Beowulf: A New Translation

You are right, of course. I didn't want to delve into that sort of complexity, because I didn't want to confuse the issue terribly much. Nonetheless, the main point regarding Icelandic that I wanted to make was about the mutual intelligibility with Old Norse, and the fact that, as languages go, it is extremely conservative (meaning that it resisted change for a long time).

For instance:

> As a testimonial from those times, the author of the thirteenth century Icelandic Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu makes a reference to the spoken English language in the time of Anglo-Saxon King Ethelred (986 – 1016 AD):

> Ein var þá tungu á Englandi sem í Nóregi ok í Danmörku. “One was the tongue in England as in Norway and in Denmark” [0]

Interestingly, this sentence renders identically into Norwegian (Bokmål) as into Danish: Den ene var tungen i England som i Norge og i Danmark. [1, 2]

In Swedish, in case you were wondering, it translates as En var tungan i England som i Norge och i Danmark. [3]

In Icelandic: Ein var tungan í Englandi eins og í Noregi og í Danmörku. Notice how similar these are to the words of a man who's been dead for a millenium.

Google Translate doesn't have nynorsk or Faroese available, but, I expect these would render into something between Swedish and Bokmål; and, something nearly identical to Icelandic; respectively.

I also didn't mention modern English's closest living relative, West Frisian. [4, 5]. Old Frisian [6] and Old English were also mutually intelligible, even moreso than Old English and Old Norse. There is still a subset of modern West Frisian that, although written much differently from its English translation, sounds nearly identical. [7] My experience of it was that it was as if one pronounced Dutch with English vowels.

So, that's a fuller exposition of the family tree of Old English. Things start getting weirder in the Middle English period, when the Normans conquer England in 1066, causing English to start accreting French loan words while, at the same time, dropping the case system and most of its inflections, and acquiring silent letters. [8]

If you want to put this all together into a fuller story of how the sounds of Anglo Saxon were reconstructed, you have to know about vowel shifts [9], and, maybe a bit about consonant shifts [10].

Once you have those tools at hand, plus the rest of a graduate course in comparative linguistics, you can essentially reverse engineer the vowel and consonant shifts to reconstruct a probable phonology for Old English.

But, that would have made a much longer comment, you see. ;)

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[0]: https://wordwidefx.com/en/blog/post/old-norse-and-old-englis...

[1]: I used Google Translate for this, but, I did study Norwegian for a bit, and, although my norsk is a bit rusty, this looks correct to me.

[2]: This is not a coincidence. Norway was essentially under Danish rule from 1523-1814. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Norway

[3]: Google Translate again. But, based on my limited knowledge of Norwegian and Swedish, this, again looks right.

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Frisian_language

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Frisian

[7]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113646/why-is-it...

[8]: For instance, in Middle English, the word "knight" was spelled the same as it is today, but pronounced /kniçt/. In Old English, it was spelled variously as cniht, cneoht, cnyht, cneht, cnieht, and maybe even 1 or 2 more variants, but still pronounced the same as in Middle English.

English spelling didn't start to standardize until William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in the late 15th century.

[9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_shift

[10]: https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Consonant+Shift

> the original authors and audiences were not dusty elbow-patched-tweed college professors. This was raucous and rowdy stuff, more akin to a dumb action movie than philosophy.

Where can I find out more about that depiction of Beowulf? The post linked above, by the author of the new translation, quotes JRR Tolkien (possibly the leading scholar of Old English in the 20th century) saying,

“If you wish to translate, not re-write, Beowulf,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in 1940, “your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day the poem was made.”

I don't begrudge Maria Dahvana Headley doing her own interpretation of the story, but that doesn't change the original.

I think she might be arguing that she is going to do it her way, not Tolkien's way. Also, there's the thrill to onlookers of seeing her thumb her nose at 'authority', rather than expressing some curiosity about the other person's perspective as a human being - the same curiosity we should have about hers. In context, that statement of hers is a bit different:

A “perfect” translation would require the translator to time travel fantastically rather than historically—more Narnia than Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. As if this weren’t enough, the language of the poem is as much a world-building tool as the plot is, engineered with the poet’s own anachronistic filter, an archaic, lyric lexicography.5

“If you wish to translate, not re-write, Beowulf,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in 1940, “your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day the poem was made.”6

Tolkien and I wouldn’t have agreed when it comes to the sort of language required for a translation of Beowulf—perceptions of “literary” and “traditional” language vary widely depending on who’s doing the perceiving, and Tolkien had a liking for the courtly that I do not share—but we agree that the original’s dense wordplay must be reckoned with.

Amid a slew of regressions in the past half decade, I must cite a win—the democratization of information. Access to formerly gate-kept texts has been radically broadened. Until recently, it was a cotton-gloved privilege to view the original manuscript of Beowulf. Now a click, and there you are, looking at handwriting a thousand years old: “Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon…” Not only is the original accessible to anyone with an internet connection, so are a huge number of translations and volumes of evolving scholarship, many long out of print. This translation exists because of that access.

This is a ridiculous PR puff piece by her publisher, and even a vague perusal of the translation indicates it's an atrocity, which is exactly what you'd expect from a "young adult writer" of her physiognomy and smug disposition.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/12/cartes-de-visite

"Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of Beowulf starts off like an exploding beer keg: “Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!”3 Generations of scholars have limped along, translating Hwaet! as “Listen!” or “Yes!” or “Lo!” or “Hail!” (Why not “Belay that!” or “Tut! Tut! I say!”?) Headley has had the wicked idea that what we’ve needed all along is Beowulf: The Frat-Boy Chronicles. If she had continued in this cheeky vein, Headley might have altered Beowulf Studies forever."

and lol

"Headley apparently knows little Old English, and it shows. In preparation, she read all the translations by women she could find."

Stunning and brave.

Do yourself a favor and put in the couple of hours it requires to just read it in the original language. Or if you can't be arsed to do the trivial work required, as apparently the author of this "translation," read Rebsamen.

> Headley has had the wicked idea that what we’ve needed all along is Beowulf: The Frat-Boy Chronicles.

Maybe it doesn't apply to the cultural context of Beowulf, but from https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/bro-culture-fitness-chiv..., I got the impression that "bro culture" is a valid — and illmuninating! — lens through which to at least view the concept of medieval chivalry.