Cain’s Clan

Derek was the kind of boy we small, bookish pupils liked to have around. He spent every untimetabled minute of the day reading history. He would read standing up, his prematurely tall body hooked over the book, like a timorous question mark. No one was going to pick on us while someone was publicly reading about the Thirty Years War for fun.

He was also mean. At lunchtimes and rainy day play-times, the grandly named school bookshop opened. It was a wooden case that folded out into a book display. Every break-time Derek picked up Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War; but he refused to buy it. He was reading their only copy from start to finish. Well, not quite. When he was one lunch hour away from finishing it, someone else bought it. The smug boy running the bookshop relished his revenge: ‘Can’t tell you who it was, client confidentiality and all that!’ On these same shelves I saw the Penguin Classics version of Beowulf. It cost me 3s 6d and, many years later, a dig in the ribs from a friend called Richard Baxter with whom I was watching a Woody Allen film. Woody is advising a friend to try evening classes as a way of distracting herself from the long wait for life and love. He counsels, ‘Take any course where they don’t make you read Beowulf!’ At the time, I was structuring my first and, it has to be said, still unsold novel around Beowulf. ‘Unfair!’ I argued all the way home. But Beowulf reeks of chalk and mortar boards. It’s easy to get a laugh at the expense of its admirers (‘fans’ seems far too enthusiastic a word), but stay with me. In one sense only I agree with Woody; don’t study it, read it as a thumping good yarn that takes a warrior from the ruthless world of the Viking age and answers the question that great art from all eras addresses: what does it take to be a man? I didn’t know any of this when I carried off my investment from the school bookshop. The fact that I bought it was due to good blurb-writing and the haunting cover photograph of an Anglo-Saxon helmet taken from the Sutton Hoo burial mound, where an entire longboat was the coffin for a king. I stared into the empty eye sockets, and romance and savagery stared back (though to be honest, I did think the helmet looked oddly put together). The story of Beowulf is told in a little over 3,000 lines of poetry, written some time between the seventh and tenth centuries in Old English. The poet has a Christian viewpoint, just about, you feel, but the old pagan world is still out there, if we lapse for one moment. It feels right that the occasional Biblical references are all from the Old Testament. The plot has the shape of a three-act drama.

Act I: A young Swedish prince, Beowulf, fights Grendel, a monster terrorizing the Danish king, kills it, and is fêted. Act II: The dead monster’s mother takes over the work of laying waste the court and is also slain by Beowulf. Act III: In old age, Beowulf, now a ruler, fights a dragon laying waste his land; both perish.

