Beowulf translation is a whole academic field, the translation has been debated ad nauseum for 100s of years, Tolkien had his own translation and opinion, which differed from others. One additional scholar adding his own interpretation doesn't necessarily overturn anything. There is not enough detail in this article to know how compelling the case is or what the counter arguments would be.
> There is not enough detail in this article to know how compelling the case is or what the counter arguments would be.
The only real way to make the case compelling would be to discover new Old English texts. So there is enough information; the case is not going to be compelling.
The paper (someone else linked it) makes a pretty strong argument with quite a bit of evidence.
It does seem quite likely that the translation that begins "What!" (with the exclamation mark being inserted by translators) was just an error by early translators who were over-indexing on Latin grammatical patterns which weren't at all common in Old English.
I used to use this (still do really) as a technique when starting undergraduate lectures. They’re there, ready to listen, but chatting away and need a moment to focus their attention.
*SO* let me tell you further fun facts about carbonyl chemistry…
Works. Those Anglo-Saxons knew what they were about.
I had a history professor who would often use a similar preamble phrase. His was "And SO IT IS that we see that..."
It worked to get our attention partly because of the time it took to say all that, and partly because it was so idiosyncratic that it sorta became a running joke.
I remember one session in particular.
This was a summer class, and as such each class session was around 2 hours long. The professor would typically give us (and himself) a 10-minute break in the middle of the class, and generally if you hung around the room, he'd strike up a more casual conversation in the room.
This was also not long after Michael Jackson died. The conversation got onto him and his life and his mixed legacy of scandal, went on for a while, and somehow made its way to one student observing that (and I quote): "he lived the American dream – he started out as a poor black boy and grew up to be a rich white man."
The room sorta hung in uneasy suspense at how the professor would respond.
"...and SO IT IS that we see that the Mongol conquest...", he said, launching noticeably-abruptly (and with a bit of a knowing grin) back into the course material.
He was generally a good-natured dude like that. His voice sounded a little unusual, and I guess some students thought he sounded like Kermit the Frog. He came back into the room after a bathroom break once to find someone had drawn Kermit on the whiteboard behind where he usually stood when speaking. He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road" (or whatever it was were about to cover; it's been quite a few years and I don't remember the specific topic).
That's great. Similar trick I've picked up is to say "blah blah blah ... is as follows:" followed by a pause and then your explanation, which is always more than the one or two words the listener might have otherwise been expecting. This technique allows you to keep the talking stick and express an idea that takes more than a few words, without someone jumping to an immediate conclusion or interrupting you.
On the first day of class in undergrad, most professors are handing out the syllabus and talking about class requirements and basically doing zero lecturing. Not my Philosophy 101 prof. The minute the class was scheduled to start, he opened the door and walked into the room saying, "The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world."
I don't remember the rest of the lecture, but his opening phrase is burned into my memory three decades later. Because in one fell swoop, he simultaneously said the following:
1. This class starts promptly. I expect you to be in your seats on time and ready to listen.
2. I have a lot of material to cover, so I'm not going to waste time talking about the syllabus. You're in college, I expect you to be able to read.
3. The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world.
(He did actually talk a little bit about the syllabus later on that day).
Maybe good pedagogy, but the point is that's not what the Anglo-Saxons were doing. What they did (in Beowulf, and seemingly most of the time they started their sentences with hwæt) would be more like starting the lecture with: "How fun carbonyl chemistry is!"
I'm confused, isn't this the exact usage that TFA is refuting?
> Yet for more than two centuries “hwæt” has been misrepresented as an attention-grabbing latter-day “yo!” designed to capture the interest of its intended Anglo-Saxon audience urging them to sit down and listen up to the exploits of the heroic monster-slayer Beowulf.
To close the loop, I had a chemistry professor who linked concepts together in lecture with the phrase "Meaning what?" E.g., "In the alkyne molecule, the carbon atoms share a triple bond. Meaning what? Meaning that the bond is much stronger than in alkanes or alkenes..." It was less a technique for getting attention and more for holding it through a chain of reasoning. But it worked.
I’ll share another great version of Beowulf- Bea Wolf. Based on kids, with fantastic artwork and a great story/version. My kids absolutely love me reading this and I absolutely love reading it as a large passed down story of battles.
