The first early attempts to make sense of the poem that Thorkelin published were made by Thorkelin himself and an Englishman, Sharon Turner. At this time, very little was known of the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) language. These early interpretations were generally filled with mistakes, to the point that they missed the gist of the story. An excellent source concerning these early attempts is The Translations of Beowulf, by Chauncey Brewster Tinker (Yale, 1903).
Thorkelin translated Beowulf into Latin, which was still the universal scholarly language. Sharon Turner translated into English, and he was working on his while Thorkelin was still watching his printed copies go up in smoke. Naturally, they became rivals who sniped at each other’s errors. Both of them interpreted Beowulf as a Viking king, literally a pirate. They misunderstood side stories as main story, they assumed he was the hero of every side story, and it’s not clear that they even grasped the monster’s role.
Turner, like Wanley and other antiquarians before him, learned his Old English mainly from copying texts in the British Museum. He probably learned a lot from a school text from the early 1000’s, which was supposed to teach Latin to Old English speakers. Using this basic vocabulary, antiquarians had been able to read simple prose like the history written by Venerable Bede. Turner tackled passages, and he published three editions, always adding more but never presenting the whole. And never actually getting it.
The first scholar to grasp the basic story and its significance was Nicolas Gruntvig, a Danish scholar of old Germanic literature. Gruntvig was already the author of a book on Germanic mythology, which gave him a background the others missed. He bought Thorkelin’s text but couldn’t read it with clarity, so he began reading through the entire thing, committing it to memory. This unorthodox approach allowed him to see the whole before he understood the parts. With his expertise in mythology, he recognized some names, such as Scyld, the first person we hear about in the poem. Thorkelin and Turner had assumed Scyld must be a character in the story; Gruntvig recognized that he was not.
With his friend Rasmus Rask, who was writing a grammar of Old English, Gruntvig tackled the entire poem. But he explained in his 1820 Danish version that “I have studied the poem as if I were going to translate it word for word . . . but I will not and have not translated it in that way.” (quoted in Tinker) And he didn’t. He hoped his paraphrased poem would become a study text for schools, but he sold barely any copies.
In 1835, there was finally a decent, full translation into English. John Kemble of Cambridge had full access to the rapidly growing field of linguistics, and he even corresponded with Jakob Grimm, who with Rasmus Rask had been formulating the famous “Grimm’s Law.” The Old English text as he printed it was basically the same as our modern one, with spelling and other nuances correct. He was even able to hazard a guess at an unknown word by comparing it to Gothic.
Once Kemble’s scholarly translation was available, the game changed. After Kemble, there could still be many scholarly studies of the words, but now the raw material was out there for translators to play with. In 1849, Professor Wackerbarth at St. Mary’s, Oscott (Roman Catholic) seminary came out with an improved translation. He, too, was a scholar of the original language, but the task became much easier after Kemble. His poem was in meter and rhyme…and this brings us to the question: what is the best way to recast the poem? Meter and rhyme? Imitation of the Old English sounds? Prose? There are arguments for all three, and all three have been done far more than once.