Yet there was one eye that gleamed not with merriment and
goodwill, one head that hatched no friendly thoughts, because the
heart swelled with malice and envy. Unferth it was, the king’s own
story-teller, who sat at his feet, to be ready at all times to
amuse him. He broached a quarrelsome theme--an adventure in
Beowulf’s youth, the only contest in his record the issue of
which, though hard fought, might be called doubtful. For this
Unferth was an envious wight, whose soul grudged that any man
should achieve greater things than himself.
‘Art thou not,’ he began tauntingly, ‘that same Beowulf who strove
with Breca on open sea in a swimming-match, in which ye both
wantonly exposed your lives, and no man, either friend or foe,
could turn you from the foolish venture? A se’nnight ye twain
toiled in the realm of the waters, and, if I err not, he outdid
thee in swimming, for he had greater strength. Wherefore I fear me
much that thou mayest meet with sorry luck if thou darest to bide
here for Grendel for the space of a whole night.’
_Criticism of the Paraphrase._
It may be inferred from the dependence upon the work of Earle that Miss
Ragozin’s knowledge of Old English is of the slightest. This inference
is borne out by frequent misapprehension of the original sense, due in
large measure to the use of a single translation. Thus on page 245,
Grendel is called ‘the God-sent scourge,’ and, again, on p. 322, Beowulf
is described as having been ‘most genial to his nobles.’ Both of these
errors are due to misapprehension of Professor Earle’s translation. The
list of proper names on p. 331 reveals an ignorance of some fundamental
facts of Old English pronunciation. Of course, an intimate knowledge of
the Beowulf style and diction is not indispensable to the writer of a
paraphrase, but the writer who has it will naturally be superior to the
writer without it. For illustration, Miss Thomson[2] never misinterprets
a passage as does Miss Ragozin on page 264, where nearly every sentence
is false to the Beowulf manner.
The paraphrase is slightly disfigured by the distinctively Romance words
which disfigure Earle’s translation.
But these slight defects need not blind us to the service done by Miss
Ragozin in making Beowulf accessible to school children. The style is,
in general, strong and effective, not without some of the beauty and
dignity of the Old English, but relieved of the more obscure and
recondite features of that style.
[Footnote 1: See supra, p. 91.] [[Earle]]
[Footnote 2: See infra, p. 143.] [[Thomson]]