (and not something more gruesomely descriptive, like byrgeð ond freteð ‘tastes and devours’): it is because the embarrowment of a body could take place only after its cremation on the pyre.

We must also take care to translate in a way that preserves the right sequence of events. This can be done by rendering the first half of this line in past tense as consumed without sorrow, thus allowing the incomplete thought from the last line to be resolved in two possible ways:

1. My bloody corpse bearing – to his better taste, consumed without sorrow – etc. (Here the descriptions of Grendel’s actions are sequential, and ‘consumed without sorrow to his better taste’ appears as a freestanding interjection in past tense inserted between two other actions described in present continuous tense)

2. My bloody corpse burying, to his better taste consumed without sorrow; etc. (Here the sense is that the corpse is buried only after it has been ‘consumed without sorrow’)

If that wasn’t tricky enough, let’s move on to mearcað morhopu, ‘marks the moor-pits’ or alternatively ‘marks the moor-mounds’. The surface meaning is that Grendel will stain his den, or the knolls and swales of his moorland home, with the blood of the man he has just eaten. Here, then, we have a clear sequence of actions in the ostensible narrative of devourment: Grendel first bears off Beowulf’s body, then eats it, then finally leaves a puddle of blood behind him. But what is the corresponding last act in the underlying analogy of a burial rite?

The answer can be found in the final fitt of Beowulf, which describes the funeral of the hero. First the body is consumed by fire, then the barrow is raised, then finally men on horseback ride repeatedly around it. This may have been a very ancient custom, given that those attending the funeral of Patroclus at the end of Homer’s Iliad are also described as riding their chariots around the body (albeit before the burning and embarrowment, although the bier does not seem to be moved from its place). One imagines that it would have served the purpose of beating a track around the barrow, marking it out and guiding all those who encountered it to walk around it rather than over it (for their own good as well as that of the dead, given that barrows in Germanic lore were fabled to be occupied by dragons).

Other than context, there are three good reasons to suspect an allusion to this custom here, and these are none other than the words mearcian, morhop[u] and angenga. Let’s deal with each of them in turn.

Mearcian ‘to mark’: this is not the most natural or normal way of referring to random staining by blood (that would be wemman ‘to blot’, or perhaps bestyman ‘to soak’), although some imprecision is to be expected in a verse-style based on sound-association. As can be seen from the examples given in its Bosworth-Toller entries (here, here, and here), mearcian is often used for marking something out with some sort of sign, and especially for marking out a place or fixing a boundary (hence the relation to mearc, ‘mark’, which could mean both a sign and a border). Both of these meanings are applicable to graves or barrows, whether they be marked by some sort of sign or merely by a circular path. The careless ‘marking’ of a wasteland area with blood would thus be a savage parody of normal burial practice.

Morhop[u] ‘moor-pit[s]’ or ‘moor-mound[s]’: there is some confusion as to whether the word hop, found only in compounds, refers to a raised hillock or a depression in the earth. I suspect the latter, since its modern dialectical descendant hope denotes a small enclosed valley, and also because Grendel is described elsewhere in Beowulf as fleeing to fenhopu (‘fen-hopes’, probably sunken dens where he could hide, since at that point in the story he is running for his life). The word is also related to modern hoop, suggesting that a hop was circular, whether it was raised or sunken. I would guess that a morhop was a pit, trough or bog in the earth, and less likely a round knoll; but in any case, it is meant to be understood as Beowulf’s resting place, analogous to either a earthen grave or a raised barrow. I further suspect that the word as written by the original poet was morhop, singular, and that it was only pluralized to morhopu by the scribe because he thought it a generic reference to fenland scenery.

Angenga ‘lone-goer’, ‘solitary walker’: this is a generic epithet for Grendel, who prowls about the fens alone at night, and may be inserted here just to fill out the verse. But I suspect that it, too, plays its part in the analogy. The act of riding around a barrow would be called an ymbhwyrft ‘aroundturning’ or ymbgang ‘aroundgoing’ (the verb form ymbgan ‘to circumambulate’ is used of the riders at Beowulf’s funeral); and if some word existed to describe such a rider, it would presumably be *ymbgenga ‘around-goer’, which is phonetically quite close to angenga. But we do not, of course, need to hypothesize a pun on an unrecorded word to see why the poet might have chosen to deploy angenga here (instead of some equivalent epithet like aglæca ‘arch-beast’). If the presence of barrow-riders was a mark of a lordly or kingly funeral, then the thought of Beowulf’s wild grave being prowled around solely by the troll that has devoured him further highlights the igmominy of his fate.

