In our libraries, you can find over 200 translations of Beowulf. Most college-educated people have met the poem in their last year of high school or their first two years of college; it is typically the first item in a survey course of English literature. If you’re a movie buff, there are about a dozen film and television versions, each “unhappy in its own way.” We think of Beowulf as something that has always been around, like Shakespeare.
But during the lifetime of Shakespeare, there was no Beowulf. That is to say, there was one single unread copy in one obscure library. It physically existed, but as literature in society, it didn’t exist. Samuel Johnson, who used countless rare old books to write the first English dictionary, had never heard of it. Jane Austen’s literary family knew nothing of it. The German poet Goethe probably never read it, though he may have heard rumors that it existed.
Being able to read Beowulf goes firmly with our modern world. The first full translation of Beowulf appeared in 1837, the year Victoria became Queen and Charles Dickens began publishing Oliver Twist. That same year the daguerrotype, earliest photographic method, and the first telegraph were patended, and Proctor & Gamble. Michigan became the 26th state, and Charles Darwin had just finished his second HMS Beagle voyage.
And yet the story itself takes us far enough back in time that we aren’t sure exactly where it fits. It may have been written during the Viking Age, but it isn’t about Viking conquests and references neither Ireland nor England. Its heroes are the Danes, but it’s written in Old English, not Danish. Some of its characters can be connected with historical kings in the sixth century, but the language and writing style belong to the 11th century.
Some scholars believe that the poem began as a memorized, chanted oral tradition, probably composed not long after the sixth century. Other scholars believe it’s a work of historical fiction composed only a few decades before the Norman Conquest. Others including Tolkien believed it was the work of a Christian writing around 750, during the height of Christian Anglo-Saxon culture.
In this series, I’ll cover all of these topics, and we’ll also go through the story. You can buy my book and read all this faster, if you like. It was published in 2005 in a library-bound hardcover edition by Greenwood Press, who had commissioned it in the first place. I bought paperback rights from Greenwood, which was not a typical thing for a Greenwood author to do. Greenwood still owns both hardcover and digital rights, but my much less expensive paperback competes with both. And it has a cooler cover.