Hwæt wegar Dena....
and for this combination of syllables he chose the translation:--
Quomodo Danorum.
There is, of course, no such word as ‘wegar’ in Old English.
Of the necessity of punctuation Thorkelin seems to have been serenely
unconscious; he did not even follow the guides afforded by the MS. Had
he done so, he would have saved himself many humiliating errors. For
example, in the text given above, to have noticed the periods mentioned
in the collation would have been to avoid two glaring instances of
‘running-in.’
_Criticism of the Translation._
But, in spite of the wretched text, it remained for the translation to
discover the depths of Thorkelin’s ignorance. It will be seen by reading
the extract given from the translation that he did not even perceive
that two men were swimming in the sea. It is to be remembered, too, that
his error of the ‘piratical expedition’ is carried on for sixty
lines--certainly a triumph of ingenuity. It is useless to attempt a
classification of the errors in this version. In the words of Kemble:--
‘Nothing but malevolence could cavil at the trivial errors which
the very best scholars are daily found to commit, but the case is
widely different when those errors are so numerous as totally to
destroy the value of a work. I am therefore most reluctantly
compelled to state that not five lines of Thorkelin’s edition can
be found in succession in which some gross fault, either in the
transcription or translation, does not betray the editor’s utter
ignorance of the Anglo-Saxon language.’ --Edition of 1835,
Introd., p. xxix.
_Reception of Thorkelin’s Edition._
The book was of value only in that it brought Beowulf to the attention
of scholars. The edition was used by Turner, Grundtvig, and Conybeare.
I have found the following notices of the book, which will show how it
was received by the scholarly world.
TURNER. On collating the Doctor’s printed text with the MS. I have
commonly found an inaccuracy of copying in every page.--Fifth
edition, p. 289, footnote.
KEMBLE, see supra.
THORPE. (The work of the learned Icelander exhibits) ‘a text
formed according to his ideas of Anglo-Saxon, and accompanied by
his Latin translation, both the one and the other standing equally
in need of an Œdipus.’ --Edition of 1855, Preface, xiv.
See also Grundtvig’s criticism in _Beowulfs Beorh_, pp. xvii ff.
[Footnote 1: Supra, p. 7.] [[Preliminary Remarks]]
[Footnote 2: See also Grundtvig’s edition of the text of
_Beowulf_, p. xvi.]
[Footnote 3: See _Beowulfs Beorh_, p. xviii.]
[Footnote 4: See supra, p. 11.] [[Turner’s Account...]]
[Footnote 5: See Thorkelin, p. 257.]
[Footnote 6: Ibid., p. 259.]
[Footnote 7: See Thorkelin, p. 40.]