The poetic metre is strict, four beats to the line, with relentless internal alliteration, making it a powerful vehicle for such a story. The most readable rendition into modern English is by another master-wordsmith: Seamus Heaney, whose translation – and I really must ram this down my friend Richard’s throat – won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize for 1999. Impressive commercial stamina for chalk-dust writing. I read that edition in Galway while the sea wind whipped the canvas of my tent, and I imagined the talons of Grendel, ‘Cain’s Clan’, slicing through it in bloodlust, just as he had ripped open the barred doors of the great Hall of Heorot, a leftover demiurge ‘harrowed’ by civilized banquets and poets’ harps. There is a pessimism in the Anglo-Saxon and Viking world view that is, perhaps, more in tune with current times, when the grim reality of war and politics is laid bare each night on the news, than the 1960s, when I carried in my duffle bag the golden hopes that all teenagers think unique to their decade. After all, the 1960s told you to ‘be what you wanna be, live like you wanna live’. Not so the 960s. They were more like my parents’ war generation: monsters laying waste your homeland year upon year? Mustn’t grumble. But the real appeal of Beowulf is something that will sound familiar to any reader of J. R. R. Tolkien. This is a world where Beowulf has a fine chain-mail coat, probably worth as much as a good house, which could model for the one that Bilbo Baggins gives Frodo. There is also an ancient sword (the technology of sword-making declined for centuries after the Romans left Britain, so old swords were highly valued). Tolkien was not only one of the finest appreciators of Beowulf but, in his 1936 essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, he restored the poem to its rightful owners, ordinary readers, and swept from centre stage the flea-pickers who had dissected it for historical information, changes in language, antecedent stories, anything in fact except a good yarn. He wanted to mend the rift between modern Britons and this vigorous, elemental, mythic past – a birthright he thought was destroyed by the Norman invasion of 1066, which broke a tradition going back to the age of the great migrations that swept Europe as Rome crumbled. Ironically, the Normans were just that, Norsemen, descendants of the Viking Duke Rollo, but they had already gone native, gone French. In a second irony, these stories were preserved not in the Germanic tradition from which they came, but by Viking colonists who went off to the edge of the known world and wrote the old stories down in a book preserved in a farmhouse on the tiny island of Flatey in their new home of Iceland. Beowulf itself survived in a single manuscript copy which came so close to destruction by fire in the eighteenth century that the singed edges of the pages may still be seen where it is displayed in the British Museum. It also houses the helmet which has now been reassembled: it looks much better. But the antiquarianism doesn’t matter when you read how a man gifted beyond normal powers has to deal with crises demanding heroism beyond ordinary mortal power and then, in the closing act, with an adversary beyond any hero’s power. Though there are unlikely tales of swimming in full armour while decimating local marine mammals, ultimately the test is not whether you win, but whether you acquit yourself with dignity. In this, the ageing Beowulf, patiently buckling on his armour against the inferno of the dragon’s breath, succeeds. He does not delegate the task to a senior minister or suggest that this is a job for a younger man. I have made pilgrimages all over Britain and the North Atlantic in the wake of Beowulf and other Norse heroes. Three years ago, I saw the burial mound at Sutton Hoo where the helmet on my Penguin edition was dug from the stubborn earth. I have followed the Viking boats west to Dublin, then home to the finest goldsmiths in Europe, to the edge of Ireland where Dún Aengus still sits immovable on the western cliffs, like the hill fort of Beowulf ’s lord, Hygelac. I have sailed north to Orkney, bare Shetland and wild Faroe, and to Iceland. In a remote fjord in west Greenland I daydreamed on the stone step of a longhouse which is regarded as the home of Erik the Red and his son Leif, who claimed to have sailed to the west and wintered in a land which could only, if it existed outside his boasts and his imagination, be America. Last year, I completed the arc of their magnificent trajectory, and stood on a green crescent of meadow at L’Anse aux Meadows on the exposed northern tip of Newfoundland. From the hearth of a house that once stood there, a small bronze pin has been excavated. The pin, now in a museum on the site, is a Viking design used in Greenland just before the end of the first millennium ad – the time Leif claimed he was there. The pin tied together a lady’s overcloak, but it also ties together the whole history of the Vikings in America: proof in the palm of your hand. I also made my way to another Greenlandic fjord, to Hvalsey, or Whale Island. There the remains of a Viking church stand taller than the old lord’s hall, a modest affair, despite the name, where poets like the author of Beowulf would have come on feast days to recite and write the stories of the bad old pagan days. The tales must have made the crackling fire seem warmer and the dark outside somehow colder, less respectful of the bones and flesh of mortal men gathered inside to hold back the night and the creatures from the edge of the map that came knocking as the lights burned low and the raillery died. The hall represents a cluster of good things: light, warmth, Christianity, order and civilization. Whatever is outside is the enemy of these virtues. One night it walks in, and it is called Grendel by the local people. Such monsters must be held back by wooden walls, and men’s swords and prayers. But this one is charmed against all blades; Beowulf must stand alone and wrestle with the creature from the pit. Beowulf has been a dam holding back other, human, enemies chafing at their gates; when he dies, they will move in. A woman mourning at his funeral pyre sees this all too clearly.

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.

The men who listened to the tale knew the life Beowulf led, a world of blood feuds, war and predation. But the poet offers hope.

For everyone of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.

My old battered Penguin now sits on the shelf next to Seamus Heaney’s version and another old Penguin: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which has been read exactly 1.9 times. Sorry, Derek.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 13 © John Harrison 2007