 Welcome to the British Library. I'm B Roelat of the cultural events team. Please sharpen your rare and ancient sword because it's Beowulf Night. Beowulf is of course the longest epic poem written in Old English and it survives in a single medieval manuscript living inside the British Library and you can explore it on our website. You are about to enjoy a sensational, new feminist translation by the brilliant Maria Devana Hedley and it's brought to vivid life by Gemma Whelan all under the redoubtable eye of writer and broadcaster Natalie Haynes. The Washington Post calls Natalie a rock star mythologist. We just call her a rock star, rock star. Her latest book, Pandora's Box, Women in the Greek Myths has been glitteringly acclaimed by Margot Atwood, Neil Gaiman and many, many more and you can buy it right here where you can also give feedback and add your questions for the Q&A, get them in early. For now, over to you, Natalie. Oh, thank you, Bea. I'm gonna introduce you to Maria and then we're gonna have a reading from Gemma so that you can get a little sense of this Beowulf before we talk to the translator slash creator of this Beowulf. Maria Devana Hedley is a number one New York Times bestselling author and editor, most recently with the novels The Mere Wife, Magonia, Queen of Kings and her memoir, The Year of Yes with Cat Howard. She is the co-author of The End of the Sentence and with Neil Gaiman. There's a lot of Neil Gaiman about tonight. She is the co-editor of Unnatural Creatures. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. Maria, welcome to London. Thank you. I'm so excited to be doing this event with you. Me too. Everyone's squeak. Let's have a bit of Gemma reading and then we can talk about the poem and what brought you to it. But first, can we have a bit of Gemma Whelan please? Lovely people who will suddenly make her appear. Beowulf arose and around him rose his armoured army though some staged to guard the war horde by request. They hastened behind their leader through here its radiance, their battle bringer stood before the fire glowing and considered his words. His chain mail, the myth protecting work of a smith links netted to one another for war glory. His helmet made him look harder so he spoke from beneath it. My respects to Rothga. I'm a kinsman of Hygelac and over the years no boasts. I've been known for my promise and prowess. I heard tell of Grendel from sailors. Seriously, the whole world knows the stories swapped and sworn of here at Hall's early curfew. How every night you surrender to silence when the sun sprints out of heaven leaving the celestial dome dark. Every elder knew I was the man for you and blessed my quest King Rothga because where I'm from I'm the strongest and the boldest and the bravest and the best. Yes, I mean, I may have bathed in the blood of beasts netted five foul ogres at once, smashed my way into a troll den and come out swinging gone skinny dipping in a sleeping sea and made sashimi of some sea monsters. Anyone who fucks with the geese, bro, they have to fuck with me. They're asking for it and I deal them death. Now I want to test my metal on Grendel, best him. A match from man into meat, just us two. Hand to hand, sweet. Maria, tell us a bit about this poem and its poet because to me this is modern. Just FYI, as a classicist, I consider this to be the height of modernity because it's only like a thousand or so years old. So can you give us a little bit of a praisey of Beowulf and of its composer? I realize I don't even know what the right thing is to call the composer of Beowulf. Yes, so Beowulf is a baby canonical text. It's only sort of been in English translation and really understandable to contemporary English speakers for about 200 years, but it's about a thousand years old in its written form. And probably it came up from an oral tradition. So the poet of Beowulf is completely unknown and maybe a collective of people who were talking, you know, telling the story. And there's some theory that the version we have is one that was a transcription of a written performance, or of a spoken performance, which I think makes some sense because it has a bunch of little random things that are like shouts out to people in the audience and like bits of poetry, the poet kind of remembered just then and decided to put in as part of the flow. So to me, this poem is really juicy in a translation that is inspired by the oral tradition. That's like something that's meant to be read aloud. And as we just heard Jeva reading it aloud, it's my translation is for that purpose. I really felt like the idea of like a super dignified translation with this material, which would have been probably sort of shouted over a bunch of drunk people by a poet doing this performance, I felt like the more formal register or the more like unclassically formal register was for me not the right register to use. And a lot of people have used it already. So we have those translations. And this one is written in a register that's meant for kind of flow and speaking in a kind of calmer way. And how do you make that kind of decision? Because I realize there's a huge tendency, isn't there among translators or has historically been a huge tendency to think that because something