“Beowulf”: A Horror Show | Hacker News Reader

“Beowulf”: A Horror Show

publicbooks.org

24 pointsCaiero25 comments

My question: is it actually true that swear words and slang have no place in epics? Like, if we consider all the major epics in their time, we won't find the historical equivalent of swears or abusive language of any sort in them?

For starters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_obscenity

Beowulf (like most Scandinavian or Scandinavian-influenced writing around that time) basically has rap-battles in it. You want to put in modern slang and swearing and such, that's where I'd do it, personally.

[EDIT] Those parts are also fucking boring in most translations, so would be the most-improved by such an approach.

Epics often used archaizing language to give the impression of antiquity and elevate the tone. Using slang alongside that would be contradictory, so I would expect it to not happen much. As for swear words, I wouldn't be surprised to see some in the old Norse sagas or from around the Mediterranean, but in the Anglo-Saxon literature we have, and in Beowulf in particular, the author was trying hard to be spiritually uplifting, so I'd expect to not see any.

Also note that slang and curses are not on the same level in different cultures. For example the most common curse word in US is almost TV-news-acceptable. But in Sweden I heard it's totally unacceptable to use most common curses. In Russia it's also totally unacceptable to say the most common one on TV news, despite major part of population cannot say a single phrase without it in casual setting.

Completely disagree with her thesis. I've studied Beowulf quite a bit, and I've never thought of it as a horror story. Beowulf just doesn't fit the horror genre.

> ...horror leaves readers or viewers with...a sense that, even though the story is over, we still have something to be afraid of.

Unlike in the horror genre, Beowulf depicts danger coming from a well defined source, and conclusively eliminated by the hero's actions.

Likewise. Have read it several times, clearly heroic action (albeit perhaps gruesome), never seemed "horror". Never occurred to me there was "something to be afraid of" after the overwrought funeral, at least nothing more than the usual risks of existence in the age.

Horror evokes existential dread, a [quasi-]supernatural threat against an unwilling [relatively] impotent protagonist, often with an ambiguous ending. The monsters may be terrifying to the Danes in general, but they are not the protagonists.

Action evokes willing combat, antagonist(s) viewed as challenger or threat to vanquish by a duty/honor-bound protagonist. Beowulf travels far to engage the heard-of horror, as challenge for pride and later protecting his people.

Beowulf sees the first monster as a voluntary challenge, the second an obligatory follow-up, and the third a duty. Any subsequent vague threats are just the way of humanity; this is not "and they lived happily ever after."

I'd agree that the first two sections heavily feature motifs and scenes that read as very horror to a modern audience, however they were original intended. But they're mashed together with roots-in-very-ancient-literature (e.g. Gilgamesh) nigh-superhero stuff that takes the edge off, ultimately, in a kind of jarring way that I expect is off-putting to a lot of modern readers.

The third section (the dragon) reads so differently to me that I can't imagine it was assembled around the same time, by the same person. Maybe one of those two things, but not both. And I don't get any horror out of it whatsoever, personally. A kind of apocalyptic-melancholy, maybe, but not horror.

Everything from just one hill past where the townsfolk regularly travel was of the unknown. It was known that something strange could be living out there -- because there were strange things living out there. There was history of weird things happening to people who ventured too far away from the familiar. What we might perceive as expected (OMG a giant white bear!!!) can be very unfamiliar to those who didn't grow up with an ABC book of animals.

But really, read the first couple of pages and tell me that it's horror. It's a hero story, and it's not horror -- he's just up against a good villain. It's more of a western -- drifter pulls into town on his horse, gets deputized to take down the out of town rancher demonizing the good people of the town.

This is... not really in disagreement with what I wrote, I think? I wouldn't call the first two sections horror, but the description of the terror that Beowulf and (later) his mother wreak on the inhabitants of Heorot is quite horror, at least to modern eyes. The way the hall is hopelessly haunted by this terror, much fallen from its glory days in ways that are plainly visible, and the inhabitants unable to escape their fate, is, separately, even pretty damn gothic-horror specifically (the extensive and detailed descriptions of pure carnage and its psychological effects are rather not gothic-horror, but something else). The environs and inhabitants of Grendel's Mother's deep mire-home, for that matter—carnage and terrible monsters are all over in hero fiction, as with The Iliad's blow-by-blow slaughter on the battlefield, or Gilgamesh's forest-monster, but the presentation isn't like that.

But overall, yes, it's not really horror because of the figure of Beowulf, who's basically Superman, and has the exact same effect on the story that introducing Superman to many horror stories would.

Pretty heavy horror motifs, imagery, et c., but structurally and viewed as a whole, not really horror. I agree that it's not best-characterized as horror, but absolutely see why someone would make the connection, and even think it might be useful to do so. Taking it as a horror-flavored hero tale isn't too far off, I'd say. "Superman wanders into a remote town terrorized by actual demons, and, predictably, easily wrecks their shit and saves (almost) everyone", maybe. The settings and premise are pretty solidly horror and are presented as such, but the story, not so much.

Though, again, I get little or none of that from the third act, which is totally disconnected narratively from the first two anyway, aside from also starring Beowulf. It seems far more straightforward to me, and reads a lot like, say, a biblical hero-tale—there's a monster terrorizing the countryside and murdering away much like Grendel, but we don't get the horrifying descriptions of wanton murder, but instead Beowulf's followers holding back and quaking in their boots while he saves the day. Though that one's hard to read with fresh eyes if you've read The Hobbit and/or LOTR, because it has so much influence on them, and I'm sure being familiar with them colors one's reading of that section, with the result that it's hard not to read it as proto-fantasy. The very voice of it even reads more modern and like something from that genre, in sharp contrast to the prior two sections.

