Gone Medieval - Beowulf

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

Composed towards the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Anglo-Saxon epic poem that transcends its time to shed light on psychological and spiritual truths that still ring true today.Seamus Heaney’s deeply felt interpretation - widely acknowledged as the greatest Beowulf translation of modern times - has just been published in a fabulous Folio limited edition with an exclusive introduction by bestselling historian Janina Ramirez. She joins Matt Lewis in this episode of Gone Medieval to take a deep dive into Beowulf.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here > You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here: https://insights.historyhit.com/signup-form Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Beowulf is one of the most famous and arguably the most important pieces of early medieval literature. Even the fact that it survives is a tale of fighting against the odds to be preserved for future generations. Shamos Heaney's translation from the Old English is considered a work that has breathed new life into this old story and allowed it to be engaged with by generations more just as those early medieval storytellers must have intended it to be. The Folio Society has released a beautiful new edition of Seamus Heaney's translation

to adorn your bookshelf and to fill your mind. And my guest today has written the introduction for the new edition. Dr Janina Ramirez is a lecturer and course director at the University of Oxford, author of Femina, which hopefully she's going to come back to and talk to us about very soon, and one of the finest cultural historians and broadcasters in history land today. So I'm delighted to welcome Janina to gone medieval to talk all things Beowulf. Thank you very much for joining us, Janina. Gosh, Matt, what a glorious introduction.

I'm honoured to be with you. Thank you. It's just my way of trying to tempt you back to talk about feminine and future. Oh, I don't need to be tempted. I can talk about that endlessly. Wonderful. It's so exciting to be talking to you about this

because publication day for this polio edition of Bearwell was yesterday. And I am out of the traps, just so enthusiastic and excited to be talking about this. It's such an honour, probably one of the biggest honours I've had in the world of writing about the medieval period, to be asked to do this. I just remember when I got the email, just thinking, me, you want me to do the introduction to this edition of Heaney's translation. It felt like a real life moment to be asked. Yeah, well, I mean, put Beowulf, Seamus Heaney and the Photo Society together and it's like a perfect storm, you know. It's the triumphance of glory. I remember when I was actually partway through my medieval literature.

degree when Heaney's translation came out. I remember racing down to Blackwell's, getting it, just being so excited because I didn't know about medieval literature when I went to read literature at university. I went to read things like Heaney. I was really into him, modern poetry, modern literature. And it was only because we were forced to do Old English at that stage that I encountered this world that changed the direction in my life. But when I realized that he was going to be translating this Old English epic, for me at that moment, in 1999 was a huge kind of collision of worlds. And now to be a part of that story, another 20-odd years down the line,

goodness me, what a thing. Absolutely. We've not talked about Beowulf before on Gone Medieval. So we're going to go all the way back to basics and try and explore it with you as much as we possibly can while we've got you here. So if we could start off by just talking about Beowulf as a manuscript, as that document that survives for us.

When does it date from the copy that we have? Very good question. And actually, the source of so much, discussion in the world of Beowulf because the Noel Codex, the actual manuscript that the poem survives in, was probably written down at the end of the 10th century, beginning of the 11th century. And given its very nature, a manuscript, handwritten on vellum, it would have been produced in a scriptorium, which is most likely a monastic scriptorium, so written down by Christian monks. But it's actually, the poem itself is describing events that take place in the 6th century

in Denmark, in Scandinavia, you have already a story which is 400 years old by the time it's being written down. And then it's being written down in England, so it's in a different geographical location. And it must have come through a long sequence of orally recited versions of the poems. The version that we have is a manifestation of the story of Beowulf. But this is why I find being part of the story, looking at how Heaney did it, how Tolkien did it, me being part of it. It is a constantly evolving beast. It was up until the point we got it, and it continues to evolve. And I love that. I love that idea that it's a poem on a journey. But the codex itself is fascinating, and it's little studied. It has other texts around it,

