Beowulf iss meyn nahma

Once a college student heard his English professor recite - "magnificently," as he later recalled - a passage from Beowulf. "I was spellbound," he confessed. "This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish."

The student's name was Auden; the professor's, Tolkien.

I never had the fortune in school to hear Beowulf recited in the original, let alone from Tolkien's voice through Auden's ears. But I have read Beowulf in translation several times. It's not the unforgiving ancient relic of legend; I'd rather read it than tons of touted modern novels. But then, I read Beowulf because I'd read Tolkien, and in particular, I'd read Tolkien's famous essay "The Monsters and the Critics," in which he argued for his colleagues to treat Beowulf as a work of literature, and not just as an archaeological dig site.

It says something about the kind of person I am that, when offered the opportunity to go hear Benjamin Bagby, an early music specialist who now goes around performing Beowulf, in the original, from memory, I leapt at the chance. And it says something, too, that I have friends who equally consider such outings to be cool. So on Wednesday, a group of us feasted on Indonesian food and then walked up the hill to the Zellerbach Playhouse in Berkeley.

The lights dimmed. Bagby walked on stage, threw his arms out and bellowed "Hwaet!" - the opening word of Beowulf, often translated "Listen!" or "Lo!" or, more prosaically, "Indeed," or "So ..." And he continued. Spoken Anglo-Saxon is not easy for the untrained Modern English ear to make out. (Neither is Middle English before the Great Vowel Shift.) It sounded a little like Dutch, with something of the inflection of Swedish. A few words that I knew from Tolkien jumped out at me, like "middengard" or "theoden" (means "king", you know). A few phrases sound the same: "any other man" is almost the same in modern English. "Beowulf is my name" comes out sounding like the transcription I give above. Supertitles helped, but unfortunately it was a very loose translation. Something like the Talbot Donaldson translation, intimidating to read but a tighter transcription, would have been much better.

Bagby did his best to keep the performance alive. He recited, he sang, he chanted, he declaimed, all in variation, whichever was appropriate at the moment. When Unferth sneers at Beowulf, he spoke drunkenly. And he played his little hand harp. The same arpeggiated open chord, over and over, not a third in a carload, varied only by an occasional strum.

It lasted 90 minutes, but it only got us through the first third of the poem, the encounter with Grendel. It ended just before the Finn episode, which is good, because that's always where I get lost, and don't pick up the thread again until afterwards. As we filed from our seats, one of our company asked, "So what comes next?" and I knew the story well enough to tell him offhand. Something like this:

So then the next night, even though Grendel is dead, one of Hrothgar's chief counselors gets killed the same way. And everyone asks, "How did that happen?" and somebody says, "You know, when I saw Grendel out on the mere, there was another monster with him, I think it was his mother." And Beowulf is all, "Why didn't you tell me that before?" So he dives into the mere, and Unferth apologizes to him for acting like such an ass the night before and gives him a sword to fight Grendel's mother with. Beowulf chops her head off, and then the king gives him even more presents and Beowulf finally goes home. Then there's this dragon ...

I went to this performance because I saw it as an opportunity to engage with the poem on a level I've never been able to do before. I would never limit my engagement with Shakespeare to armchair reading and pass up all opportunities to see the plays performed, so why not give Beowulf the same chance to prove itself as a performance piece? It was challenging, but interesting and unforgettable, and maybe if he learns the rest of the poem and comes back next year ...