Kevin Crossley-Holland (transl.) - Beowulf; The Fight at Finnsburh

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

BEOWULF

THE poet of Beowulf is unknown to us, but he was an Anglo-Saxon, almost certainly a Christian, and perhaps a cleric. The main action of the poem is set in early sixth-century Scandinavia, and the earliest likely date for its composition is about 150 years later, the middle of the seventh century, when Christianity was beginning to spread throughout Anglo-Saxon England. Scholars now tend to place the poems composition at some time in the late eighth or ninth century. The dating of the single manuscript in which the poem is found to the very beginning of the eleventh century provides us with the latest possible date for the poem. Beowulf is written in Old English, in the standard alliterative four-stress line common to all Anglo-Saxon poetry. The language of the original gives us little clue as to where in Anglo-Saxon England it was composed. Even though the poem bears some of the characteristics of oral compositionespecially in its use of formulaeit seems likely that its composition was literary, though it was probably designed for oral recitation. There are no explicit references to Christianity, but there is a good deal of biblical allusion, especially to the Old Testament. The poem is also rich in allusions to the legendary world of Germanic heroism and Scandinavian history which we know mainly from Old Norse sources. Epic in length, style, and subject matter, Beowulf is also profoundly elegiac in tone, depicting a long-past world of monsters, heroes, and kings.

KEVIN CROSSLEY-HOLLAND is editor of The Anglo-Saxon World (Oxford Worlds Classics), translator of The Exeter Book Riddles, and author of The Penguin Book of Norse Myths. He has written seven volumes of poetry and is a Carnegie Medal-winning writer for children. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

HEATHER ODONOGHUE is Vigfusson Rausing reader in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature in the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Linacre College. She is the author of The Genesis of a Saga Narrative: Verse and Prose in Kormaks saga (OUP) and works particularly on the links between Old Norse, Old English, and Irish literature.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

The Fight at Finnsburh

Translated by
KEVIN CROSSLEY-HOLLAND

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
HEATHER ODONOGHUE

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Translation Kevin Crossley-Holland 1999
Editorial matter Heather ODonoghue 1999

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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1999

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Beowulf. English
Beowulf; The fight at Finnsburh / translated by Kevin Crossley
Holland; edited with an introduction by Heather ODonoghue.
(Oxford worlds classics)
1. English poetryOld English, ca. 4501100Modernized versions.
2. Epic poetry, English (Old). I. Crossley-Holland, Kevin.
II. ODonoghue, Heather. III. Fight at Finnesburg (Anglo-Saxon
poem). English. IV. Title. V. Series: Oxford worlds classics
(Oxford University Press)
PR1583.C76 1999 829.3dc21 9822104
ISBN 019283320-0 (pbk.)

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Beowulf is an Anglo-Saxon poem about Scandinavian characters and events in a half-legendary, half-historical Germanic past. Its lengthover 3,000 linesits subject mattera hero fighting against the forces of evil in a world of vicious power struggles between tribes and kingdoms in early Northern Europeand its abiding concernsthe dignity of human conduct and the value of heroic societyidentify it at once as an epic poem, and specifically, heroic epic. Epic poetry has been described as an expression of a societys cultural heritage and certainly, in its breadth of reference and the grandeur of its ethical conception, Beowulf has always been viewed as the defining text of the Anglo-Saxon world. But, in common with Homeric epic, Beowulf does not slot into any clear historical or social context. We do not know when or where in Anglo-Saxon England it was composed; whether it had an oral prehistory; what kind of author it had. We can only guess how its contemporaries regarded it, and who its audience might have been. Most tantalizingly, we do not know whether its picture of heroic life reflects reality, or literary tradition, or is the poets own invention; some of the events and characters in the poem have their basis in historical fact, while others, including the monsters, and the hero Beowulf himself, belong to a wholly different order of reality, the mythic or legendary.

The poem tells the story of how its hero, Beowulf, gains renown by coming to the aid of Hrothgar, King of the Danes, killing first a terrifying humanoid monster, Grendel, and then the monsters infuriated, vengeful mother. Beowulf eventually becomes king of his own country, Geatland, but when he is old (as Hrothgar was when Beowulf came to kill Grendel) Geatland itself is threatened by a monstera fiery dragon which Beowulf fights and kills, dying in the process. With the death of Beowulf comes another, different threat to the Geatish people: without their king, they will be vulnerable to attack from old enemies, and the poem ends with a lament for Beowulf which is also a lament for the future of the Geatish people and, by extension, an elegy for heroic society as a whole.