Not disagreeing with you at all. Just saying that "horror" and fear of the unknown was much more normalized in times where you could quite easily be lost in the woods and eaten by a bear (or witch or dragon). What they might view as normal life would be a horror or dystopian setting for the modern reader.

> The very voice of it even reads more modern and like something from that genre, in sharp contrast to the prior two sections.

I've read criticism that the whole thing is closer to the modern novel than virtually anything else for centuries. And it really rang true on my most recent reading of it, unfortunately many years ago. I'm going to need to revisit.

> I'd agree that the first two sections heavily feature motifs and scenes that read as very horror to a modern audience

Demonstrated well by The 13th Warrior (which excludes the third section.)

Also, the (now quite old) video game Darklands, which takes a "what if the stuff dark-ages people thought was real... was real" approach, and the result is surely horror.

She already shows her lack of knowledge in her first sentence -> "The Dark Ages"

As far as I can tell the term remains in limited use by modern scholars, largely to describe periods & places of the time span traditionally so-labeled that happen to be particularly lacking in primary sources so are indeed, in that sense, "dark", as in lacking illumination and obscured. Seems to me that usage would fit OK for the setting of Beowulf. Or it may have been employed in the colloquial sense, which also seems fine and clear, IMO.

No just no, you don't use that term if your a knowledgeable middle-age historian:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

Yes just yes. Since that supports exactly what I wrote.

>>and today's scholars also reject its usage for the period.

>>The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether due to its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate.

That's NOT what you wrote....

To quote myself:

> in limited use

Which is supported by the article you cited. My only point was that its presence wasn't necessarily reason to decide the author doesn't know what they're talking about.

I also think the "poetic" sense of it, in context, is wholly enough to defend its usage here against such out-of-hand dismissal of the author over it. Since I did provide two reasons someone who's not unqualified to write on this topic might choose to use it.

In general I find that fans of fields tend to be more pedantic about this kind of thing than practitioners, sometimes to the point of being wrong from the perspective of those in the field (see: "the US isn't a democracy, it's a republic!")

> Eleanor Johnson is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University

Yes even worse to use the term "Dark Ages"

Regarding Headley's work: At what point does a "translation" become "Interpretation"? There seems to be no argument in the several reviews/comments I have seen of the book, that she is claiming a literal translation or to understand Beowulf in a traditional sense. As a non-lit major, it seems past writers have attempted to capture the mechanisms and literal meaning and tone of the original, in the most accessible way possible for the language and dialect of the time. Headly said "fuck it" and used particularly modern slang to make almost a parody of the telling.

I'm not offended by it, but /if/ it can be said that prior translators kept their bias and creativity to the minimum required to maintain story and poetic elements, she went far beyond such shackles. It therefore would never be considered a canonical work, even if it sees uptake in some classrooms.

All translation is interpretation. Every language carries it's own nuance, which rarely translates directly to another. When translators fail to acknowledge this, they end up doing the interpretation unconsciously, and often mangle the piece. An example I can think of off the top of my head is Max Stirner's "Der Einzige und sein Eigentum" (Either "The Unique and it's Property" or "The Ego and It's Own" depending on your choice of translation) was originally translated into English by Steven Tracy Byington. The translation is bad, missing pretty much all subtext included in the German, for example, translating the identical first and last lines of the book differently. Now, in their respective contexts, each translation of that line is reasonable, but by translating them differently that piece of humor is missed. The Wolfi Landstriecher translation, on the other hand, attempts to maintain the symmetry, perhaps at the cost of a more literal translation of the wording.

Yeah, even this fairly-positive (ultimately) review ends up painting it more as an adaptation or workin-inspired-by-X than a translation. Almost a parody, even.

Every translation requires interpretation. Even if you tried to do a word-for-word dictionary translation of a book, you still have to make decisions about how to handle things like idioms, metaphors, and puns that don't necessarily make sense when translated directly. A lot of translations of verse also try to keep some sort of meter in the translation, which requires even more artistic interpretation. That's only compounded with a story like Beowulf where the only known extant copy has missing sections, typos, and intentional alterations from whatever it was originally transcribed from.

>I'm not offended by it, but /if/ it can be said that prior translators kept their bias and creativity to the minimum required to maintain story and poetic elements

One thing that can be interesting to look at is the things that prior translators tried to avoid or gloss over in their translations. If you look at public domain translations from the 19th and 20th centuries, you'll see that the translators often go through great pains to avoid even a hint of sexuality or vulgarity. The most infamous example I can think of is Catullus 16, a poem that begins with the speaker threatening to insert his penis into various orifices of his rivals.

Some translations totally skipped those lines of the poem. Or partially translated them like Sir Richard Francis Burton in 1894 ("I'll . . . you twain and . . . Pathic Aurelius!"). Some liven the lines in with a bit of euphemism while still sounding clinical ("I will make you my boys and bone you, sexually submissive Aurelius"), from ET Merrill in 1893. Some translations jazz it up with literal descriptions of the actions while keeping the aggressive tone ("I'll sodomize and face-fuck you, submissive Aurelius"), some turn into steretypical Xbox Live users ("I'll push your shit in and stuff your face, Aurelius you stupid cocksucker") etc. It's also worth keeping in mind that a translation for the 19th century won't have the same impact on a modern audience as it would then, at least without additional context. e.g. Calling someone pathic would've been like using a homophobic slur back in the day.

I think Headley's translation actually does a good job of that even when it isn't so literal. "#blessed" was a bit silly. But the opening along the lines of "Bro! Back in my day, everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory bound, but I’ll sound the Spear-Danes’ song, hoarded for hungry times" really sets the tone of "crusty drunk dude at the bar telling you a badass and exaggerated story". Older translations just don't do that for me:

Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped, we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!

Clearly in her telling, Beowulf himself is now the monster.

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