Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)
poetryfoundation.org52 points by gsf_emergency_6 3 days ago
52 points by gsf_emergency_6 3 days ago
Beowulf translation is a whole academic field, the translation has been debated ad nauseum for 100s of years, Tolkien had his own translation and opinion, which differed from others. One additional scholar adding his own interpretation doesn't necessarily overturn anything. There is not enough detail in this article to know how compelling the case is or what the counter arguments would be.
The article references a forthcoming publication that I can't find a draft of. Here's an older publication on the topic by the same author: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2013_hwaet.pdf
Edit: Oh, the PF article is from 2013, so this must be the actual publication after all.
I used to use this (still do really) as a technique when starting undergraduate lectures. They’re there, ready to listen, but chatting away and need a moment to focus their attention.
*SO* let me tell you further fun facts about carbonyl chemistry…
Works. Those Anglo-Saxons knew what they were about.
I remember one of my friends in college pointing out before lecture that the professor would always start by saying "OK, So."
I have had to train myself out of doing that when recording videos. The best I've managed is that I can do it sometimes, and most of the rest of the time I leave a long enough pause after that I can cleanly edit it off.
> SO let me tell you
all about how...
Oh no, now my brain wants to play the whole song in my head before allowing me to move on.
Graham Scheper has a recent video on this topic. He also believes that "Hwaet" is not an interjection, but more like Red Riding Hood's "What big eyes you have!"
You seem to have linked the wrong video (yours is about the meaning of the name Beowolf), the right link about Hwaet is:
I agree with Dr. Walkden here. While it was used as an interjection at times (just as it is today when someone exclaims, "What?!") in the context of the opening line of Beowulf "hwæt" is more likely being used to reformulate a statement in order to convey a sense of emphasis. An example in modern English would be something like, rather than saying "That was a gorgeous sunset!", one says "What a gorgeous sunset that was!". (Notice that the verb has now moved to the end of the sentence. In fact if you look at the last word of the line in question, we have the verb "fremedon" which means "performed", so indeed the placement of "what" at the beginning of the line facilitates the restructuring of the sentence in such a way that makes it "sounds right".)
People are saying that the interjection interpretation is influenced by its use as interjection in Shakespeare’s time. By that time what/hwæt was being used differently than the way it was when Beowulf was authored hundreds of years before.
Nevertheless I do think it is safe to say that such interjections were used, at least on a day-to-day basis. (Bear in mind that relatively few Old English texts survive to this day and almost certainly not many were produced to begin with. Old Norse itself was for the most part a spoken language, unlike Latin for example, and its predecessor which developed in England only started to be written down because of external influences.) Point is, all of the Nordic languages employ interjections akin to "Ah!", "Oh!", "Why?!", "Indeed!", "How?!", etc. So there really isn't any reason to think that such things wouldn't exist in OE as well.
"What ho" as in British English seems like a descendant of this usage
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77151/what-ho-of...
There was a more colloquial translation a few years ago that rendered it as "Bro!"
That's the 2021 translation by Maria Headley
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374110031/beowulfanewtran...
It took me a few minutes to track down the original source of this. It is a paper by Dr George Walkden published in 2013 called "The status of hwæt in Old English" You can access the pdf from the link below [0].
The abstract reads:
>It is commonly held that Old English hwæt, well known within Anglo-Saxon studies as the first word of the epic poem Beowulf, can be ‘used as an adv[erb]. or interj[ection]. Why, what! ah!’ (Bosworth & Toller 1898, s.v. hwæt, 1) as well as the neuter singular of the interrogative pronoun hwa ̄ ‘what’. In this article I challenge the view that hwæt can have the status of an interjection (i.e. be outside the clause that it precedes). I present evidence from Old English and Old Saxon constituent order which suggests that hwæt is unlikely to be extra-clausal. Data is drawn from the Old English Bede, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints and the Old Saxon Heliand. In all three texts the verb appears later in clauses preceded by hwæt than is normal in root clauses (Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.0001 in both cases). If hwæt affects the constituent order of the clause it precedes, then it cannot be truly clause- external. I argue that it is hwæt combined with the clause that follows it that delivers the interpretive effect of exclamation, not hwæt alone. The structure of hwæt-clauses is sketched following Rett’s (2008) analysis of exclamatives. I conclude that Old English hwæt (as well as its Old Saxon cognate) was not an interjection but an underspecified wh-pronoun introducing an exclamative clause.
