Poets - Not Only Dead But Unknown

The BBC "Age of Kings" production of Shakespeare's history plays which I saw as a freshman in high school (1960-61) first sparked my interest in English literature. That interest got another big boost my junior year in high school in Robert Ruffing's English literature class. The first thing we read was "Beowulf," or as I now realize a small section of the epic poem. I remember Mr. Ruffing telling us that 20 or 30 years ago (I forget exactly) we would not have read "Beowulf" because it had either not been re-discovered or perhaps translated.

Anyway we read what was obviously a fragment of the whole work and I don't recollect a lot about it. The piece we read was Beowulf's struggle with the monster Grendel and I remember, or at least I think I do, the line "In the darkness dwelt a demon sprite," which illustrated for us the alliteration typical of such epics.

I currently work with a high school student on English and part of his summer reading is the Seamus Heaney translation which was so popular when it came out about 10 years. Having read almost all of it, I understand why it was so popular it is a great work - some of it feels almost Shakespearean. I read that the turning point in "Beowulf" being taken seriously as literature came with an essay by J.R.R. Tolkien - the author of "The Hobbit" and the "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. I hope to get that essay out of the Rutgers library tomorrow. Reading this translation it isn't hard to see where Tolkien got a lot of his ideas for his great works.

I haven't seen the "In the darkness dwelt a demon sprite" line which means either this is different in translation or my memory is bad - which happens more and more these days. As most people know the Heaney translation has the old English on one page and the translation on the facing page. Since the old English is almost entirely different I haven't been spending much time looking at the original. But I am reminded that a lot of colleges now offer a year long course where one studies old English in the first semester and then reads Beowulf in the original in the second semester. If I could work that out I would love to try something along those lines.

Last year a similar translation came out of another anonymous poem - "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," written many years later this in middle English. I haven't read it yet, but will soon. As with Heaney's translation the original is on one page, the translation on the other. Since some of the middle English is the same as modern English, I will try to spend more time on the original.

I just told a friend of mine who is part of a book club that they should read this translation of "Beowulf." He looked at me like I was more than a little nuts, but I really meant it. An epic story told in an epic form with literary and dramatic devices that still work so many centuries later.