Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetry-news/69208/new-research-opening-line-of-beowulf-is-not-what-weve-eternally-thunk

by gsf_emergency_6 • 6 months ago

104 95 6 months ago

poetryfoundation.org

larrik• 6 months ago

It's an interesting idea, but I'm thrown by "a count" in "should be taken into a count by future translations"

Jtsummers• 6 months ago

Not present in the original report at The Independent:

“I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into account by future translations,” he said.

https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/new...

It's possible The Independent fixed it up in an edit after The Poetry Foundation made a copy of it.

jihadjihad• 6 months ago

Amusingly, the source article [0] linked to in TFA does not contain the same error:

  > “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into account by future translations,” he said.

0: https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/new...

pc86• 6 months ago

Is this the Beowulf translation field equivalent of incorrectly correcting someone's correct use of the their/there/they're homophones?

steve19772• 6 months ago

Me too, I just thought that I wouldn't trust an article on linguistics with such an error too much.

cvoss3• 6 months ago

Yeah, weird to see a couple of linguistic mistakes like this in an article about linguistic mistakes. Another is the misuse of "latter-day". The article uses it to refer to an old thing that is analogous to a modern thing: "[a] latter-day 'yo!'" But "latter-day" actually describes something modern. (E.g., the "latter days" refers to the present age. See "Latter-day Saints".)

selimthegrim• 6 months ago

See also "latterly".

tracerbulletx• 6 months ago

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.

cvoss3• 6 months ago

The article references a forthcoming publication that I can't find a draft of. Here's an older publication on the topic by the same author: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2013_hwaet.pdf

Edit: Oh, the PF article is from 2013, so this must be the actual publication after all.

thaumasiotes4• 6 months ago

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.

gsf_emergency_6• 6 months ago

May I suggest Old Frisian (& Old Saxon) as well

https://xcancel.com/thijsporck/status/1395838213198127111

Video from this week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs&t=12m57s

Addresses Shakespeare's objection

Commenters there point to German translations that open with "Wie.."

https://archive.org/details/beowulfdasltest00beowgoog#:~:tex...

(Karl Simrock, 1859)

antonvs7• 6 months ago

Check out the paper - someone else linked it. It has several examples from Old English and other related languages which support its case. It seems pretty compelling to me.

The fact that earlier translators had to break up the original sentence and insert an exclamation point after "What" is already a bit suspect. Walkden's interpretation actually makes more sense, when you see examples like "Hwæt stendst þu her wælhreowa deor?", meaning "Why are you standing here, cruel beast?"

This may be a case where early translators over-indexed on e.g. Latin patterns and made a mistake which was then just accepted by subsequent translators.

antonvs7• 6 months ago

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.

gadders2• 6 months ago

You could always read the Maria Dahvana Headley translation that starts with "Bro!":

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."

spchampion2• 6 months ago

I know it's unconventional, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading that translation. It felt so alive, and other translations have never engaged me in quite the same way.

gadders2• 6 months ago

It was the only version I managed to finish, unless you count "Eaters of the Dead" by Michael Crichton (which is loosely based on it and mashed up with the story of Ahmad ibn Fadlan).

I think it's a good compromise between staying true-ish to the language, and also making it come alive as an epic adventure story.

Eric_WVGG• 6 months ago

beat me to it. another article: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/27/906423831/bro-this-is-not-the...

her adaptation, The Mere Wife, needs to get adapted to film or series yesterday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mere_Wife

zahlman3• 6 months ago

How about "Whoa!"? That seems to me like it preserves some of the ambiguous sense (calling for attention vs. remarking upon a discovery).

cvoss3• 6 months ago

The issue is really focused on the grammatical function of the word. The researcher is arguing that it's not ever used as an interjection, which "whoa" always is.

zahlman3• 6 months ago

I would say the presence of an exclamation mark, in a context where exclamation marks are rare, is strong evidence of use as an interjection. Unless we're arguing that some other mark was mistaken for an exclamation, generally I would say rare typography is "marked" (noteworthy) rather than being likely mistaken. I think the researcher's position is not likely to hold much sway going forward.

badgersnake• 6 months ago

Bill and Ted kill a dragon.

slwvx• 6 months ago

"What ho" as in British English seems like a descendant of this usage

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77151/what-ho-of...

Rebelgecko• 6 months ago

There was a more colloquial translation a few years ago that rendered it as "Bro!"

chuho• 6 months ago

That's the 2021 translation by Maria Headley

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374110031/beowulfanewtran...

onraglanroad• 6 months ago

I guess "What bro!" is less sexist than "What ho!"

WorldMaker2• 6 months ago

I feel like Lil Jon would remind us that "What?!" still works pretty well today.

roywiggins• 6 months ago

(2013)

IAmBroom2• 6 months ago

(circa 1000)

WWWWH• 6 months ago

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.

antognini• 6 months ago

I remember one of my friends in college pointing out before lecture that the professor would always start by saying "OK, So."

ErroneousBosh• 6 months ago

I have had to train myself out of doing that when recording videos. The best I've managed is that I can do it sometimes, and most of the rest of the time I leave a long enough pause after that I can cleanly edit it off.

vanderZwan• 6 months ago

SO let me tell you

all about how...