but it went through this moment where it was burnt. And what we have today is this was singed, damaged, very darkened vellum. And again, I think that adds an element of mystique. Like you say there's a sense of chance survival, a miracle that the thing survives at all. And the world it presents could seem problematic to us today. A pagan, Germanic warrior society being written down in a monastic scriptorium by Christians. How do the two come together? So there's many issues that come to like when we think about the physical object of Beowulf. But also it's important to remember that in that physical object, in that manuscript,

it's written in a hand that is very hard to decipher. Paleographers will turn their skills to unpacking the handwriting of this thing. it's written with letters that don't exist in our modern language, things like ash and thorn, and it's written in another language. It's written in Old English, which I remember when I was first asked to translate Old English into Modern English, I thought it would be Ye oldie puppy, and I'd just knock the E off. My goodness, no, it's got its own grammatical forms, it's closer to German, especially high German at this point, and there are the elements of modern English there, but they are quite hard to discern at times. It's a difficult

English to work with Old English. So it's cloaked in all these things that you have to unpack when you start your love affair with the poem of Beowulf. One of the elements that always fascinates me about it is that we have that one snapshot of Beowulf and there's a danger in thinking this is the story of Beowulf. It's not, this is aversion, this is the one that happens to have survived. Storytellers are telling this all around the country in front of fireplaces everywhere. It must have evolved with every telling, to branch off in new directions, get a little bit different, maybe a little bit local, apply it to modern politics and all of that kind of things. And we've lost all of that nuance. So I think there's a danger in thinking this is the only Beowulf because it's just

one that we have, isn't it? Yeah, I tend to describe myself as a cultural historian because by nature, I've always been an interdisciplinary medievalist. And I think historians tend to prioritize the textual, written down archives and evidence. But when you're working in a society, like early medieval England where very few people are actually recording things on vellum or writing things down so much creativity so much inventiveness and art and productivity is taking place on platforms that we have no access to now but i like to compare it with thinking about when i read beowulf the reason it resonates so strongly with me is the alliteration and the half-line it pops it's all about the way it sounds in the mouth how it's supposed to be recited and the closest thing i

compare it to with students, it's like rap, really, because with rap you're being led in this storytelling, you are being taken to a time and a place and the sounds and the dynamism of that half-line in Beowulf. It's a similar thing. It's a rhythm. It's got movement to it. So you cannot think about it purely as this manuscript, this text that's been formally written down and now is part of the canon. It was outside of that. Like you say, around fireplaces across the country, they'd have brought in their own characters, their own kind of reference points. And the very model of old English poetry, the way that the half-line works and the way that Kennings work. Kennings are words where two concepts are combined in one. You might have something like

the sea horse is a boat and that idea bring two things together. The reason they use Kennings is because they're riffing a lot when they're orally reciting. Sometimes they have to recite poems that go on for hours or even days, there's records. And in those moments, they're trying to create alliterating patterns. And if they can't immediately conceive of a word that's going to have the same beginning letter, like the M that has to carry over to the half-line, they can create a kenning. And that allows them to keep riffing, keep rhyming. So if we don't think about it as a performed piece, we lose so much of understanding thereof. I guess the words are doing two jobs, aren't they? They're telling you the story, but they're also providing you

the rhythm and the beat and the pace of what's going on as well, which they come together to be the story. Totally. And sibilants, when the monsters happen, there's a lot of sissing. And then when there's drama, when there's a battle, it's all dental alliteration, like d, and teat and and d-tut-da. And then when it's a bit more reminiscent when they go off into some of these poetic asides, it might alliterate on the letter M or N, something more sort of narrative. So those sounds, they are dictating the story as much as anything else. It's so interesting, actually, when I was working on Hini's translation and why he did it. why he came back to it. He actually says in his introductory material that he was writing some of

his most famous poems when he was quite a bit younger. And he didn't realize at the time, but he was alliterating and using a half-line. And it was only later on in life when he was asked to translate Beowulf and he thought he'd return to the project. He realized that subconsciously, it was the seed of so much of his writing. He was taking it via Gerald Manley Hopkins, who was also a poet who was steeped in old English. But this idea that even when we think of the most famous passages of Tolkien, you can see what happens when you've imbued yourself in old English literature. You almost can't help yourself.