Cool, that was enough to intrigue me, but for those on the fence perhaps it’ll help to note that the author is none other than Zach Weinersmith of SMBC fame.
Regarding the topic, this graphic novel begins “Hey, wait! Listen to the lives…”
> “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into a count by future translations,” he said.
I think there’s a bit of unintentional humor in this line, like it belongs in “i am the walrus”. The researcher would _like_ to say something, which makes me think the sentence has an implied completion of “but I won’t say it”, which I already find kind of funny. And then of course the quote is tagged with “he said”, lol, almost like the author is mocking him. Idk, that’s so funny to me
It took me a few minutes to track down the original source of this. It is a paper by Dr George Walkden published in 2013 called "The status of hwæt in Old English" You can access the pdf from the link below [0].
The abstract reads:
>It is commonly held that Old English hwæt, well known within Anglo-Saxon studies as the first word of the epic poem Beowulf, can be ‘used as an adv[erb]. or interj[ection]. Why, what! ah!’ (Bosworth & Toller 1898, s.v. hwæt, 1) as well as the neuter singular of the interrogative pronoun hwa ̄ ‘what’. In this article I challenge the view that hwæt can have the status of an interjection (i.e. be outside the clause that it precedes). I present evidence from Old English and Old Saxon constituent order which suggests that hwæt is unlikely to be extra-clausal. Data is drawn from the Old English Bede, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints and the Old Saxon Heliand. In all three texts the verb appears later in clauses preceded by hwæt than is normal in root clauses (Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.0001 in both cases). If hwæt affects the constituent order of the clause it precedes, then it cannot be truly clause- external. I argue that it is hwæt combined with the clause that follows it that delivers the interpretive effect of exclamation, not hwæt alone. The structure of hwæt-clauses is sketched following Rett’s (2008) analysis of exclamatives. I conclude that Old English hwæt (as well as its Old Saxon cognate) was not an interjection but an underspecified wh-pronoun introducing an exclamative clause.
> and more recently “So!” by Seamus Heaney in 2000. This is despite the research suggesting that the Anglo Saxons made little use of the exclamation mark
I agree with Dr. Walkden here. While it was used as an interjection at times (just as it is today when someone exclaims, "What?!") in the context of the opening line of Beowulf "hwæt" is more likely being used to reformulate a statement in order to convey a sense of emphasis. An example in modern English would be something like, rather than saying "That was a gorgeous sunset!", one says "What a gorgeous sunset that was!". (Notice that the verb has now moved to the end of the sentence. In fact if you look at the last word of the line in question, we have the verb "fremedon" which means "performed", so indeed the placement of "what" at the beginning of the line facilitates the restructuring of the sentence in such a way that makes it "sounds right".)
People are saying that the interjection interpretation is influenced by its use as interjection in Shakespeare’s time. By that time what/hwæt was being used differently than the way it was when Beowulf was authored hundreds of years before.
Yeah—I'm reminded of the opening sentence of Slaughterhouse Five, which goes, "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." Kurt Vonnegut isn't worried that you're not listening; he's trying to create a sense of intimacy and emphasis, as one who is taking you aside to tell you something crucially important which he fears you may dismiss out of hand.
It seems intuitive to me that the "hwaet" functioned more as a literary device than as a simple call for attention. It is, after all, a poem.
It could also have been both, as well. In the immediate moment it functions as an interjection and as the rest of the sentence develops it fills in a pronoun gap. Like starting a shanty with a loud, slow single syllable to get attention (and maybe catch others on to the key) and that still being also a part of the first line of the song.
Graham Scheper has a recent video on this topic. He also believes that "Hwaet" is not an interjection, but more like Red Riding Hood's "What big eyes you have!"
There are some other videos on Tolkien's translation. He didn't like the phrase "whaleroad" used in some versions because he thought it sounded too like "railroad".
38 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 70.6 ms ] threadThe only real way to make the case compelling would be to discover new Old English texts. So there is enough information; the case is not going to be compelling.
It does seem quite likely that the translation that begins "What!" (with the exclamation mark being inserted by translators) was just an error by early translators who were over-indexing on Latin grammatical patterns which weren't at all common in Old English.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/beowulf-bro
"Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!
