Books: There Be Dragons

Just don't take any course where they make you read Beowulf," Woody Allen advised Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1977). The throwaway line elicited laughs from Allen's core audience of college grads, especially the one-time English majors among them who had learned to dread--if not actually read--what they had heard was a grim Anglo-Saxon epic filled with odd names and a lot of gory hewing and hacking.

The joke, it turns out, was on the chucklers. In January, a British panel chose Beowulf for the Whitbread Award as the best book of 1999, with J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban running a close second. But these judges, of course, did not suddenly come to their senses about the merits of a manuscript composed sometime late in the first millennium. They gave their prize--and an instant spot at the top of British best-seller lists--to a new verse translation of Beowulf by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Heaney's Beowulf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 219 pages; $25) has now been published in the U.S., giving American readers the chance to take the measure of this Harry Potter slayer, the deadest white European male in the politically incorrect literary canon. Judging by the electronic-sales ratings updated constantly by Amazon.com Beowulf is becoming boffo on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Credit for this surge of interest should rest squarely on the marvelous language that Heaney has found to set this old warhorse of a saga running again. All translations, especially of poetry, involve constant compromises between sense and sound, between the literal meanings of the original words and the unique music to which they were set. The Anglo-Saxon idiom of Beowulf sounds particularly alien to modern ears: four stresses per line, separated in the middle by a strong pause, or caesura, with the third stress in each line alliterating with one or both of the first two. Heaney follows these rules to the letter in such lines as "No one could miss their murderous feuding" or "The shepherd of people was sheared of his life." But he also regularly works supple variations on this pattern, letting the Anglo-Saxon rhythms echo as an undercurrent in lines that would seem, in another context, almost prosaic: "She turned then to the bench where her boys sat."

Much that seemed off-putting about Beowulf to modern readers becomes, in Heaney's retelling, eerily intriguing instead. Yes, the Scandinavian hero kills three monsters: a scaly maneater called Grendel (Beowulf rips off the creature's right arm at the shoulder); Grendel's aggrieved mother; and, 50 years later, a fire-breathing dragon that mortally wounds Beowulf before expiring. But these bloody deeds actually occupy fairly few of the epic's 3,182 lines. The Beowulf poet, who is recounting legends that were passed down orally from several centuries earlier, is interested less in violence, which appears to be inescapable in the world he portrays, than in the workings of fate (wyrd) in human lives.