You fall into it. I'm terrible. I can't write a sentence without illiterating. It's like I have to stop myself sometimes. And I think that's why he was the perfect person to then take on the translation project. And he also understood this idea of its organic, changeable, morphing nature. So he's not a strict translator. He will adapt. He will create new cannings, new words to fit what he thinks the feel of that passage is. Some people criticise his translation for not being literal enough. But I think he carries on that spirit of the poem. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to ask you a really mean question now. We've covered what Beowulf is. What is the story of Beowulf? Okay, sit back, relax.

The reason it's such a successful epic is because ultimately it is in three parts. It has an arc to it. The arc deviates off. It's a very poetically self-conscious piece. So you have poems within poems and you have statements where the narrator will suddenly say, I am unlocking my word hoard and they're ready to go into a sort of an extra sub-story.

But the ultimate line of the poem is that you start off in Herod, in Hegelax Court, which is in the land of the Danes. He is from a long line of powerful warriors, but his kingdom has found itself under threat from an external force. And this external force is this monster, Grendel. And we can discuss a bit more about monsters. And in fact, I'll do a modern equivalent to this once I've done the narrative. But Grendel is threatening the safety of the hall. One of the most recurrent themes that you find in Old English literature is this idea of the safety of the home or the safety of the hall and the threat of the external wilderness outdoors. And Grendel is the wilderness made manifest.

He breaks into the hall and he murders warriors while they sleep. And essentially, Beowulf is from the Land of the Geats and he is also from a long line of warrior folk. and he's a young buck trying to prove himself. So he goes on an epic quest. He is going to go and deliberately encounter supernatural foes, which he will, through defeating them without weapons, he makes the point he's going to do it hand on hand with Grendel. He will secure his reputation.

So he takes a band of warriors to Herot, and he does, well, do I spoil it? He defeats Grendel by ripping his own. arm off at the socket. And there's elements here of the berserker. There's a kenning at the very heart of this poem, which is Bayo Wolf. In Old English, those are two words, Biao, Busy Bee, and Wolf. How are it a wolf? And together, they mean something else, a wolf that likes honey, which is a bear. So Beowulf himself, his name suggests he is a bear. And this goes right back to Tacitus's Germania, where he describes the Germanic people being berserkers, B-E-A-R-Zerkers,

who run into battle with no weapons and just an animal skin on their backs and manifest the beast in battle. So Beowulf is a berserker and he goes berserk, he defeats Grendel. This leads to the revenge of Grendel's mother. Grendel discovers her son has been killed and there is a dramatic underwater battle scene. Again, Beowulf triumphs. He returns to the land of the Gert's a hero and becomes a leader, a king of his own people. Interspersed are two other poems. One referring to the dragon slayer, which takes you off on a mini

epic, a mini saga. And later on, Battle of Finsberg episode where it describes some of the issues that affects states at war. So these poems within poems have roles to play, but there also pauses from the main action. And then we'll return at the very end to Beowulf late in life. He has had a long and successful career as a king. He knows it's the end of his life. A dragon has been assaulting his people and he's guarding this treasure hoard in a cave. Beowulf, along with his godson, Wiglaf, goes to try and defeat the dragon and it is ultimately his final battle. He does defeat the dragon, but they both die as a result of this final combat. And then there is a dramatic funereal scene at the end.

And the suggestion that Wiglaf was the one that stood by him right up until the end. And he is the inheritor of that legacy. And he gives hope. Because all the way through the poem, there's a sense of a sort of culture and decline, a world drawing towards its inevitable end. And it's only with that hope of Wiglough that something more is coming, that there's a slight sort of glimmer of the future. Each combatant represents something different.

