Beowulf's funeral

I am fortunate in my friends: they read me too well. Thank you.

If you need a reason to doubt that the future is digital, handle this slim volume and admire the publisher's art. Like Heaney's translation of Sophocles' The Burial at Thebes, this is a wonderful translation beautifully produced. It will survive when my CDs are dust. The introduction is a deeply felt essay: Heaney speaks of his task as "scriptorium-slow", yet the resulting translation is a work as relevant today as it was at the close of the first millenium. The agony of the woman's loss is ever present, Iraq, Darfur, Gaza, an anonymous missile, a timeless grief.

Composed in Anglo-Saxon between the 7th and 10th Century.

"The Geat people built a pyre for Beowulf,
stacked and decked it until it stood foursquare,
hung with helmets, heavy war-shields
and shining armour, just as he had ordered.
Then his warriors laid him in the middle of it,
mourning a lord far-famed and beloved.
On a height they kindled the hugest of all
funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke
billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
and drowned out their weeping, wind died down
and flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
burning it to the core. They were disconsolate
and wailed aloud for their lord's decease.
A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke."

Seamus Heaney, Beowulf, Faber & Faber, 2000, p98