Colophon: Here endeth the story of Beowulf done out of the old English
tongue by William Morris and A. J. Wyatt, and printed by said William
Morris at the Kelmscott Press, Uppermall, Hammersmith, in the county of
Middlesex, and finished on the tenth day of January, 1895. Large 4to,
pp. vi, 119.
Troy type. Edition limited to 300 copies on paper and eight on vellum.
Second edition. The Tale of Beowulf, Sometime King of the Folk of the
Weder Geats, translated by William Morris and A. J. Wyatt. London and
New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1895. 8vo, pp. x, 191.
Ninth English Translation. Imitative Measures.
_Differences between the First and Second Editions._
In the second edition a title-page is added. The running commentary,
printed in rubric on the margin of the first edition, is omitted.
_Text Used._
The translation is, in general, conformed to Wyatt’s text of 1894,
departing from it in only a few unimportant details.
_Part Taken in the Work by Morris and Wyatt respectively._
The matter is fortunately made perfectly clear in Mackail’s _Life of
William Morris_, vol. ii. p. 284:--
‘(Morris) was not an Anglo-Saxon scholar, and to help him in
following the original, he used the aid of a prose translation
made for him by Mr. A. J. Wyatt, of Christ’s College, Cambridge,
with whom he had also read through the original. The plan of their
joint labours had been settled in the autumn of 1892. Mr. Wyatt
began to supply Morris with his prose paraphrase in February,
1893, and he at once began to “rhyme up,” as he said, “very eager
to be at it, finding it the most delightful work.” He was working
at it all through the year, and used to read it to Burne-Jones
regularly on Sunday mornings in summer.’
The plan of joining with his own the name of his principal teacher was
one which Morris had used before when translating from a foreign tongue.
He published his rendering of the _Volsunga Saga_ as the work of ‘Eirikr
Magnússon and William Morris.’ There is no evidence that Mr. Wyatt had
any hand in forming the final draft of the translation. In defending it,
Morris took all the responsibility for the book upon himself, and he
always spoke of it as his own work. In writing to a German student
toward the end of his life Morris spoke of the translation as his own
without mentioning Mr. Wyatt[1]. Nor has Mr. Wyatt shown a disposition
to claim a share in the work. In the preface to his edition of the text
of _Beowulf_ (Cambridge, 1894), he says:--
‘Mr. William Morris has taken the text of this edition as the
basis of his modern metrical rendering of the lay.’ --Page xiii.
Finally, it may be added that the specimens of Mr. Wyatt’s translation
printed in the glossary and notes of his book bear no resemblance to the
work of Morris.
_Morris’s Theory of Translation._
None despised the merely literal rendering of an epic poem more than
William Morris. In writing of his version of the _Odyssey_ to Ellis,
Morris said: ‘My translation is a real one so far, not a mere periphrase
of the original as _all_ the others are.’ In translating an ancient
poem, he tried to reproduce the simplicity and remoteness of phrase
which he found in his original. He believed it possible, e.g., to
suggest the archaic flavor of Homer by adopting a diction that bore the
same relation to modern English that the language of Homer bore to that
of the age of Pericles. The archaism of the English would represent the
archaism of the Greek. This method he used in rendering Vergil and
Homer.
But when he approached the translation of _Beowulf_, he was confronted
by a new problem. It was evident that fifteenth-century English was
ill-adapted to convey any just notion of eighth-century English.
_Beowulf_ required a diction older than that of Sir Thomas Malory or
Chaucer. Hence it became necessary to discard the theory altogether,
or else to produce another style which should in some true sense be
imitative of _Beowulf_. This latter Morris tried to accomplish by
increasing the archaism of his style by every means in his power. This
feature is discussed in the following section.
_Nature of the Translation._
The translation of _Beowulf_ is written in extremely archaic language.
An imitative measure of four principal stresses is used. Wherever
possible, the Old English syntax has been preserved (see line 1242); the
word-order of the original is retained. The archaic language is wrought
of several different kinds of words. In the first place, there is the
‘legitimate archaism,’ such as ‘mickle,’ ‘burg,’ ‘bairn’; there are
forms which are more closely associated with the translation of Old
English, such as ‘middle-garth,’ ‘ring-stem.’ There are modern words
used with the old signification, such as ‘kindly’ (in the sense ‘of the
same kind’), ‘won war’ (in the sense ‘wage war’), ‘fret’ (in the sense
‘eat’). Finally, there are forms which are literally translated from Old
English: ‘the sight seen once only’ from _ansȳn_, face, 251; ‘spearman’
from _garsecg_, ocean (see extract), ‘gift-scat’ from _gif-sceatt_, gift
of money, 378; ‘the Maker’s own making’ from _metod-sceaft_, doom, 1180.
Romance words are excluded whenever possible. A glossary of ‘some words
not commonly used now’ is included in the book, but none of the words
cited above, save ‘burg,’ is found in it.