Beowulf and Grendel, they are equally strong, they're proving their strength in opposition to a fine foe. With Grendel's mother, it becomes a little bit sadder. You pity her. She is full of sadness and loss, and she's, again, a formidable foe, but your empathy levels are ramped up. By the time you get to the dragon,

you're seeing a really sad, almost reluctant battle between these two great old, wizened warriors who are on their last legs. So there's a pathos in that. But in a way, the poem has a very clear narrative arc. Thank you very much for summarising it so well and so quickly. Thank you. A great job of that. Thank you.

I thought I was asking you a really mean question, but clearly you're far too good at answering it. Can I just, in that respect, just make the aside I was going to say, which is about the modern parallels. So I was going back over the poem just this week once I got my beautiful copy of it. Honestly, this is like working through a medieval manuscript.

Each page is weighted, and each page when the story develops, you just want to know what's coming next. It feels so epic moving through the book itself. And I was rereading it, and the Wagner-Pooten thing is just been happening. And I was thinking about modern parallels. And what this underlying theme is throughout the poem is battle and fear and war and what war brings about the destruction of war. And essentially, Beowulf and his band are the sort of mercenaries. They are going in, they're going to be paid in gold by a weaker king to save the kingdom.

And yet they have got their own ideas of grandeur. They want to go back and take that away with them. There's always the threat of the Swedes behind this as well. You've got the Gaets and the Danes, but you've got the Swedes are a constant kind of external threat on both these states, and it's about nation-building. But reading it with war in my mind, it's got such power in those phrases. There's so much boasting and macho behaviour, but underneath that, there's so much vulnerability. There's so much fear and weakness and insecurity that comes along with war as well.

It just felt really poignant, holding that modern parallel in my mind while I was reading this poem that's over a thousand years old. So, yeah, I just wanted to bring that into the conversation as well. I think it's incredible how some of these things, as you say, over a thousand years old, can still seem so relevant and current and can still speak to us so clearly through those centuries' moments. I just wanted to pick up on what you're saying as well about the difference between the hall, which is warm and light and comfortable and structured and ordered and safe, and the outside which is kind of wild, dark, dangerous.

That's clearly trying to make a statement about your best off staying with your lord and maybe obeying the structure of society and keeping to that. But I guess there's also the question that what you're speaking to then about the weakness of the king, that there's kind of a subjective view of whose hall is the safe place. Wherever your lord is, you consider that your hall and your safe place. Someone else might consider it the wild, which is dangerous. Dare I make another modern comparison. but this is such a confession, but this is just for you in the podcast,

I have been gorgeing on Walking Dead on the moment, zombie apocalypse stuff, and in that, there's this constant sense that groups together are going to fare better than individuals alone in the wilderness. And this is absolutely what you're seeing in Bay. Well, if you see it in Volfer Neardvaca, in the seafar and the wanderer, it's a really present theme in the old English surviving poetry. And I do think it's about kind of embryonic nation building. It's this idea that working together collaboratively is better for everybody.

And being alone, being exiled or doing things that are risky, you can do it if you're a superhero like bear wolf. You could just about get away with it. But on the whole, it's unwise. It's better, like you say, to be in debt to the ruler, to prop up that social structure. and it's all about comitatus loyalty to one's lord. That final episode with Wigluff and Beowulf and the Dragon, that is celebrating the bond between the Lord and his follower, that it's reciprocal.

We saw it in the coronation just recently, Charles saying, I serve the people. Well, it's out of these medieval traditions of the Lord being the ringgiver, right the way through Beowulf, you've got the idea that if a warrior is willing to serve the Lord, they have to repay them in gold, but also in safety, in terms of provision. And so it is a reciprocal relationship. And that comes through very strongly.

But I think it continues. We are all part of societies and communities where we are expected to reciprocate. So again, it feels timeless. That's underpinning this society. When you first read Bayerwolf, it can feel so unfamiliar and alienating. It can feel like a weird world of fantasy.

