Putting a Bawn into Beowulf

Abstract

In the introduction to his 1999 translation of Beowulf, Seamus Heaney recalls experiencing a thrill of recognition when he encountered, in the glossary to his student edition of the Old English poem, the verb polian ‘suffer’, familiar to him as ‘the word that older and less educated people would have used in the country where I grew up’. Its appearance on the first page of his translated text — ‘he knew what they had tholed’ (line 15)¹ — amounts to an assertion of cultural identity, the more emphatic since it is substituted for another, synonymous, dialect survival. ‘Tholed’ translates drugon, past tense of dreogan, which might have rung an etymological bell in the ear of a Scot who knew how to ‘dree his weird’.² Iconic examples of the Scots-derived Irish dialect of Heaney’s childhood stud his translation, often similarly disengaged from any specific Old English parallel. Of others mentioned in Heaney’s Introduction, ‘hoked’ for ‘rooted about’ (of a raven, line 3026) has no Germanic parallel; ‘graith’ is paralleled in Old Norse and Middle English, but not Old English. Heaney improvises a compound, ‘war-graith’, for the poet’s coinage, gryregeatwe ‘terrible armour’ (l. 324). The Celtic ‘bawn’ is used of Hrothgar’s and Hygelac’s halls ‘for reasons of historical suggestiveness’,³ appropriately enough since standard English offers few options for a structure that is both a fortress and a home (castle?). It has personal resonance too, recalling ‘Mossbawn’, the family farm in County Derry where Heaney grew up, often symbolizing rootedness in his poetry. Appropriate in a different way is the use of ‘brehon’ — ‘an ancient Irish judge’, according to the OED — for the sinister courtier Unferb (line 1456), since it translates the even more opaque Old English pyle.⁴