[0] https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/413d...
I’ll share another great version of Beowulf- Bea Wolf. Based on kids, with fantastic artwork and a great story/version. My kids absolutely love me reading this and I absolutely love reading it as a large passed down story of battles.
> and more recently “So!” by Seamus Heaney in 2000. This is despite the research suggesting that the Anglo Saxons made little use of the exclamation mark
Seamus Heaney does not use an exclamation.
His version begins:
“So.”
It's an interesting idea, but I'm thrown by "a count" in "should be taken into a count by future translations"
Yeah, weird to see a couple of linguistic mistakes like this in an article about linguistic mistakes. Another is the misuse of "latter-day". The article uses it to refer to an old thing that is analogous to a modern thing: "[a] latter-day 'yo!'" But "latter-day" actually describes something modern. (E.g., the "latter days" refers to the present age. See "Latter-day Saints".)
Amusingly, the source article [0] linked to in TFA does not contain the same error:
> “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into account by future translations,” he said.
Is this the Beowulf translation field equivalent of incorrectly correcting someone's correct use of the their/there/they're homophones?
Me too, I just thought that I wouldn't trust an article on linguistics with such an error too much.
Not present in the original report at The Independent:
> “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into account by future translations,” he said.
https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/new...
It's possible The Independent fixed it up in an edit after The Poetry Foundation made a copy of it.
You could always read the Maria Dahvana Headley translation that starts with "Bro!":
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/beowulf-bro
"Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!
In the old days, everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound.
Only stories now, but I’ll sound the Spear-Danes’ song, hoarded for hungry times."
I know it's unconventional, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading that translation. It felt so alive, and other translations have never engaged me in quite the same way.
beat me to it. another article: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/27/906423831/bro-this-is-not-the...
her adaptation, The Mere Wife, needs to get adapted to film or series yesterday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mere_Wife
Related: Rumi’s Mesnevî also opens with “bishnav”, “listen” in Persian.
> “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into a count by future translations,” he said.
I think there’s a bit of unintentional humor in this line, like it belongs in “i am the walrus”. The researcher would _like_ to say something, which makes me think the sentence has an implied completion of “but I won’t say it”, which I already find kind of funny. And then of course the quote is tagged with “he said”, lol, almost like the author is mocking him. Idk, that’s so funny to me
I love the phrase "Subtly wide of the mark."
Does it matter? Genuine question-- does this (mis)translation change anything
Not really. It does however help drive home the point that such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale. (On the other hand in Latin and Celtic traditions, interjections were widely used in story-telling, eg. "Ecce!" and "Féach!" respectively). Old English speakers would have been more inclined to used interjections in a responsive context. For example, to the statement "The boat is taking on water!", one might respond "How?!". But to begin a conversation with an interjection, that just isn't consistent with what we see in any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.
Do you know the joke about the priest who died, and discovered God meant priests to "celebrate", not "celibate"?
It matters to those who care about this piece of literature. Maybe not as much as a lifetime of coital bliss missed, but who's to say?
How about "Whoa!"? That seems to me like it preserves some of the ambiguous sense (calling for attention vs. remarking upon a discovery).
The issue is really focused on the grammatical function of the word. The researcher is arguing that it's not ever used as an interjection, which "whoa" always is.
I would say the presence of an exclamation mark, in a context where exclamation marks are rare, is strong evidence of use as an interjection. Unless we're arguing that some other mark was mistaken for an exclamation, generally I would say rare typography is "marked" (noteworthy) rather than being likely mistaken. I think the researcher's position is not likely to hold much sway going forward.
The exclamation mark is added in transliterations of the manuscript because it is believed to be an interjection. If you look at the manuscript, there is no such mark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf#/media/File:Beowulf_Co...
Why would you assume the original had an exclamation mark? Indeed the whole symbol was not invented until the 1300s.
The article puts punctuation into its rendering of the original text. That confused me too.
