Bro, This Is Not The 'Beowulf' You Think You Know

The first thing I need to tell you is that you have to read it now. No, I don't care if you've read Beowulf (the original) before. No, I don't care if you loved it/hated it, if it traumatized you, if it ruined and/or energized the English language for you, or ruined you for translations or whatever. I don't care what you think of when you think of Beowulf in any of its hundreds of other translations because this — this — version, Headley's version, is an entirely different thing. It is its own thing. A remarkable thing that probably shouldn't even exist, except that it does.

It is Beowulf, mostly. Beowulf, kinda. It is Beowulf down to the line numbers, and tells the story of Beowulf and Hrothgar and Grendel and Grendel's mom and the dragon and Wiglaf and everything.

Except that Headley has made it modern, not in form or style or content, but in temperament. In language. "Language is a living thing," she writes in her introduction. "And when it dies, it leaves bones. I dropped some fossils here, next to some newborns. I'm as interested in contemporary idiom and slang as I am in the archaic. There are other translations if you're looking for the courtly romance and knights."

Truth: Beowulf would've been a vanity project if it wasn't written by Headley, and if Headley hadn't made a splash back in 2018 with The Mere Wife which was, in itself, a retelling of Beowulf set in 21st century suburbia and focusing (largely, but not exclusively) on Grendel's mother. It would've been a thesis. An academic passion project read by no one but Beowulf nerds, loved or hated almost in a vacuum.

Instead, Headley's Beowulf is a big release — discussed, debated, talked about (as it should be) because it has everything: Love, sex, murder, magic, dungeons, dragons, giants, monsters. It spills blood by the bucket and gore by the gallon, makes heroes, slays villains and serves as an instruction manual for toxic masculinity, circa 700 AD.

I mean, that's ridiculous. And brilliant. And genius-level washed-up barstool-hero trolling all at the same time. "Bro" to take the place of Behold! and Lo! and What ho! because Behold! and Lo! and (especially) What ho! are all silly and stilted and stupid and do not — not a single one of them — have the social heft and emotional dwarfism and Bud Light swagger of "Bro," because "Bro" is the braggart's call, the throat-clearing of someone who wasn't, you know, there, but heard about it from some dude who totally was.

It is thousand-year-old slam poetry, 'Hamilton' for the Geats and Skyldings — full of blood and honor, inside jokes and historical digressions.

And THAT is the emotional level at which Beowulf works. Has always worked, really, but absolutely works in Headley's newest version. It is bragging. It is urban legend. It is that guy who once threw three touchdowns against State telling the story again — five beers deep on a Tuesday night — before hey-buddy-ing the bartender for his sixth.

That's what Beowulf always was. An epic poem made to be shouted over the howls of mead-drunk Spear-Danes as they toast the fallen and lovingly punch each other to sleep. It is thousand-year-old slam poetry, Hamilton for the Geats and Skyldings — full of blood and honor, inside jokes and historical digressions.

Headley takes liberties. She has reasons (and explains them in an extensive intro) and she has the right (having studied Beowulf as closely as anyone), and so she tinkers with focus and with the weight given to smaller characters (Unferth going toe-to-toe with Beowulf, trying to put the lie to the tales already told of him, becomes one of the poem's most memorable scenes — an epic mead-hall rap battle), and re-humanizes Grendel's mother into a grief-stricken mom demanding a blood-debt for her murdered son. Monstrous, yes. But no longer a monster.

It rolls. It demands to be spoken, to be shouted and spat. To be taught as the thing that it is — the Marvel movie of its time.

Which is all fine. Which is all as it should be. Because there is no real Beowulf. Not anymore. It has been translated and re-translated. Academics have tussled with the language for ages. Even the original (not the original-original, but the original document upon which all other translations are based) was a group project. Two scribes, working through the 3,182 lines together, fighting each other in the margins, crossing out each other's words and replacing them.

So Headley's version (translation? transcription?) is just as real and twice as vital right now as any other. It sings straight through, the alliteration and temper of it invigorating (as it should be) and roaring (as it should be), like Beowulf, introducing himself to Hrothgar:

It rolls. It demands to be spoken, to be shouted and spat. To be taught as the thing that it is — the Marvel movie of its time.

