Seven Books: Beowulf

translated by Seamus Heaney

I last saw Beowulf when we were both in High School. He was a bit weird, kept to himself, a big guy with bad skin. He lisped and stuttered, had a funny walk: bent forward with a hesitation in it, almost a limp.

He was always on about a monster, but I hardly listened. I mean--monsters? I was giving civics presentations in which I talked about what would happen to Omaha if someone air-burst a twenty-megaton nuclear war-head over the high school roof. From the Strategic Air Command, less than twenty miles away, bombers swept past, their shadows flashing over us before their sounds. The Looking Glass hung on the horizon, day and night. I didn't have need of dragons.

I can't tell you how weird it is to see Beowulf again. He's still on about monsters, sweeping "in off the moors,
down through the mist-bands," comes one of "Cain's clan, condemned as outcast," while men sit and drink and feast in their splendid hall. They know he's there -- but what can they do?

It turns out we were on about the same kind of things, Beowulf and I. About monsters outside the feasting hall, yes. But we both saw how things might end up, in our culture of warrior prowess and ordained retribution: at a funeral pyre, where a woman

with her hair unbound unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.

Is it still our story, here in the third millennium? Yes, it is ours. This magnificent story, of heros and heroic deeds, and yet of the limits of heroism, a critique of the culture of revenge. Two years ago I might not have felt this -- but now I do. Does anyone doubt it?

How sure-footed Beowulf seems now, not a limp but a lope, a weird and easy power. Irish and Northern is that accent -- what accent better for a story of heroism and the horrors of revenge -- but universal, timeless, neither modern nor antique, sounding rooted, and at the same time, ready to travel.

The unknown poet stood on the brink of two cultures, new Christian one, and the thousands-year culture of pagan heroism and revenge. Heaney has made a masterpiece of a masterpiece, crows the cover of the book. Yes. But better, he's made this poem ours again, made it modern again, made it strange again. Let us see, again, that we are still standing on that brink.