Beowulf Story

These pages present some of work done by Beowulf translators and scholars. I am a Beowulf hobbyist (how nerdy can you get!) and not an expert on Anglo-Saxon literature or translation. The only contribution I am making to Beowulf scholarship is to bring other people's work together into one place. These pages are not meant for scholars, they are for people who are just starting to learn about Beowulf.
The Thorkelin translation of Beowulf was into Latin, the 1820 Grundtvig translation was into Danish, and the 1826 Conybeare translation was only of parts of the poem. The first complete English language translation of Beowulf was published by J. M. Kemble in 1837 (although his first partial translations were published in 1833 and 1835).
There have been many translations of Beowulf into German (which is not surprising, given that Anglo-Saxon is a Germanic language -- there were, at one time in the 19th century, more German translations than English ones), as well as translations into Danish, Swedish, Italian, French, and other languages (the best list of early translations might be that of Chauncey Brewster Tinker). I cannot read any of those languages, and so I have not acquired any versions in languages other than English, but I would like to own some of them -- particularly those from the 19th century -- so that I have a more complete collection, and so that I can see what sort of illustrations might have been included in them. As I acquire them in the coming years, I will add references to them to these pages. Acquiring translations in other languages should allow me to push my collection to over 100 different versions of Beowulf, plus several dozen books of commentary and analysis.
Many of my own comments on these pages have been strongly influenced by the book Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript (1996 revised edition), by Kevin Kiernan. Professor Kiernan is described by the British Library as "the world's leading authority on the history of the Beowulf manuscript." He has also won the Beatrice White Prize, which is awarded for outstanding scholarly work in the field of English Literature before 1590. His reports on the results of his research with the physical manuscript, and his conclusions about the authorship and dating of the poem, are very compelling.
I have read a fair amount of analysis and commentary on Beowulf and I am finding that the more I read, the more I think that I shouldn't try to present summaries of those analyses on these pages. When I first started reading the notes in the front of the various translations I had the feeling that I had a pretty good handle on the origins, dating and significance of the story, and when I first set up these web pages I wrote with confidence that Beowulf was composed by a single person in the eighth century and written down by two scribes (who made many mistakes) in the early eleventh century. I have found however that the more I read about these things, the less confident I feel that there is any consensus at all about the authorship and dating of the story.
I try to keep in mind however the reasons why I like this story, and the reasons why I wanted to set up these pages in the first place. It is an exciting story, and it is interesting to read the various translations, and I try not to get too caught up in the academic discourse. I suspect that if I were studying Beowulf as an undergraduate student that I would not have the luxury of enjoying the story without the analysis. I know that many of the hits I get on these pages are from students who are beginning to study Beowulf for the first time. I hope that you are fortunate enough to have an instructor who makes the story seem interesting and well worth reading, rather than making it seem like just another boring old book.
You might find that prose translations like the ones by Constance B. Hieatt and David Wright are a little more accessible at first because they are written in a modern style, and you might want to choose one of those versions for your first reading in order to learn the details of the story without having to acclimatize yourself to the possibly unfamiliar rhythm of the style of the Old English version. I hope you find however that the alliterative translations are much richer and more enjoyable to read, and that you will take the time to read the story a second, or even a third, time.
Note that with the Howell D. Chickering Jr. version I tried to use all of the proper Old English letters and I think I have typed them all correctly (it is difficult to proof-read a language you do not understand) except for the lowercase æ diaeresis/umlaut character (æ with a line over it), which does not seem to be available in the usual 8-bit character codes used in HTML (although I am sure it is available in the 16-bit Unicode character set). I have used "æ" (without a line over it) instead, which means that the reader of the pages on this site will not know when the æ is supposed to have a line over it and when it is not. In addition, it is not clear to me which HTML characters I am supposed to use to get a letter with a straight line over it. In HTML we have, for instance, â (â - a with diaeresis) and ä (ä - a with circumflex), but neither of these has a straight line over it. Likewise for e, i, o, u and y. I have used the diaeresis but I am going to have to look into this further.
The original Old English version of the story is included in about a dozen different books. There is an indicator in the book comparison table as to whether each book has the Old English text, a modern English translation, both, or neither. The various Old English editions do not always agree precisely on how to spell the Old English words in the story, and you will see, when examining the various images of the manuscript on this site, that the letters which actually appear in the manuscript do not always match the letters in the Old English printing of the text in books. It seems that modern printing of the Old English text is done to allow modern readers to pronounce the words properly, rather than to precisely emulate the manuscript.
I have noticed that I am getting a lot of hits on these pages by people searching for "Beowulf translated by Burton Raffel." I think that that translation is one of the least interesting of the ones I have read. I suppose it is popular because it is available in an inexpensive paperback and the language is reasonably straightforward. I hope that some of you will make a bit of an effort and try one of the more interesting translations such as those by Frederick Rebsamen, Tim Romano, Ruth P. M. Lehmann, Benjamin Thorpe, Lesslie Hall, Seamus Heaney, Edwin Morgan and Francis B. Gummere.