In the old days, everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound.
Only stories now, but I’ll sound the Spear-Danes’ song, hoarded for hungry times."
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77151/what-ho-of...
*SO* let me tell you further fun facts about carbonyl chemistry…
Works. Those Anglo-Saxons knew what they were about.
It worked to get our attention partly because of the time it took to say all that, and partly because it was so idiosyncratic that it sorta became a running joke.
I remember one session in particular.
This was a summer class, and as such each class session was around 2 hours long. The professor would typically give us (and himself) a 10-minute break in the middle of the class, and generally if you hung around the room, he'd strike up a more casual conversation in the room.
This was also not long after Michael Jackson died. The conversation got onto him and his life and his mixed legacy of scandal, went on for a while, and somehow made its way to one student observing that (and I quote): "he lived the American dream – he started out as a poor black boy and grew up to be a rich white man."
The room sorta hung in uneasy suspense at how the professor would respond.
"...and SO IT IS that we see that the Mongol conquest...", he said, launching noticeably-abruptly (and with a bit of a knowing grin) back into the course material.
He was generally a good-natured dude like that. His voice sounded a little unusual, and I guess some students thought he sounded like Kermit the Frog. He came back into the room after a bathroom break once to find someone had drawn Kermit on the whiteboard behind where he usually stood when speaking. He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road" (or whatever it was were about to cover; it's been quite a few years and I don't remember the specific topic).
I don't remember the rest of the lecture, but his opening phrase is burned into my memory three decades later. Because in one fell swoop, he simultaneously said the following:
1. This class starts promptly. I expect you to be in your seats on time and ready to listen.
2. I have a lot of material to cover, so I'm not going to waste time talking about the syllabus. You're in college, I expect you to be able to read.
3. The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world.
(He did actually talk a little bit about the syllabus later on that day).
> Yet for more than two centuries “hwæt” has been misrepresented as an attention-grabbing latter-day “yo!” designed to capture the interest of its intended Anglo-Saxon audience urging them to sit down and listen up to the exploits of the heroic monster-slayer Beowulf.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60316971-bea-wolf
Regarding the topic, this graphic novel begins “Hey, wait! Listen to the lives…”
I think there’s a bit of unintentional humor in this line, like it belongs in “i am the walrus”. The researcher would _like_ to say something, which makes me think the sentence has an implied completion of “but I won’t say it”, which I already find kind of funny. And then of course the quote is tagged with “he said”, lol, almost like the author is mocking him. Idk, that’s so funny to me
The abstract reads:
>It is commonly held that Old English hwæt, well known within Anglo-Saxon studies as the first word of the epic poem Beowulf, can be ‘used as an adv[erb]. or interj[ection]. Why, what! ah!’ (Bosworth & Toller 1898, s.v. hwæt, 1) as well as the neuter singular of the interrogative pronoun hwa ̄ ‘what’. In this article I challenge the view that hwæt can have the status of an interjection (i.e. be outside the clause that it precedes). I present evidence from Old English and Old Saxon constituent order which suggests that hwæt is unlikely to be extra-clausal. Data is drawn from the Old English Bede, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints and the Old Saxon Heliand. In all three texts the verb appears later in clauses preceded by hwæt than is normal in root clauses (Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.0001 in both cases). If hwæt affects the constituent order of the clause it precedes, then it cannot be truly clause- external. I argue that it is hwæt combined with the clause that follows it that delivers the interpretive effect of exclamation, not hwæt alone. The structure of hwæt-clauses is sketched following Rett’s (2008) analysis of exclamatives. I conclude that Old English hwæt (as well as its Old Saxon cognate) was not an interjection but an underspecified wh-pronoun introducing an exclamative clause.
[0] https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/413d...
Seamus Heaney does not use an exclamation.
His version begins:
“So.”
It seems intuitive to me that the "hwaet" functioned more as a literary device than as a simple call for attention. It is, after all, a poem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gZKCPk40WI
The P.G. Wodehouse translation?
There are some other videos on Tolkien's translation. He didn't like the phrase "whaleroad" used in some versions because he thought it sounded too like "railroad".