The Wordhoard

Bibliographical Essay

Thomas Stell - 21/1/2010

So far, work on producing a stage adaptation of Beowulf has consisted of reading (or examining pieces of theatre) and note-taking. The material I have studied so far can be divided into the primary text itself, along with criticism and translation of that text, an examination of the context of the poem, both cultural and historical, and scripts and productions of plays which may influence and inspire the final piece.

For a copy of the poem in Old English, I am using Beowulf: A Student Edition, edited by George Jack. I have not read through the whole of the text in Anglo-Saxon yet as I am not sure my command of the language would support it but using it as a reference while reading translations and secondary literature has shown that the edition is extremely accessible, with extensive notes and vocabulary parallel to the text which makes reading the text very easy, even without a translation and only a basic knowledge of Old English. Most of my annotations on the poem have been made on the translation by Seamus Heaney. It has the obvious advantage of being a verse translation - prose translations may be better for accuracy to the language of the original, but that amounts to little if the very fact that Beowulfwas written in verse is not taken into account. Seamus Heaney’s version follows the alliterative scheme of the original and uses a largely Germanic lexicon, which reflects the tone of the original very accurately. It is moreover, a work of art in its own right, which has its poetic merits which are often separate from those of the original - it is clearly Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, and as he writes in his Introduction, it reflects the influence of “Hiberno-English” on his writing and ear for poetry. He “wanted Beowulf to be speakable by one of those relatives [from Ulster]”. This gives his translating a “prejudice in favour of forthright delivery” as the “relatives” were “big-voiced” because “a simple sentence … took on immense dignity” when one of them spoke it. In many ways, this is an accurate representation of the original - the voice of Beowulf is “attractively direct”. It also allows Heaney’s use of word sounds, important through much of his poetry, to be put to good use. However, this does mean the tone drops to the almost colloquial in places, which, he admits, does not represent the “ornate” diction of the original.

William Morris’ translation (The Tale of Beowulf) is also alliterative and also uses a very Germanic vocabulary. However, unlike Heaney’s version, the language used in it is very heightened, with many archaic words and syntactical archaisms. Also unlike Seamus Heaney’s version, it is, in the words of the Beowulf critic John D Niles “unreadable” - “Then speedy at holm was the hythe-warden yare” being fairly a typical line. Niles also wrote “Rewriting Beowulf: The Task of Translation” which efficiently summarizes the main considerations in translating the poem - those of verse form and of diction in writing a translation which accurately reflects the tone of the original. It is perhaps more an interesting examination of the nature of translating itself, arguing it provides a link to the “total vision” of the now vanished culture in which Beowulfwas composed, than a practical guide to translating the poem. The major disadvantage of this essay for my own project is its view of the translation as a link to a past culture which will soon become obsolete due to changes in modern language. It does little to help a translator who wishes to create a long-lasting work of art in itself from the Old English text of Beowulf.

Heaney also gives a critical overview of the poem in the introduction to his translation. Here he examines the monsters; Grendel and his mother are an uninevitable threat which Beowulf faces to prove his heroism while the dragon is part of his fate - it is “more wyrd than worm” - as Beowulf must be defeated by a suitably fearsome and inhuman opponent. He also takes a broad look at some other of the most important themes in criticism of the poem: the role of the “digressions” in the narrative, the presentation of the lord’s hall as a focus of human solidarity and security and the impact of the poet’s Christian perspective. Tolkien’s essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” has had a huge impact on a modern understanding of the poem and it helps the reader to appreciate as well as criticise the work. Importantly, Tolkien takes Beowulf’sstatus as a work of art consciously put together by one poet for granted and from there he argues that a literary critic must be interested foremost in the narrative and themes central to the poem, rather than the allusions to other legends which give an insight into the context of the poem. These allusions and references in Beowulf are, Tolkien argues, deliberately used by the poet to create the illusion of the “heathen, noble, and hopeless” world which was fading as he wrote and upon the boundary of which and a newer, Christian world, the poet stood. Thus “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is needed to unearth the original poem from the mountain of criticism of its philological, historical, mythological and archaeological value under which it has been buried, however it also gives the reader far more respect for Beowulf, demonstrating how Beowulf’s fight with inhuman “folk-tale” monsters reflects across the whole poem that idea of Northern courage which runs throughout northern Germanic literature but is elsewhere seen only in “a line here or a tone there”.

If the other heroic legends referenced in Beowulf do need to be examined (and according to Tolkien they do not - at least, any study of them must be subordinate to the study of the poem as a poem for the criticism to be literary as opposed to historical or mythological), R M Wilson’s The Lost Literature of Medieval England gives an overview of those heroic legends which have largely disappeared in English works in the first two chapters. Wilson discusses literature in other European languages and later English writings (including the later medieval chronicles and romances) which concern these stories, and from these a vague picture of the legends as they would have been in Anglo-Saxon England can be seen. Gerald Simons’ The Birth of Europeprovides some historical context in the second chapter, “The Germanic Kingdoms”, though the information it gives on the Anglo-Saxon’s is to brief to be of real importance to the project. It is most useful in describing the situation of the southern Germanic kingdoms of the Dark Ages, which are beyond the scope of this project.

