VI.—The Translation of Anglo-Saxon Poetry

Extract

It is more than sixty years since Professor Conybeare in his ‘Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1826)’ gave us metrical versions of certain specimens of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and such versions have been from time to time increased, until now a very considerable portion of this poetry has been clothed in a modern English dress, either in prose or in verse. The form that the translation should take has varied with the taste of the translator. Thorpe, in his editions of the’ Codex Exoniensis’ (1842) and of ‘Béowulf’ (1855), contented himself with an English prose version by half-lines in parallel columns with the text. Kemble, however, had previously published his prose translation of ‘Béowulf’ (1837) in a separate volume from the text. Wackerbarth published in 1849 the first complete English verse translation of ‘Béowulf,’ using verses of three and four accents, riming irregularly, sometimes stanza-fashion, as in the opening lines:

Lo! We have learned in lofty Lays
The Gár-Danes Deeds in antient Days
And Ages past away,
The Glories of the Theod-Kings,
And how the valiant Aethelings
Bare them in Battle's Day.