To be honest, I think for the monks that wrote it down in the year 1000, it would have seemed like fantasy, like Game of Thrones or something. And they have every right to enjoy fantasy fiction as much as we do today. But I think that the warrior culture they're describing is a recognisable one for them. And once you start to unpack the boasts and the weapons and the minutiae of what it was like to be a warrior in the early medieval period, the social workings that poem presents are very recognisable today.

Yeah, I like to wonder whether those monks sitting there writing this down, were absolutely engrossed in the story and going along with it, or whether they were kind of rolling their eyes and tutting and thinking, this rubbish we've got to write out because someone's told us to. I can't work out which one I think it is. Okay, so something really exciting happens at the first millennium, which is we are so indebted to this group of antiquarian monks, who, I don't know whether it was millennium angst or what.

Certainly you can read in Smanglo-Saxon text that they were very aware that the millennium was happening, and they were slightly anxious about it. But around this time, some of the great monastic houses like Winchester and Canterbury, they start a very deliberate project of preserving older texts, texts that are not Christian texts on the whole. And they're doing it in the way that we would now try and preserve Shakespeare, or we would try and look after the texts of the 15th, 16th century. They're looking backwards, they're seeing that these things are valuable

and worthy of preservation. And they're doing quite a consistent effort of finding a good oral source and then writing it down carefully. I think they're doing it deliberately. It's also a period where they're standardising the English language in a written form. It becomes West Saxon because Wessex is the most dominant kingdom

at that point. But what you have to remember, to this day, there are dialect or varieties. But in the Old English period, it could be vastly different. Even by the time we get to the 40th century and 50th century, Katsten is describing trying to get eggies when he's in the north. They're saying, Aaron, eggies? Two completely different words, but they both mean eggs.

And so this dialect of variety was rife. But West Saxon, these monks, this concerted scriptural effort to create a standardized old English and then preserve old English texts, means that West Saxon becomes dominant. What you can see in Beowulf is that there's elements of East Angley in there. The person who's probably telling this story is from East Anglia, and then the monks are consciously standardising as they go along, but letting a few words slip by accident. And that's really interesting,

because the closest sort of genealogical links that we have between the figures that are being described in Beowulf, real historical figures in the land of the Danes, their closest parallels are in East Anglia. And when you look for archaeological parallels, You've got Gamma Uppsala in Sweden, you've got recent discoveries that are being made, possibly of the actual hall of Herod in Denmark, and then you've got Sutton Who, and the East Anglian House of Redwald and the Wolfingers.

So is this a sort of common bonds that they still see in East Anglia an ancestral line tying them back to these territories and to these people? I don't know. it seems like things like the shield found at Sutton, who and the sword started life in the land of the gaiats and came over as royal treasures, if you like, to the royal family of East Anglia. So the fact that East Anglian dialect is preserved

at points in the written down poem really makes a link there. But going back to your idea of what were the monks thinking, we know even right the way through old English text that monks are being told off for listening to heroic poetry. They love it. There's a famous phrase, what has Ingeld got to do with Christ? because basically in the Refactory, they're not listening to gospel stories, they're telling heroic epics. So I think they would have enjoyed it as a romp.

And yet they would have been able to have justified what they were doing because they were part of this broader campaign to preserve the stories of earlier centuries. So yeah, I think it was both an intellectual exercise and an exercise in pleasure. I'm James Patton Rogers, a war historian, advisor to the UN and NATO, and host of the warfare podcast from History Hit. Join me twice a week every week as we look at the conflicts that have defined our past and the one shaping our future. We talk to award-winning journalists. ISIS, this peculiar strain that we all came to know very well in the mid-2010s, really got its start because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. We hear from the people who were actually there.

