Beowulf translated by Burton Raffel

"But a monster still lived, and meant revenge/She'd brooded her loss, misery had brewed/In her heart, that female horror, Grendel's/Mother, living in the murky cold lake/Assigned her since Cain had killed his only/Brother, slain his father's son/With an angry sword. God drove him off,/Outlawed him to the dry and barren desert,/And branded him with a murderer's mark. And he bore/A race of fiends accursed like their father [. . .]"

This wasn't the first book I intended to read, much less review this year. I had hoped to start with Demons, but my student teaching assignment had other plans. As I re-read Beowulf in preparation for the beginning of the new semester in a couple of weeks, a review began to form in my head. I began to read my old high school copy, the much touted Seamus Heaney translation, then found out my class would be using the older Burton Raffel translation. For the sake of this review, I find this just fantastic. I love translated literature and I love comparing translations from different writers and the effect the different styles and wording have on the reader.

Like most, I truly admire the Seamus Heaney translation. It is masterful, it is literary, it employs techniques that exhaust me just imagining the effort required to remember and effectively use them for an entire epic poem. Raffel's translation, on the other hand, is much easier to read. Not only do I still appreciate the action of the story, I feel like I'm sitting around the fire in a mead-hall listening to a king's favorite storyteller extol the feats of a great warrior.

I was gripped anew by the fight between Beowulf and Grendel, the underwater fight with Grendel's mother, and the pain of the Geats surrounding the funeral pyre of their King. The story itself is familiar to a modern reader, both because many of us have read it, and in that much of it has been used in huge numbers of stories since then: dragons, monsters, fate, fame, kings, treasure and revenge. It employs all of the elements of an epic poem in the most barebones way possible: in just over 3000 lines (about 125 pages, compared to 500 pages for The Odyssey) our hero goes on a quest, defeats a monster, journeys to the underworld to defeat yet another monster, returns home victorious and lauded by all, then faces a final challenge at the end of his life. This final challenge claims his life, but he still defeats the ancient evil that has been buried deep within the earth. In one of the most moving of literary passages, he is lauded and mourned by his people as the flames of his funeral pyre swallowed his body and riches.

There are elements of written oral traditions that I find difficult to read - namely, the tangents. The stories of the greatness of Hrothgar and Beowulf's ancestors, the warning inherent in the tale of Siegmund and his pride in his own great deeds. While I had trouble leaving off and picking up the main story around the shorter stories within it, I appreciated how the poet used those tales to give weight to the tradition of storytelling in this tradition. Overall, for sheer literary technique I would recommend Heaney's translation, the way that he tries to stick to the format of the Anglo-Saxon poet is impressive and commendable. For a first introduction to Beowulf or for pure enjoyment of the story rather than the craft of it, I would recommend Raffel's translation. If you're as much of a language nerd as I am, pick up both and compare.

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle

In merry England, in the time of old, when good King Henry the Second ruled the land, there lived within the green glades of Sherwood Forest, near Nottingham Town, a famous outlaw whose name was Robin Hood. No archer ever lived that could speed a gray goose shaft with such skill and cunning as his, nor were there ever such yeomen as the sevenscore merry men that roamed with him through the greenwood shades.

We all know the story of Robin Hood, the sober, humorless soldier, hardened by his battles during the Crusades, rounds up a band of sober, humorless men to fight beside him and, in a psychic flash, discovers the Magna Carta and brings Democracy to Medieval England after fighting an epic battle against the French. And now that we’ve covered the 2010 movie, whose authors apparently didn’t realize that there’s already a fictional character named Robin Hood, let’s talk about this book.

I admit it: although I’ve read Robin Hood before, I was inspired to read it again after seeing the essentially unrelated and joyless film. I knew the basic outline and I knew the source material was much lighter and more humorous, but I had forgotten how much. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is really a comic novel, written as a series of inter-related vignettes, which collects various folk tales of Robin Hood and put them into a coherent framework, codifying Robin and his Merry Men into something like an Anglo-Saxon mythology—but this misses the point. Robin Hood isn’t a dull academic exercise, and it doesn’t read, aside from the poetic King’s English, like it was written over a century ago. It moves quickly—I read the entire 350pp book in a little over a day—and rarely missteps.

What was surprising to me is how much of my idea of Robin Hood was missing from the book. Maid Marian warrants exactly two mentions, both times as passing thoughts in Robin’s head. Prince John, immortalized as a lion cub in Disney’s retelling, appears only at the tail end. And what’s included is sometimes surprising as well. Close to a quarter of the book recounts adventures in which Robin himself doesn’t appear at all, focusing on the Merry Men and, in one case, a knight given assistance by Robin’s band.

But, onto the stories themselves. They largely follow the same structure—Robin and his men get bored, hatch an elaborate prank, execute it, and improvise. This leads to Robin’s merry band getting their butts kicked a lot, and it’s this element of “Will it work or not?” that gives the book most of its narrative thrust. However, just when the repetition threatens to grow stale, Pyle switches formats, focusing on a side character or a more involved adventure, such as the elaborate plot to help newfound Merry Man Alan a Dale reclaim his love at her wedding ceremony. The final third of the book, however, abandons the format almost entirely and takes some surprisingly dark and affecting turns.

Ultimately though, Robin isn’t a gloomy slog. It’s joyous and raucous and funny, and the characters, thinly sketched as they sometimes are, are really likable. Like Sherlock Holmes (which also got a terrible movie adaptation recently), Robin Hood is well worth revisiting.