The real question is how to translate all of this in a way that remains at once faithful to the text and intelligible to the (reasonably antiquarian) modern reader. I would opt for consumed without sorrow, the sole foot-trudge betrailing the moor-grave.

The word betrail means literally ‘to trail about or around [something]’, but carries additional connotations of leaving a trail on something (compare besmirch, besmear, befoul, bepiss, etc.), as well as a passing resemblance to bewail. Sole foot-trudge (‘trudger on foot’; compare e.g. footpad, ‘itinerant thief’) emphasises the contrast between Grendel and the barrow-riders at the end of the poem; yet if the connection needs to be made more obvious, we could always depart from the text a bit, and use something like solitary vigilant or sole wake-marcher. Moor-grave is a noncommittal interpretation of morhop, and makes the analogy more obvious (necessarily so, I would say, so as to compensate for the obscurity of the burial practices alluded to here); other options would be moor-pit or moor-mound.

No ðu ymb mines ne þearft // lices feorme / leng sorgian

This is the last hurdle in our way, and perhaps the hardest to clear, since it may involve three meanings instead of just two. For now, let us leave the most troublesome word untranslated: “you will not need to sorrow [worry] long about my body’s feorm.”

Sorgian, ancestor of sorrow, could mean ‘to grieve’ or ‘to worry’ and can be rendered into modern English as fret. At first glance, the word feorm looks simple as well: its common meaning is ‘food’, ‘provisioning’, ‘sustenance’, by extension ‘feasting’ and ‘entertainment’. Many scholars have thus read this line as “you will not need to worry about hosting and feeding me for long”, and Tolkien speculated that the habit of voracious eating may have been a traditional attribute of the Beowulf character.

This is an attractive reading, and we would certainly not want to close off any lines of interpretation that may lead back to the lost traditional matter behind this poem. The problem is that feorm is not as simple a word as it looks. A better idea of its range of possible meanings is given by the Bosworth-Toller entry for the verb form, feormian, which lists three definitions: ‘to supply with food’, ‘to feed upon’, and ‘to cleanse’. It would seem that the noun form feorm was commonly used for only the first of these (although an alternative noun form, fyrmþ, was used for both ‘feasting’ and ‘cleansing’); but as we have said, poets do not always stick to the common meanings of words, and especially not when dealing in analogies and allusions.

The fact is, then, that Beowulf’s statement can be read in three different ways: 1) that Hrothgar will no longer have to worry about the sustenance of his living body; 2) that he need not long sorrow about the consumption of his dead body; and 3) that he will not have to spend any time at all worrying about the cleansing and maintenance of his dead body (i.e. prior to a proper funeral). And since the rest of the passage can be read only two ways, as a funeral or as an act of cannibalism, it may be that the first interpretation is the only one that was not intended. Yet it makes sense to imagine, as Tolkien does, that Beowulf was traditionally held to be a voracious eater; and there is no reason why the poet should have ignored the most common meaning of feorm.

How, then, to translate this word? I would opt for provisioning, which may be a little anodyne, but can be interpreted in all three ways: 1) as the provisioning of food and drink that Hrothgar as host must offer to a living Beowulf, 2) as the provisions that would have to be made for a dead Beowulf in Hrothgar’s possession prior to a proper funeral, and 3) as Grendel’s act of provisioning himself upon Beowulf’s dead body. I would translate the whole line-and-a-half as follows: not much will you need to fret for the provisioning of my fleshly body.

Let’s now put all of this together in a full retranslation of the passage. I daresay it has not been possible to expunge from it a certain trace element of oddness and obscurity, but this may have been palpable in the original text as well. It’s what slows the reader down and cues him to understand that all is not what it seems.

...Feel not obliged
My head to inearth;    for in haste he'll take me,
Bedecked in all my gore,    if death befall me;
My bloody corpse bearing –    to his better taste,
Consumed without sorrow –    the sole foot-trudge
Betrailing the moor-grave.    Not much will you need
To fret for the provisioning    of my fleshly body.

I can assure you that not all of my Beowulf translation will be like this, because not all of the original Beowulf is like this. Most of it is quite straightforward, narrative-focused, and imitative of oral epic, and does not have to be constantly untangled like the work of Norse skalds or Anglo-Saxon riddlers. Yet every now and again you come across a line or passage, like this one, that has a bit more depth of meaning to it.

This passage, I would say, serves the purpose of narrative as well as irony. The poet is foretelling the death and funeral of his hero in a short, poor, grisly, ignominious form – a sort of counter-traditional ‘bad ending’ for Beowulf.

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