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Auschwitz combined the functions of death camp and concentration camp and slave labour. Join us on the Warfare podcast from a history hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned archaeology there, thinking particularly of things like Sutton Who, how does the archaeology inform our underwent,

understanding of the poem and vice versa, how can the poem help us to understand some of the archaeology as well? Up until the discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, on the eve of World War II, people had known about Beowulf. They had started transcribing the manuscript in the early 18th, 19th century, and then translations and transcriptions were coming out all the way through the 19th and the 20th century. So the poem was known about, but everybody thought still that the medieval period was dark, brutal, ignorant, superstitious, all the lights went out. That lovely kind of post-Reformation propaganda that we've all been fed down the centuries, that the medieval period was rubbish. They had inherited that and they were saying it's a fantasy. It must be a fantasy. It must be a complete fabrication made up in the mind of a writer like Tolkien a thousand years ago who's just

imagined this world and written it down. And when Sutton Who came out of the ground, There was a sequence of incredible articles rolling out. Tolkien wrote that seminar work on this, but also Roberta Frank and really important articles coming out by Campbell as well saying, Beid, Beowulf, Sutton Who. This is a new sort of landscape that we're opening up these texts through the archaeology. And the world that came to light through Sutton Who was magical, sparkling. Nobody really tends to look at it.

They're all fascinated by the shoulderclubs and the gold buckle, but the cauldron chain that was discovered suggests that the height of the hall in which that cauldron was originally hung was possibly as much as eight, nine metres high. We're talking palatial halls. Up until that point, archaeologists have found Grubenhauser, these tiny sort of dark sunken huts. And they thought that's where all the medieval people lived in these grotty little huts. And now you're starting to get post-hole analysis. You're starting to get the discoveries of things like Javering, where Brian Taylor was able to fly over this burnt out field and see the outline of enormous wooden halls. And the woods gone,

but the post holes remains. So the world of the hall starts to become a reality and the archaeology almost had to catch up to it. And the most exciting thing about working in this field at the moment is that archaeology is taking us to the next step. We're now starting to find the people that inhabited the past. Your DNA analysis, databasing is allowing us to find the many, not the few. So archaeology continues to really enliven our understanding of historical texts. Yeah, it's incredible how they can come together to tell a bigger story than either of them can on their own. And just thinking about Seamus Heaney's translation, we've talked a little bit about his approach to Beowulf, but that's the translation that the Folio Society have used for this new edition.

And just for everyone that's listening, I can see Janina on a camera, and she is very meanly waving her copy of the Folio Society book at me. It's absolutely massive, absolutely stunning, and I'm incredibly jealous. I know, I'm sorry. I cried a little bit when I received it and I opened it up. And the illustrations, this is another thing I did on an Instagram live that's still available with the Folio Society and Clive Hicks Jenkins, who is the illustrator. Now, for those who don't know, Clive is one of our most impressive living artists.

He's based in Wales. And I followed his work for a long time. And the fact that he was asked to do this and said yes is such a cue. But talking to him, listening to him, he has done so much research on the poem. He read it 15 times back to front in order to do these illustrations. And what I love is in the spirit of what I was describing earlier, this poem being constantly changing and organic. He hasn't just replicated objects from the early medieval period.

He hasn't just based his designs on things like Sutton Who. He has used it as a springboard for his own imagination. And he's actually made these images by creating little puppets, little cutouts. And it's all pierced through. All the figures have got this sort of cut throughs that he's used. And I did say to him, gosh, like Closanone. So yeah, I think the Closinotone of the Anglosusism was coming through when I was making them. But I was not going to be replicating.

I was going to be creating something new. And so in this volume, he's turned the images negative to positive. So he's done them in black on white. then he's had them transcribed into negative and then he's had it turned into blue so it's three-phase process that have come up with these eerie, otherworldly images

that each double-page spread is a work of art. What you get with this book, you don't just get bail off the pan. You've got a collection of 11 original artworks by Clive Hicks Jenkins. So, you know, ah, what a thing to be involved in? You can tell I'm still buzzing.

