A Beowulf Kind of Mood
Book Choice for January 2020: Beowulf, Author unknown, 6th (?) c. AD
I’m on holiday. I’m on holiiii-daaaay. While I have since had the luxury of studying in a couple countries, growing up we weren’t “holiday people.” So many people in North America just have to work so much. Almost every summer of my childhood however, we would drive 900km to my grandma and grandpa’s house in the idyllic Eastern townships of Quebec, I ran wild over my dad’s little farm, and we went camping for a week or two. Those were the trips I took, along with two exceptional trips out East, once to PEI and once to the Bay of Fundy. Looking back my childhood does seem very natur-y. And I didn’t set foot on a plane until I was 19.
Now I’m thirty, and beginning to learn that holidays don’t just happen, you really have to MAKE them happen. You have to coordinate schedules with your partner’s holidays. You have to book tickets in advance. You have to leave detailed cat care instructions, and bribe your friend with ice cream. You have to work ahead and make sure everything is done so you can be without email for a few days (ideally).You have to clean the house decently and buy extra cat food. You have to pack!
Yes it’s a lot to do, to take a 4 day holiday. And we aren’t going so far, we are going to the Coast (of Germany). But it’s still fairly exciting (I’m in the liminal space of being on the train right now), we are just starting out. Will it be relaxing? Will the days hang heavy on our hands? What is travelling anyway?
I’m not sure, but we are seizing this opportunity. Awhile ago I wrote in my phone that my ideal life would be “doing pieces of writing and then taking vacations to recover from them” (I know, seriously, who do I think I am?) My boyfriend said “yeah hun that WOULD be nice.”
Anyway, maybe it’s working. Only two weeks ago I submitted a piece of writing, my first article, and it sure did make me very tired. Submitting the article was followed by a three-day hangover, not alcohol induced, thankfully, but the writing process had taken its toll, even though I was reasonably on schedule until the very end. Writing a (short!) article turned out to be an incredibly emotional battle against myself, who was CERTAIN I could never make it–how dare I think I could—be a scholar—in moments I thought I would not finish and therefore, die—and then it was done. It was existential.
None of the above matters. The tiny hinge between my internal confidence war and the work of art that is Beowulf was originally meant to be the Sea, but this has now been overtaken in my mind by the theme of “battle,” in general. My demons were interior, intent on self-sabotage; Beowulf’s water monsters were personifications of chaotic external forces, intent on destruction…Come to think of it, maybe the monsters Grendel and his mother were manifestations of Beowulf’s internal psyche, of his deep-rooted human fear of being extinguished… who on earth knows how literature works?*
Returning to reality, I read Beowulf in January. Actually, I listened to it on audiobook (I have a tangent on this topic, but I’ll save it for another day) in the translation by Seamus Heaney, which the author himself read, and it was wonderful. As Beowulf was originally an orally-transmitted poem, taking the chance of listening to it really turned out to have been the right way to do it. Heaney’s translation flows superbly, and his word-choice, in many cases the literal renderings of the old English (or at least it sounds this way), is incredibly atmospheric, sparks flying up to the dark heavens, cloudy waters, flame…I’m simply not doing it justice, it’s a must read (or listen).
I took an Old English course once, when I was underemployed and passing the time (as usual I look back to the time before I met my profession as a charmingly different world of unknowingness and time. Can this particular feeling of the slower pace of one’s past ever be found again?) Although the course was great, and the teacher a truly ‘unique’ eccentric, who used her vacations to travel on cargo ships so that she could write while feeling the sea rolling; there is something about studying, learning the technical aspects of literature and language and caught up in “doing translations” for homework, that led to me leaving the course without the deep appreciation for Beowulf that I have now, after hearing Heaney’s version.
I’m sure we read it, or were supposed to, among many other fragments of Old English poetry and history but it didn’t leave the same impression that I have recently gained. I had to slow down. I had to sit and listen to the cadences. And—I am writing the conclusion to this blog post a month after our trip to the sea—it has stayed with me. I have a paperback copy of Heaney’s version at home, and it is on my to-retrieve list. I would love to read Beowulf yearly. I would love to know it. As I can’t climb out of the historian’s skin I was born in I also want to dork out with the introduction to the gloomy Denmark of that time, but I must concede that Beowulf is so mysterious and powerful it actually beats imagining the historical reality; it is the daydream, it is the nightmare.
It’s a myth that tells itself.
*lots of people, accredited and otherwise