is in poetic language and because that language itself was probably never spoken in that way. It's never conversational. It's what translations have said of Homer. It's certainly what translators have said of Beowulf. It's like, oh, well, then we should definitely put it into some kind of formal archaic sounding thing because then that would sound like the original language would have sounded. And there are so many levels of subjunctive going on and that interpretation is like, well, this would be the right thing to do because this would have been the right year. Are you sure about all of that? And you've cheerfully breezed in and gone, the most important thing, at least it seems to me, the most important thing is that it's a performance. Let's make it something that we can perform. How did you make that choice? Well, I made that choice because in a few years before this Beowulf translation came out, I was working on an adaptation of the Beowulf story called The Mirror Wife, which is a novel. And it was from the point of view of all the women in the story, basically. And I had was as a result of doing that, I was reading and reading all kinds of both translations of Beowulf and newer translations, Shamosini's translation, J.R. Tolkien's translation had just come out as I was working on this. And Heaney's translation is somewhat vernacular. It's kind of has little bits of Irishness in it, which is, I think, really cool. And Tolkien's translation conversely is really formal. It has a register. I mean, you've heard how his elves talk, so. His Beowulf talks like his elves. It feels like a Lord of the Rings situation. It's the world of men and the register is that. Which as I was reading Tolkien's translation specifically, I felt like the material in this story is in conflict with the register that you're using. Because the material in the story is bros bragging about their exploits. It feels very modern, but that's also partially because we haven't ever managed to get out of a patriarchal society. So we've just been in it, in it, in it. So it really feels familiar. And the exploits and sort of bragging of the men in the story feel familiar to us. But if you put them in a high formal language, not that that kind of language isn't necessarily appropriate for bros bragging, I think it makes it feel it distances you from the parts that are relevant to working on our society now, which is what I think stories are for. Like, especially stories that have lasted for as long as this story has lasted as long as the Greek classic stuff has lasted, the reason that those things have lasted is that they have been used to build and to work on societies going forward. So for me, it's relevant to make them connectable from where we are to the past and look at the whole trajectory of history through time using the language. So that's what I did. That's how I made that choice. I was like, okay, I'm going to get to grab some classic words and some archaic words and also grab out of the old English, which is what this is originally written in. And also use contemporary slang that's from Instagram and from everything about our last 30 years as humans living in this time with sort of constantly evolving slang, but also recognizing that constantly evolving slang is a part of language and that that's absolutely normal for there to be slang in poetry, for there to be slang in pieces of work that last. I mean, I think we have like some sort of idea that slang is the informal language isn't allowed, but our language is made in formal language. But also I think it's a really interesting category error that people make, which is to think that somehow if you use formal, high language to translate poetry, that then that translation will somehow transcend the time in which it was created and will be closer therefore to the time in which the original poem was created. And yet if you read, classicists will know of which I speak when I talk of lerb translations, which we were all given when we were at school because it has the Greek or Latin on one side and then English on the other. And they're often or at least I hesitate to slur the lerb library, which I know plenty of people are retranslating at record speed. But when I was at school, you'd get versions that were from 1890 something. I honestly can't understand the English. If anything, I understand it less than I understand the Greek. It has traveled so badly through time. Why on earth would we believe that formal language is timeless and slang is transitory? What on earth would give us that idea? All languages transitory, your translation, you say specifically in the introduction, belongs to you now because you wrote it having been born in this place at this time, growing up in this world, it's yours. Of course it belongs to now. Yeah, it's an interesting thing to imagine that the formal register has been fixed. Yes. Of course it hasn't been fixed. And the register of like viral storytelling, which is what all of these things kind of inherently are when we're talking about classics and folkloric texts and mythological texts are the register has changed and changed and changed and the register of like what is formal has changed and changed. So it's, I think it's a pleasure to reinvent. I've heard a lot since this came out about like, what if it doesn't last? Well, I will be dead. So that's fine. And also, even if it doesn't last like right now, tomorrow, still that's okay. Like there's not, it's not an emergency for a text to not last a thousand years. I mean, and even like William Morris did a translation of Beowulf in the 1890s and it is really crazy. It's like full of archaic words but also full of the kind of William Morris entangled language. And it's fun. It didn't last. Like it's a messy, crazy thing. But looking at it as a product of the Victorian era is really interesting. Looking at the idea of looking through Beowulf through that lens of Victorian ideas is pretty cool. And I think looking at each of these translations of classic texts through the lens of the time the translation happened is something that's worth doing. We see how our notions of what is formal and what is exciting have changed and what is thrilling have changed. So I think that's or stay the same. I think that's one of the cool things about translating old texts into one's own registered ones on time. And I guess I hope that you couldn't have possibly foreseen when you embarked on this project that actually the notion of the contemporary Anglo-Saxon value would have a very different resonance after you'd published it in America today than when you've set out. I wondered if you'd talk a little bit about that. I didn't realize that Anglo-Saxon values were a source of debate in the US until very recently but it turns out they are. Well, the US is really, I mean, this is not just a US thing but this just happened in the US. So in the United States, a Congresswoman decided that she would put forth a caucus of people to protect, quote, American values. And she worded it as protect Anglo-Saxon values which of course means white people. It means like we're going to protect white people. That's what our job is in Congress in the United States in 2021, which we know we have an ongoing never excised problem here. And it's problem of like massive racism, the country company I said almost in capitalist society but the country is built on racist blocks and has always sustained them. So this is a situation where this representative from Kentucky decided that she would say the noble wonders of the quote, Anglo-Saxon world where it's all these texts are about white people and the heroics of white people and how society should respect and elevate white people. And yeah, she had never read Beowulf. Beowulf is about the wrongfulness of wrongdoing against other people who are on the other side of your wall, the ways in which you can think you're a hero and actually be destroying your society. And I think that the people of Kentucky are still safe from dragon attacks. So who's the real winner? I mean, I presume people have come crowding in on you for quotes about the notion of Anglo-Saxon values as imagined by someone who hasn't read Beowulf. Or hasn't read anything from that early English period which is not what they think it is. Like the story of that period of time is not what they think it is. They think it's like homogenous white nationhood. No, it's not. It's full of people from everywhere all around the world and people who are not all white. So, I mean, certainly not all white in a big way. And you mentioned earlier the notion of this being a bro's bragging vibe in this poem. I think I must be confident in saying this must be the first translation of Beowulf which begins with the word bro. Which is just the most magnificent marker to set down. I feel like there can't be many times someone's used three letters and one syllable to more successfully go. This is the kind of book I am writing. You're welcome. But I wondered how long it took you to decide that you would do that. That was the idea that I had. I wasn't planning to translate Beowulf. I was planning to adapt it and do it, tell it only through the women's voices which you and I, we've done work in common in that regard. And my mere wife is sort of similar to some of your work in that regard. And someone in a Q&A for the mere wife said, when is your translation coming out? Cause clearly you're doing a translation because I was at the time being very critical about the history of translation of this text. So I thought about it. I was like, no, no, no, I'm not going to do it. And then I thought about it for a few days and thought, well, no one has really done it the way that I think the text is. Like no one had done the bro translation. No one had translated what? Which is the first word of Beowulf in Old English as bro. It's been translated in Shemesini's translation it's so which is coming out of his Irish storytelling tradition. Yes, it's an old guy propped up against a bar, isn't it going, you know, let me tell you basically. Let me tell the story. Here I am. And it's also translated sometimes as hark or as low or as, there are lots of different words but the words are not bro. And my feeling about bro is that it gave us a format to look through the lens of the sort of bro storyteller and see the whole text through a different, from a different angle than we had previously seen it in translation. So I crazily decided to do it and sent off an email to my editor and said, I want to translate Beowulf. I know this is a crazy thing to do and I can definitely do it in probably like three months. I said lying, lying and not realizing how hard it would be but I said I'm going to start it with bro and he bought it. He was like, okay, that sounds like an interesting thing to do but he wasn't totally sure that that was really what we should do because it also veers it toward a less serious translation, I guess, the idea of putting it in vernacular. But I always thought, I mean, this is a story that's been really adopted as a text for successful masculinity. It's like a dude text. And I feel like using bro enables us to look at it from that POV but also from the POV of a critique of that, of toxic masculinity sort of running through the female characters in the poem but also through men going, oh no, I've gotten it wrong. I haven't done it right, which occurs over and over at the poem. It's like old men say, oh no, and it's part of the poem. So that's an interesting way to look at it, I think. It sure is. I mean, because it is a poem of conflict, isn't it? There are three battles essentially or it's three acts as it were. And the first of those battles is Grendel. And I was really interested to see how you have downplayed his monstrosity and upplayed his personness for want of a better word. And I wondered if we could talk just briefly about that and then we might go on to talk about, oh, I don't know, Grendel's mother. Well, yeah, I'd love to talk about Grendel because he, I mean, I think so often in texts like these, my sympathy is almost always with the monsters, quote unquote. And in the case of Grendel, he essentially is living his life, he's fine. And then suddenly a big like frat hall is built next to his house and it's really loud and everybody in it is singing and shouting and drunk all the time. And he's like in his nature preserve life. He is not expecting this. And he has, so he has a legitimate grievance. Someone has built essentially on his lap and said, your land belongs to me. And now I'm here and I've built a glorious hall here and I have all my guys here and we're just here now. You can't have any space here. Which is- Apparently this text had some resonance in modern America. I can't imagine how. It's really not relevant. Yeah, it's totally relevant. It's relevant to everything that we've seen as a society and as societies around the world because this is a very common theme, the theme of colonialist smashing of indigenous peoples and of people who already own the land. You're coming in and saying, this land is my land now, not your land. And so that's like running through the Beowulf story. The idea of building a top someone's ancestral space. And Grendel comes in into this hall and does something major. I mean, he kills a lot of people and eats them. And he also sort of drags people off in a sack. He has some skills. He's not like an unskilled warrior. So the Grendel character is described as a monstrous character in the original plot. But he is described as coming down from some bad fortune ancestrally. He's coming as a descendant of Cain and he's being punished long-standingly by God. And his punishment is that he is miserable and a loner. So it's interesting to sort of look at the grafting of Christianity onto this poem that has also roots in a pre-Christian society. And that's part of the genesis of the poem is like Christian scribes, maybe some Christian poets mashing in on an older story. So this is a mashup of like mini gods and one God. And Grendel is the sacrificial victim of that mashup basically. And I think is a really interesting character. Grendel is basically in pain, his ears hurt. He can't stand the noise. And I have been there long-standing New Yorker. And like sometimes you do not deal with your neighbors. But also like thinking about the history of America it's really that aspect of the story is really relevant to it. Yeah, I love, I've talked many times about Oedipus being the original road rage incident because obviously he kills his father when they coincide literally metaphorically at a place where three roads meet. But Beowulf has to be the first neighborly dispute, noisy neighbor dispute. It just feels, even all those brothers at war and earlier narratives, I don't feel like it's ever, you're making too much noise and I can't sleep and my ears hurt. It's so specific, it's just incredibly charming. Of course, and spoiler for those of you who haven't managed to read it, but in fairness you've had a thousand years, so that is on you. Then Grendel does not make it to the second third of the poem and is avenged by one of the most interesting characters in literature and that is Grendel's mother. I'm gonna ask you about her in just a second, but Gemma Whelan will read us a little bit of her first, I hope. Grendel's mother, warrior woman, outlaw. Meditated on misery. She lived ill-fated, sinking beneath cold currents to her kingdom under country. Her line linked to extinction since Cain crossed swords with able and fled. Murder marked to make his home in wastelands, solitary and silent. From Cain came more misery, a legacy of lost souls. Grendel was one of those, banished and blasted. He'd found a waker among the dreamers, a battle amid the beds and wrestled the warrior who'd woken into war. Beowulf saw himself as God's gift. Grendel as a goner. He used his strength to slay the intruder, trusting in his father to protect him as he always had. He bled the Helian and Grendel fled piecemeal. No heaven for him, no honey, only rushing through a haunted hall to die in his own mausoleum. Now his mother was here. Carried on a wave of wrath, crazed with sorrow, looking for someone to slay, someone to pay in pain for her heart's loss. She found the path and made her way to hear it. Ring-danes were dreaming there, a murdering herd of sleepers, drooling, drunk, their feast filling them. They were the cream of the crop, but soon they'd be the chaff, scythed from swordsmen into skeletons. She was the one to do it. The horror wasn't muted by the measure of women's strength against men's brawn. Both can hold slaying swords, glazed with gore and score the borecrests from war helmets, warming them with blood. In here at Hall, hard-honed blades were yanked from over benches, shields shouldered to cover blinking sleepers, waking bare-headed, bare-chested, stunned by her arrival. She moved swiftly, knowing she had only moments to sift men for her vengeance and remain among the living. She tore a warrior from his bed and dragged him defenceless to her thin. This was Hrothgar's best friend, most adored on the land between the two salt seas, warrior and retainer, she slew him sleeping. Beowulf was lucky, bedded elsewhere. After the brawl, gift quarters had been appointed him like rings. The geat was asleep when Grendel's mother struck. Here at Hall howled, she'd taken their trophy too. Grendel's hand, man by man, they squawored. This was unjust, a bad bargain that both sides should suffer losses, though the war was dealt and done themselves, the clear winners, the wise king, gray and battle brittle. Moaned when he knew the news that his closest advisor, nearest to ear, was no more, doornail dead. Maria, I think I'm right to say that Grendel's mother was your first encounter with this poem. And so she is the character who lured you in to the rest of it. She's your gateway drug, essentially, is what I'm saying. And I wondered if you talk a bit about your childhood discovery of Grendel's mother and what it's gone on to produce. Yes, Grendel's mother, I saw a picture of Grendel's mother in a sort of compendium of monsters at some point, which I have never located again. I don't know how I encountered this even, but I was a little girl. I was probably eight years old. And I saw this picture of a woman coming up out of a pond with a sword in her hand. And she was pretty much naked. Like she was a little bit sexy, but more furious than sexy. She looked scary and like she was done with behaving. And even as an eight-year-old, I was like, that's what I want. Squant, go! Now let me come in and live my life against the rules. And I didn't even know what the rules were at that point. I was little. I didn't know that there was sexism. I didn't know that I wasn't supposed to be a warrior or that I was supposed to be good, but I thought that woman looks like she has power. And what I thought when I saw her was that she was the main character of whatever she'd come from. There was no Beowulf in this picture. There was no Grendel in this picture. There was just Grendel's mother coming up out of the water. And of course, time went on and I read Beowulf as the sign text in the US, it's a signed reading. And Grendel's mother is the middle battle and she's a little bit, she's pretty short battles, but she was extreme. I mean, it's an extreme battle in which an older woman who's probably about 70 takes on an 18-year-old warrior and he is terrified of her and he almost dies. And the only thing that saves him is that God says, I choose you. And he gets a light shown on the sword that will kill Grendel's mother. So it's like really interesting to see an example of a woman being seen as an equal warrior, an elderly woman being seen as a warrior with equal strength to a teenage boy who's self-declared the sort of best warrior in the world. And I think that that kind of caught my attention but I never saw a version of Grendel's mother in which she wasn't depicted as a supernatural creature. And the actuality of the Grendel's mother character in Beowulf is that she is a single mother. She's a single mother who's raising a son who's pretty sensitive and delicate. And as we see, he loses it when he hears too much noise from next door and she's really capable. She's in charge of her own kingdom. She's been the queen for 50 years of her own place. So I just started thinking as time went on and now I'm 43, so this is however many years, I can't even do the math since eight years old but some time. And I was thinking, okay, why the injustice of female warriors being depicted as monsters? And in translation of the Grendel's mother character, the word for fingers which in old English's finger is often translated as claws by translators. And it's not, it's fingers. And if she's using a dagger which is what she uses, why would you do that if you had claws? And how would you grab it if you had long claws? You could, it takes some work though. So I