Yeah, if you needed another reason to grab a copy, But just on Seamus Heaney's translation, why do you think it's important that it's written, as you're discussing it, he hasn't literally translated it, he's made it accessible and understandable today. How important is that for the story, the journey of Beowulf? It's so important because there are so many barriers to engaging with Beowulf as a poem. I was lucky in a way that I was forced to engage with it, that I didn't really have an option. And I will tell you this anecdote. I've told it before, but I went to school in Slough and I worked really hard. And I always wouldn't. to study history at university because that's what my Polish uncle had managed to do. He escaped here from the war, managed to read history at Oxford against all the odds, and I wanted to be like him. And it was only in my A-levels that I realized history wasn't where my heart was. I didn't want to do dates and battles and great men. I wanted to understand the thought processes behind the people of the past. So I ended up veering towards literature.

And as I mentioned earlier, it was largely modern literature. I was a young woman. I was reading the angst of Sylvia Plath and contrasting it with Ted Hughes and then throwing in some Hini and a bit of existential play drama. So when I finally, like against the odds, got my place at Oxford, I got sent a reading list and it said, you read these books by Dickens, read this by Bronte, and translate three poems from Old English into Modern English. And I'd left that till the end, because these books are big old tones, so I worked for all of those. And then I opened my Bruce Mitchell guide to Old English and I could not believe what I was looking at. As I described to you earlier, the letters aren't even the same. And I really knew I was going

to struggle. But I sat there for days on end. I barely slept, just going to the glossary, coming up with these awful sort of pigeon English translations that just were clunky. And I turned up on the first day and I meet my other fellow English students and I go, how did you find the translation from Old English? Wasn't it absolutely impossible? And I went, no, I just went out and bought a book of translations and copied them out. And I thought, yeah, you're so clever, Nina. You couldn't think to do that. But in the process of having spent that time with the language, that's where my love affair began. And that's where the understanding of the nuts and bolts of this process of translating Old English began. And I've only ever grown to love

it more. And thinking about what Heaney did, Heaney was trying to take some of those barriers out of the way. He was trying to say, okay, maybe you don't have three weeks to spend working your way through the Old English language. Maybe the Old English is actually intimidating and scary and maybe you want to read a good, rollicking poem. And that's what he's trying to do. He does it as dual text. So if you want to see what's going on in the Old English, you only have to look to the side and you've got it right there. That's magic to come up with a poem that reads so beautifully by itself in translation and then to have the original there. And as all great translators do, he has made it his own. Even the opening, that famous

huat that was designed to call an audience to attention. Yeah, it's been translated variously as low or listen or here to kind of bring the reader in. He does it as so. He does that because that's what you do in Ireland. You start a sentence, so. And that's an indication to the person you're talking to that you're about to tell them a story. I love those little, the things he brings to it himself. I said in the introduction to this edition, this poem, the translation is as much Heaney as it is Beowulf. It is a beautiful poetic beast in its own right. And when one of the greatest modern minds meets the greatest epic poem of the last thousand years, it's just the

most beautiful mashaw. And I think it also goes back to exactly what Beowulf was meant to be. It would have been a story that people like Seamus Heaney took, made their own, updated, slightly, said in their own words and their own language. And we're back to that idea that the one we've got is just the one that is trapped in that manuscript. There are so many free versions of it lost in time running around the country. So what Seamus Heaney's done is simply continue the lost tradition of Beowulf rather than slavishly sticking to what we have. Yeah, you could not be more right. I've just come back from Glastonbury, hence the slightly croaky voice. And what I was trying to think again, oh God, I'm never off, am I? But I was there

watching these bands, these big names and seeing people going, absolutely crazy for them as they perform on stage. And each performance that they are doing as an artist is going to be slightly different from the one before. But people know some of the choruses. They know what they want to hear. They want to go along with it. And that's what you would get with some of these minstrels, these singers, tellers of stories that would become the superstars of their age. And they would travel from town to town and they would recite and people would be excited and they'd be drawn into the performance. And they would be being brought along with the variations. They'll be listening out for them. Always changed that middle bit. Always added in a bit

