Violence and Vernacular in Seamus Heaney's Beowulf

In the introduction to his translation of Beowulf (2000), Seamus Heaney makes clear his commitment to an anticolonial project aimed at revealing and reversing the baleful effects of colonial violence. This is a project, as Heaney suggests, founded upon the cultural force and political suggestiveness of the vernacular. Describing his decision to refer to Hrothgar's reced or great hall with the Ulster dialect word bawn, a word originally derived from the Irish bó-dhún ("cattle fort") and appropriated by early English settlers to signify the fortified dwellings meant to keep dispossessed Irish natives at bay, Heaney writes in the introduction that

it seemed the proper term to apply to the embattled keep where Hrothgar waits and watches . . . every time I read the lovely interlude that tells of the minstrel singing in Heorot just before the first attacks of Grendel, I cannot help thinking of Edmund Spenser in Kilcolman Castle, reading the early cantos of The Fairie Queen to Sir Walter Raleigh, just before the Irish would burn the castle and drive Spenser out of Munster back to the Elizabethan court.¹

Thus, by foregoing more standard equivalents for reced such as "keep" or "fort" and putting a bawn into Beowulf, Heaney attempts, as he says, to come to terms with a "complex history of conquest and colony, absorption and resistance, integrity and antagonism, a history that has to be clearly acknowledged by all concerned in order to render it ever more 'willable forward / again and again and again'" (B xxx). Indeed, the insertion of the vernacular seems to accomplish this and more. His bawn stands as a subtle, yet deliciously subversive means of recalling Spenser's travail at Kilcolman Castle, an edifice which Heaney elsewhere calls "the tower of English conquest and the Anglicization of Ireland, linguistically, culturally, and institutionally."² Moreover, Heaney's insertion of dialect into Beowulf memorializes and enacts the kind of linguistic and cultural cross-fertilization that has characterized relations between Ireland and England for more than eight hundred years.

Through such hybrid transformations of Beowulf, Heaney not only rewrites a seminal Anglo-Saxon text—a text which has been used by various Old English scholars to further claims of cultural and linguistic superiority, particularly in discussions concerned with issues of national origin and the justification for colonialism—but he also adds another intriguing narrative strand to the often vexed story of English-Irish relations.³ Specifically, Heaney's vernacularized revision of the poem transcreatively transforms it into a kind of looking glass through which Irish cultural and sociopolitical experience might be seen—sometimes darkly and sometimes vividly.

At various points, for example, rather than using terms from the lexicon of medieval Anglo-Saxon society to designate key social relations and positions, Heaney deploys terms drawn from the Gaelic social structure that was first drastically altered and ultimately decimated by the colonial schemes of Spenser and his successors. Thus, the Old English māga ("kinsmen") becomes clan (B 19: 247), Unferth's court title yle ("spokesman") is rendered with the Gaelic brehon (B 101: 1457), and the Irish sept (B 115: 1674) replaces the Old English lēoda ("people" or "tribe").⁴ Terms descriptive of cultural behavior and topography also take on an Irish hue. Hildeburh sings a keen (B 77: 1119), not a dirge or lament, and features of the landscape become decidedly Irish: windige næssas ("windy headlands") becomes "windswept crags" (B 95: 1358) and fen-gelād ("path over the fen") is rendered keshes (B 95: 1359). Through such renderings of the Old English source text, Heaney thus appropriates and alters this quintessentially English cultural treasure.

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The question concerning Heaney's decision to recast Beowulf in an idiom inflected by Hiberno-English and Gaelic diction has become the central point of debate in the half dozen or so extended critiques of the translation. Unfortunately, this narrow focus tells only part of the...