I always liked Beowulf a little for what it was: history, foundational myth, epic poem of swords and dragons, source material for paintings on the sides of vans. But Maria Headley's Beowulf I love for exactly what it is: a psychotic song of gold and blood, stylish as hell, nasty and brutish and funny all at once, mad and bad and sad and alive now in a way that these words simply haven't been for more than a thousand years.

Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, video games, books and Starblazers. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia magazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.

I don’t know much about Dewy, but I agree with you that Heidegger was a subjectivitist. I think he start out with Husserl and phenomenology. Phenomenology could be an easy stepping stone to subjectivism and relativism. I know many of the post moderns think highly of him and they are not believers in Truth. But here’s the insane irony: they say it’s true that there is no truth — which is contradictory and hypocritical. However, that doesn’t seem to stop them. I read that some post moderns appeal to Heidegger’s insight that contradiction lies at the deepest levels of Being. And maybe that’s true at the quantum level where phenomena defy common sense, e.g., you can have the same particle occupy two different spaces simultaneously. But I don’t think Heidegger got that insight about contradiction from science or philosophy... maybe through poetry vaulting over everything, but who knows?

I know Heidegger wanted to purify the language of philosophy but I don’t know exactly how. I also know the positivists where suggesting something similar. With the positivists there was a push to make language scientifically accountable. But I think Heidegger was more concerned about Being, its categories and how people got the central idea wrong since Plato. I guess that also goes into the topic of ontics and ontology which you brought up.

I think relativism is thoroughly entrenched in almost every aspect of western life. Again, the irony is that the US went to the moon based on the idea of truth — that we can know the truth about the physical world. But western culture is a different story and for many people it seems harsh to say the West knows the truth — which means that other cultures don’t know the truth. It goes against the left’s idea equality and compassion. The left claim Capitalism is a repressive evil that victimizes minorities and silences their voices with its grand narrative. These minorities also have their cultural truths. But would people who espouse this line prefer to go to a doctor in the West than a witch doctor from Africa? They say that truth is cultural and relative. If truth was so relative why would they go to a western doctor? Why not go to a witch doctor from Africa? So they are hypocrites once again.

Though Heidegger was also a terrible human being (unrepentant Nazi, had affairs with his students while married, had an affair with Hannah Arendt, etc.) I like his idea that “Language is the House of Being.” I don’t know if he came up with it himself or took it from another source — for example, I think took “Being toward Death” from St Augustine. This works well with my idea that God has come to rest in language.

If I can briefly explain my idea that God is now language. We are born and die within language. It surrounds and shapes our existence. In the Pre-modern period God existed as a separate entity. He was Logos or the Word – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Aristotle said that God was “Thought thinking thought.” With Christ the Word poured himself into flesh. And then years later that idea of God is eclipsed by secular modernity with Nietzsche’s idea that “God is Dead.” In the Romantic Era, man now becomes God by way of his creativity and his Will to Power. Think of all the creative geniuses that were worshiped in the Romantic Era — the artists were high priests of the spirit. The artists still believed in a spirit, despite the rise of a godless science. And now we have Post Modernism and the emphasis on language — the idea that language determines man’s fate. Language maybe working without our consciously knowing — think of Richard Dawkin’s selfish genes or Hegel’s The Absolute working through man. Laurie Anderson said language is a virus. However, it surrounds and defines our being and our ideas about our world. I think Heidegger might have said that without language there would be no world, there would be nothing...

So I’m curious about this topic because it starts with God as “The Word” and ends up with a godless Heidegger saying that without language there would be nothing. The ancient “Word” ends up as Language in postmodernism – some kind of crazy full circle. If you have any insight, with respect to Heidegger or otherwise, on this topic please let me know.

I have a hard time with Heidegger and have read that he purposely wrote to make reading very difficult. It is almost impenetrable writing and even commentators seem to disagree with each other. It all seems intentional and I just pity the people ensnared in his words. It’s like a fly trap and you are groping around to find meaning – there maybe more sleight-at-hand than present-at- hand with him. But he is a big influence on postmodernism. Still, I think there are trans-historical and trans-cultural truths. As well, not all cultures are equal in having the truth – some have it more of it than others. In other words, there is a big difference between putting a bone in your nose and going to the moon.

A lot of my understanding of post modernism has come from Stephen Hicks’
“Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.” It’s a great and informative read if you are interested.

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