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Notes
1. Headley, “Monsters for President,” online transcription.
2. Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” 126.
3. Jason Sheehan is the first admirer, James Parker the self-declared “Beowulf nerd.”
4. Beginning in 1837, about ninety other complete English translations of Beowulf, in verse or in prose, have been published, eleven of them between 2011 and 2020 (based on Marijane Osborn’s annotated list from 2003, updated using BeowulfTranslations.net, Googlebooks, and Amazon.com). Richard Hamer, a student of Christopher Tolkien, is the other 2020 translator.
5. My evidence for this is somewhat anecdotal, including my younger sister’s recollection, but may also be gleaned from the introductions to many other translations.
6. Julie Boyden’s is the stripped-down “pagan” Beowulf, Meghan Purvis’s the expanded one.
7. At the end of her Acknowledgments, Headley thanks “those encountering Beowulf for the first time in this translation, the teachers teaching it …” (140). In her podcast “Monsters for President,” around minute 40, she expresses her desire to “get into the canonical structure of assigned reading” (my transcription).
8. Irina Dumitrescu comments: “In transforming Beowulf into an allegory of twenty-first-century American toxic masculinity, Headley suppresses some of the complexity of early medieval manhood” (44).
9. Headley’s translation is cited here by line number, her Introduction by Roman numeral page number, and her Acknowledgements by page number. Line numbers for the source text correspond to Frederick Klaeber’s edition.
10. Headley discusses translators’ characterizations of Grendel’s mother in her Introduction, xxiii–xxvi.
11. She analyzes her linguistic style beautifully in her introduction, xx. Around minute 45 of “Monsters for President,” she comments that she uses “slang from the past 500 years.”
12. Later, when Hrothgar declares he wants to adopt Beowulf, Headley has him call the hero “my foundling” (translating “sunu,” “son,” 948), explicitly recalling Scyld.
13. Even Donaldson, in his remarks on his translation, discusses the temptation to insert a couple of explanatory words on occasion.
14. Besides including over 150 pages of glossaries and indices, Klaeber’s edition (not a translation, but the basis of many translations), contains about 100 pages of introduction, 110 of notes on the meaning of specific lines, and 150 of appendices (including related texts and references in other texts to the characters of Beowulf).
15. A famous burning is the climax of the Icelandic saga of Burnt-Njal; the dishonor of burning a family in their own house is remarked on by the burners themselves. More relevantly, the Beowulf poet speaks of the “enemy flames” that would burn Hrothgar’s Heorot not long after Beowulf leaves (83–86; Headley, The Mere Wife, 83–85).
16. In this case, with Unferth’s sword Hrunting, the phrase “Let it shatter in the silt” is probably meant to be Beowulf’s thought as he throws it down (I don’t care if it shatters), but it could also, given the brisk syntax of the passage, be a sentence with Beowulf as the subject: [He] let it shatter.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Judith P. Shoaf
Judith P. Shoaf, director emerita of the University of Florida Language Studio, holds her Ph.D. from Cornell University in French and Medieval Literature. She is the translator of The Quest of the Holy Grail (Broadview Press, 2018) and of an open-access Lais of Marie de France (1996). Shoaf is currently the managing editor of Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature.