01 Beowulf

Family Trees

Acknowledgements

Family Trees

Family trees of the Danish, Swedish, and Geatish dynasties.

Names given here are the ones used in this translation.

THE DANES or THE SHIELDING5

S H I E L D S H E A F S O N

of Halfdane

Acknowledgements

The proposal that I should translate Beowulf came in the early 1980s from the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, so my first thanks go to M. H. Abrams and Jon Stallworthy, who encouraged the late John Benedict to commission some preliminary passages. Then, when I got going in earnest four years ago, Norton appointed Professor Alfred David to keep a learned eye on what I was making of the original, and without his annotations on the first draft and his many queries and suggested alternatives as the manuscript advanced towards completion, this translation would have been a weaker and a wobblier thing. Al's responses were informed by scholarship and by a lifetime's experience of teaching the poem, so they were invaluable. Nevertheless, I was often reluctant to follow his advice and persisted many times in what we both knew were erroneous ways, so he is not to be held responsible for any failures here in the construing of the original or for the different directions in which it is occasionally skewed.

I am also grateful to W. W. Norton & Co. for allowing the translation to be published by Faber and Faber in London and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York.

At Faber's, I benefited greatly from Christopher Reid's editorial pencil on the first draft and Paul Keegan's on the second. I also had important encouragement and instruction in the latter stages of the work from colleagues at Harvard, who now include by happy coincidence the present Associate General Editor of The Norton Anthology, Professor Stephen Greenblatt. I remember with special pleasure a medievalists' seminar where I finally recanted on the use of the word "gilly" in the presence of Professors Larry Benson, Dan Donoghue, Joseph Harris, and Derek Pearsall. Professor John R. Niles happened to attend that seminar and I

was lucky to enjoy another, too brief discussion with him in Berkeley, worrying about word choices and wondering about the prejudice in favour of Anglo-Saxon over Latinate diction in translations of the poem.

Helen Vendler's reading helped, as ever, in many points of detail, and I received other particular and important comments from Professors Mary Clayton and Peter Sacks.

Extracts from the first hundred lines of the translation appeared in The

Haw Lantern (1987) and Causley at 70 (1987). Excerpts from the more recent work were published in Agni, The Sunday Times, The Threepenny Review, The Times Literary Supplement; also in A Parcel of Poems: For Ted

Hughes on His Sixty-fifth Birthday and The Literary Man, Essays Presented to Donald W. Hannah. Lines 88-98 were printed in January 1999 by Bow & Arrow Press as a tribute to Professor William Alfred, himself a translator of the poem and, while he lived, one of the great teachers of it. Bits of the introduction first appeared in The Sunday Times and in an article entitled "Further Language" (Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. XXX, no. 2). The epigraph to the introduction is from my poem "The Settle Bed" (Seeing Things, 1991). The broken lines on p. 151 indicate lacunae in the original text.

S.H.