Spake out then Unferth that bairn was of Ecglaf,
And he sat at the feet of the lord of the Scyldings, 500
He unbound the battle-rune; was Beowulf’s faring,
Of him the proud mere-farer, mickle unliking,
Whereas he begrudg’d it of any man other
That he glories more mighty the middle-garth over
Should hold under heaven than he himself held:
Art thou that Beowulf who won strife with Breca
On the wide sea contending in swimming,
When ye two for pride’s sake search’d out the floods
And for a dolt’s cry into deep water
Thrust both your life-days? No man the twain of you, 510
Lief or loth were he, might lay wyte to stay you
Your sorrowful journey, when on the sea row’d ye;
Then when the ocean-stream ye with your arms deck’d,
Meted the mere-streets, there your hands brandish’d!
O’er the Spearman ye glided; the sea with waves welter’d,
The surge of the winter. Ye twain in the waves’ might
For a seven nights swink’d. He outdid thee in swimming,
And the more was his might; but him in the morn-tide
To the Heatho-Remes’ land the holm bore ashore,
And thence away sought he to his dear land and lovely, 520
The lief to his people sought the land of the Brondings,
The fair burg peace-warding, where he the folk owned,
The burg and the gold rings. What to theeward he boasted,
Beanstan’s son, for thee soothly he brought it about.
_Criticism of the Translation._
The Morris-Wyatt translation is thoroughly accurate, and is, so to
speak, an official commentary on the text of Wyatt’s edition. It is
therefore of importance to the student of the _Beowulf_.
As a literary rendering the translation is disappointing. In the first
place, it must be frankly avowed that the diction is frequently so
strange that it seems to modern readers well-nigh ridiculous. There are
certain sentences which cannot but evoke a smile. Such are: ‘(he) spoke
a word backward,’ line 315; ‘them that in Scaney dealt out the scat,’
line 1686.
Secondly, the translation is unreadable. There is an avalanche of
archaisms. One example of the extreme obscurity may be given:--
‘Then rathe was beroom’d, as the rich one was bidding,
For the guests a-foot going the floor all withinward.’
l. 1975-76.
It would seem that the burden of ‘rathe,’ ‘beroomed,’ and ‘withinward,’
were sufficient for any sentence to carry, but we are left to discover
for ourselves that ‘rich one’ does not mean rich one, but ruler, that
the ‘floor’ is not a floor but a hall, and that the guests are not
guests, but the ruler’s own men.