Oh no, now my brain wants to play the whole song in my head before allowing me to move on.

ubertaco• 6 months ago

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).

andrewflnr• 6 months ago

He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road"

Optimal play from the professor.

CGMthrowaway• 6 months ago

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.

rmunn3• 6 months ago

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).

stavros• 6 months ago

Unfortunately, cataloguing all the knowledge in the world created new knowledge, leading to a sort of Zeno's paradox of cataloguing.

skybrian2• 6 months ago

Which Greeks? What project is this?

vintermann2• 6 months ago

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!"

tdeck• 6 months ago

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.

gjm11• 6 months ago

Same purpose, different grammatical structure.

Heaney's famous translation begins "So. The Spear-Danes ..." with that "So" being an interjection, a thing that could in principle stand on its own. (You might say "So." and wait for everyone to settle down and start listening.) Even more so with things like "Yo!" or "What ho!" or "Bro!" or "Lo!". (Curious how all the options seem to end in -o.)

This is more like "So, the Spear-Danes ..." where the initial "So" has roughly the same purpose of rhetorical throat-clearing and attention-getting, but now it's part of the sentence, as if it had been "As it turns out, the Spear-Danes ..." or "You might have heard that the Spear-Danes ...".

I think the theory described in OP makes the function of "hwaet" a little different, though; not so much throat-clearing and attracting attention, as marking the sentence as exclamatory. A little like the "¡" that _begins_ an exclamation in Spanish.

Of course a word can have more than one purpose, and it could be e.g. that "hwaet" marks a sentence as exclamatory and was chosen here because it functions as a way of drawing attention.

bitwize• 6 months ago

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.

IanCal• 6 months ago

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.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60316971-bea-wolf

wvbdmp• 6 months ago

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…”

wduquette• 6 months ago

It's a whole lot of fun.

pinkmuffinere• 6 months ago

“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

pcrh• 6 months ago

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.

[0] https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/413d...

jccc• 6 months ago

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

Seamus Heaney does not use an exclamation.

His version begins:

“So.”

spyrja5• 6 months ago

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".)

mc32• 6 months ago

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.

spyrja5• 6 months ago

Nevertheless I do think it is safe to say that such interjections were used, at least on a day-to-day basis. (Bear in mind that relatively few Old English texts survive to this day and almost certainly not many were produced to begin with. Old Norse itself was for the most part a spoken language, unlike Latin for example, and its predecessor which developed in England only started to be written down because of external influences.) Point is, all of the Nordic languages employ interjections akin to "Ah!", "Oh!", "Why?!", "Indeed!", "How?!", etc. So there really isn't any reason to think that such things wouldn't exist in OE as well.

bccdee• 6 months ago

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.

WorldMaker2• 6 months ago

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.

mklyachman• 6 months ago

Does it matter? Genuine question-- does this (mis)translation change anything

IAmBroom2• 6 months ago

Do you know the joke about the priest who died, and discovered God meant priests to "celebrate", not "celibate"?

It matters to those who care about this piece of literature. Maybe not as much as a lifetime of coital bliss missed, but who's to say?

spyrja5• 6 months ago

Not really. It does however help drive home the point that such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale. (On the other hand in Latin and Celtic traditions, interjections were widely used in story-telling, eg. "Ecce!" and "Féach!" respectively). Old English speakers would have been more inclined to used interjections in a responsive context. For example, to the statement "The boat is taking on water!", one might respond "How?!". But to begin a conversation with an interjection, that just isn't consistent with what we see in any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.

thaumasiotes4• 6 months ago

that just isn't consistent with what we see in any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.

What's up with the phrasing? Old English isn't a language that developed from Old Norse.

antonvs7• 6 months ago

It does however help drive home the point that such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale.

Beowulf was written in Old English, which is not a Nordic language.

... any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.

Similarly, Old English didn't develop from Old Norse.

nonethewiser• 6 months ago

According to the historical linguist, rather than reading: “Listen! We have heard of the might of the kings” the Old English of “Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!” should instead be understood as: “How we have heard of the might of the kings.”

So semantically... no difference.

dizzy9• 6 months ago

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!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gZKCPk40WI

tsimionescu3• 6 months ago

You seem to have linked the wrong video (yours is about the meaning of the name Beowolf), the right link about Hwaet is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs

ralferoo• 6 months ago

I watched this video a few days ago after it was randomly recommended by YouTube. Definitely found it very interesting and he has a load of other videos about learning Old English, so I'll be checking out more of them soon.

n4r9• 6 months ago

Is it just me or does this video look AI-generated?

plasticeagle• 6 months ago

I love the phrase "Subtly wide of the mark."

Jun8• 6 months ago

Related: Rumi’s Mesnevî also opens with “bishnav”, “listen” in Persian.

dghf• 6 months ago

Since then it has variously been translated as “What ho!”

The P.G. Wodehouse translation?

Synaesthesia• 6 months ago

LMAO

the_gipsy• 6 months ago

Sound just like "That: [situation or summary]" style. Interchangeable that and what.

nephihaha4• 6 months ago

Graham Scheper had a good video on this recently. About a quarter of an hour long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs

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".

Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)

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