As the final piece will take the form of a script, in verse, for the stage, I have been looking at some examples of stylised theatre forms. My adaptation of Beowulfwill be very ritualistic, so most of the forms I have studied so far are very early forms of theatre or, as in the case of the no plays, are from a very formalised tradition which goes back hundreds of years. The first ritualised form of theatre I considered was Greek tragedy - I will not discuss most of the primary and secondary texts on this genre since most of my work on these was done before this project was started. However Tony Harrison’s translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia is worth considering partly because of the verse it uses, which is very rhythmic and often dactylic and anapestic. In Peter Hall’s production, the verse was chanted. This gave the speech and choral odes great energy as the rhythms were either more spondaic and heavier than those in blank verse or normal speech or were much faster, with more unstressed syllables. The first choral ode begins:

Ten years since clanchief Menelaus

and his bloodkin Agamemnon

(the twin-yoked rule from clan-chief Atreus —

double thronestones, double chief-staves)

pursued the war-suit against Priam,

launched the thousand-ship armada

off from Argos to smash Troy.

Harrison’s diction is however very simple, with a very Germanic vocabulary but few archaic words - his writing has a viscerality about it which would perhaps be more appropriate to a version of Beowulf than Aeschylus’ long, complex sentences and elevated lexicon. However despite the more colloquial points of the script, it can be difficult, when the words are chanted in performance, to work out exactly how each sentence works grammatically because of the broken syntax of the choral odes and the frequent use of compound words. The word sounds and meter are of more importance to the listener. Another major aspect of Peter Hall’s production of this Oresteia is the use of masks - Peter Hall’s Exposed by the Mask further explores mask acting in Greek theatre while David Wiles’ Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy discusses the use of masks with this production as an example.

The Japanese no theatre which reached its present state in mid fourteenth century Yamato region, is another early form of stylised theatre - Japanese no Dramas, edited and translated by Royall Tyler, provides a useful overview of the style and a number of scripts for no drama. It is an extremely complex art form, encompassing music, dance, singing, ritualised speaking and physical theatre which cannot be easily mastered. Japanese no Dramas therefore does not aim to show the reader how no is performed and treats the scripts largely as pieces of literature in their own right. This is both undesirable for an actor or director and misleading since Japanese criticism of the arts held, until the middle of the twentieth century, that no could exist only as whole spectacle of drama and music. However its introduction gives a basic outline of how the plays work in performance. Everything in a no production is stylised - the speaking, the movement which is exaggeratedly slowed down, and the props which are kept to a minimum. The acting of no is thus entirely representational rather than presentational. Not only is no stylised, it is also formalised - each play in the repertoire of no is divided into distinct sections and has set role-types which are the same from play to play. I was drawn to no theatre for two main reasons - primarily because the stories used in its plays are drawn from myth and folk tradition. A legend such as Beowulf would not be out of place represented in a similar form. The form of no lends itself to these elevated and removed stories from myth and epic because the form is itself ancient and ritualised, and because the anti-realism combined with spectacle draws the audience into a world which is higher than, and removed from, reality. Secondly, because no is totally aesthetic - form precedes meaning, intellectual meaning in no is almost an irrelevance, and form aspires towards grace, beauty and elegance.

No has influenced western culture through the impact it had on European writers, composers and playwrights such as Auden, Brecht and Britten. In Britten’s works it can most obviously be seen in Curlew River, a “parable for church performance” which takes the plot and structure of the no play Sumidagawa by Juro Montomasa and shifts the events to Christian Europe (most no plays are heavily influenced by the particular form of Buddhism prevalent in medieval Japan). Thus the play begins with a procession of monks who then put on masks to represent their characters and assume a very stylised form of physical acting. Essentially, the monks act like the “narrative voice” of the play and perform it to the audience. All the speech in Curlew River is sung, accompanied by instruments which are also “part of” the performance, played by monks visible to the audience. The action of Curlew River is not only removed from the audience by the anti-realism of the acting and singing, but by the fact that the actors/singers always present the monks, their characters are another step away from reality.

Any form of theatre which can present a mythical story removed from the audience but still maintain a dignity and spectacle to it, is potentially interesting as far as this project is concerned. However, most reading in the near future will concern Beowulf itself. Furthermore, there will be more reading of the poem and about the poem, than about the poem’s contexts or myths referenced in the poem since Tolkien has reminded me that the poem must be appreciated in its own right. More detailed plans will be made in an outline plan for the year.

Bibliography

Anon. Beowulf edited by George Jack (Beowulf: A Student Edition). Oxford University Press, 1994

Anon. Beowulf translated and with Introduction by Seamus Heaney. Faber and Faber Limited, 1999

Anon. Beowulf translated by William Morris and A.J. Wyatt (The Tale of Beowulf). Vol. 10 of The Collected Works of William Morris. Edited by May Morris. Longmans, 1911

Curlew River. 1965 [CD recording] Directed by Benjamin Britten and Viola Turner, composed by Benjamin Britten. English Opera Group. London ADRM

Harrison, Tony Plays Four. Faber and Faber Limited, 2002

Hall, Peter Exposed by the Mask. Oberon Books Ltd., 2000

Niles, John D. “Rewriting Beowulf: The Task of Translation.” In College English, Vol. 55, No. 8 (Dec., 1993): 858-878. National Council of Teachers of English

Oresteia. 1983. [a National Theatre of Great Britten Production, filmed and televised] Directed by Peter Hall. England: Channel 4 Television

Simons, Gerald, and the editors of Time-Life Books The Birth of Europe. Time Inc., 1969

Tolkien, J. R. R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” In The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. HarperCollinsPublishers, 2006

Tyler, Royall (edited and translated) Japanese No Dramas. Penguin Books Ltd., 1992

Wiles, David Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge University Press, 2007

Wilson, R. M. The Lost Literature of Medieval England. Butler and Tanner Ltd., 1970

A few posts ago I mentioned an interest in the no-theatre of medieval Japan. I’ll explain quite why I’m doing this in more detail a bit later, but for now here is my paraphrase of the general introduction to the form of no-theatre from Japanese No Dramas, edited and translated by Royall Tyler as part of the Penguin Classics series.