more there. We're constantly looking at the past who rose-tinted spectacles as if it's some sort of exhibit in a glass cabinet fixed, unchangeable. But I love to look backwards and be imaginative and imagine the sights, the smells, the feels of being alive at that time. And I think nothing does that for me more than bail. There's a wonderful passage where you've got the description of the end of the world. It's part of the lament of the last surviving, which I think is one of most beautiful miniature poems within a poem ever. And in it, it's all about the

sensations of being alive in the medieval period. I'll read it in old English and then I'll do the translation. That's hearpon win, gomenglea abemas, ne god a hafok, ye on the seala swingeth, ne se swift a mearha, burstead a beaetetethe, bealo quailm hafath,

fell a feurkina, for on sender. No trembling harp, no tuned timber, no tumbling hawk, swerving through the hall, no swift horse pouring the courtyard, pillage and slaughter have emptied the earth of entire people. So you can hear the alliterative patterns in the old English, and then, Blumenhinis only pulled it out the bag. He hasn't used the same letters to alliterate,

like that last line is alliterating on F in old English. fella feyorkina forth onsendid he's used e have emptied the earth of entire peoples so he's able to play around and adapt but why i love that passage is because here you've got the idea of the harp the trembling heart the sound of the hall you've got the tuned timber which is referring again to the heart the tumbling hawk the sight the idea of a hawk moving through the hall that runs to be beads as well swerving through the hall no sweet horse pouring the courtyard. You can smell the horse, you can see the courtyard, you can hear the hoof pounding on the courtyard. It's cinematic, the scribe that wrote it down. They want us to be in that space, hearing it, smelling it, seeing it. And that's how I like to engage with the past. It means that I end up using my imagination a lot of the time, but which of us as historians don't. We are always having to bring our own take to the past. And my take is to make it feel real and make it feel experiential. So yeah, that passage in particular speaks to me.

The last question that I'd written down to ask you is, is Beowulf still relevant today? And I think you've demonstrated in so many different ways how much it is, how it can relate to events that are still happening around the world today, how it can connect us to our obsession at the moment with Marvel superhero films, you know, it's exactly what it is. But also how it still talks to something deep in our souls, in our humanity about wanting a safe space, It's a nice warm place where we know we're cosy. We know there's danger outside, and some people might want to go and engage with that. But most of us, we just want to stay warm in our hall, thank you.

Oh, my goodness. The number of resonances I've experienced being a medievalist living through the pandemic. So one of my other areas, which I will have to come back on the podcast to talk to you about, is, of course, women. I wrote a book and made a documentary about Julian of Norwich, the medieval mystic, and her being an anchoress, walling herself up inside a room for 30 years. When I used to say that to my students pre-pandemic, they what sort of a nutter is she? But that now she lived through not just the black death but subsequent

plagues. She wanted to be in a safe space where she could write and learn and read and ruminate. And we all did that. We all had to lock down. We became scared of going outside. And yeah, every big event that is happening to us in the modern day, because we're living through historic times, it shows us that we're not that distant from our medieval forebears. They experience things too and they're not that dissimilar to us. Our basic needs, our basic human wants are the same. The packaging, the language, the fashion, those things might change. But like you say, the desire to be safe, the need for family, for comitatus,

for loyalty, for looking after one another, that's still there. And that is at the very beating heart of this poem. But more than that, we are passionate feeling creatures and the passion that comes through in the language of Beowulf, that old English poem, it hits you in the heart and in the head. It's a pounding rendition, full of feeling. So that's why it's still relevant today. I mean, I could genuinely just sit here and talk you all day about this. So I've absolutely loved doing that. Thank you very, very much for sharing all of that with us, Janina. Thank you. I've loved it too. Can you tell them a bit excited about this book?

As you should be. I mean, it's an incredibly exciting thing to be involved in. Yeah. So the new Folio Society edition of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, complete with introduction by Janina, is available now. Go and get yourself a copy. Get yourself a forklift to get at home, but get yourself a copy. And Janina's book Femina is also out, and I will get her to come back and talk to us about that as soon as I possibly can.

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