started thinking about the ways in which she's not actually depicted as monstrous. She's depicted as probably a human woman who has a son who is epic. And I mean, I think I'm a parent. I'm like, well, that could happen. And the world might look at you as monstrous because you're capable. So I became capable without a man. And that's something that's disallowed sadly for a long, for thousands of years. So. And she reminds me so much of Clytemnestra, you know, of a woman who avenges a child and in Clytemnestra's case, obviously a daughter. And is therefore derided as the ultimate bad wife because, you know, she can't spoil her again because she kills her husband. It's like, well, he killed her daughter and she even says in Escalus, well, how come her life was worth less than his? And there's just no answer. And I thought of her all the way through your translation. And I thought, I don't ever remember thinking of Grandaul's mother in this, in such a humanized way. And I knew, I felt really confident that that had been your intention. But I wondered if that was, was that, that's another part of what makes this translation so much of its time. It feels to me that we have never more been interested in de-monstering monsters and de-heroizing heroes and saying, this requires nuance and perhaps there aren't. And I hesitate to spoil Westerns forever one. Perhaps there aren't goodies and baddies. Yes, I mean, I think in terms of this being, I mean, in the original text, there's so much gray area in terms of monster and hero and good and evil. It's not, it's not as clear as we have thought it would be in translation. And in translation, usually it's like the monsters and the heroes, but the same word is used for Beowulf and for Grendel and for Grendel's mother and for the dragon. It's the same word across the board except that Grendel's mother gets the feminized version of it. And it's a word that sort of historically has been translated as hero and as monster, but a more contemporary notion of that is that it's more like formidable and tough, strong. And so I definitely use that concept as I was running through here going, okay, hero and monster are actually really close together in terms of what the characteristics of each thing are. They're usually stronger than everyone else. They're tougher than everyone else. They're more fearless than everyone else. And the idea in literature is that we're really thinking about the line between like which way do you go and it's your actions. It's whether or not you've managed to figure out how to be good. And in this case, Grendel's mother does the kind of feud rule vengeance. She kills one person. Her son is killed and she kills one person. She doesn't kill the whole room. She doesn't kill everyone. And she might be able to, but she doesn't do it. She comes upon them when they're sleeping, drags one guy out, an important guy and kills him. And that is a human thing to do. I mean, I would do it if my child was killed. I would be like, how can I get the person who killed him? And if I can't get that person, what can I do to make reckoning? Yeah. It seems to me a poem where almost more than any I can think of where the translator becomes a character within the poem. At least in this version in particular, I think there's some really lovely, I mean, I think it's true with the Heaney as well, right? Where he makes the poem have that Irish tinge to it because that's who he is and that's what we want when we read his version. But I love these moments of thinking essentially and I feel slightly like your stalker's saying this. It feels like we're hanging out. It gets to moments and you're like, here's what I know. And I go, yeah, tell me what you know. Come on in and tell me about this. I wondered if that was part of the delight for you. It feels like you're so jubilant in these moments of going, hey, let's talk about this character in this way. Come on, come on, Henry talk. One of the amazing things about the original poem is that there are narrative breaks. Like the narrator of the poem sometimes comes in and says, I was there, I saw it, I saw it. And it's like the narrator or the poet got so excited thinking about this story that they decided that they were in the room. And so for me, I decided that I was in the room as I was working on this. I was like, okay, I am sitting here with this long dead poet or poets or kind of conglomeration of people. I have no idea who they are, but I'm going to extend my fingers across a thousand years and see if I can sort of touch fingers with them and we hold the pen together and work on our commentary on this action together. Because the narrator of the poem in the Old English is very much a commentator on the action on the story that they're telling. And longstandingly, I would have used the pronoun he. I would have said the story that he is telling. But the more I worked on this the more I thought about it, the more I was like, not necessarily. Like we have no idea who was writing this story and who was speaking this story. We don't know where the story came from and how it grew. And the more that I looked at this and I was like, okay, if you shaved my identity off of this and nobody knew that I was the translator of this version in 2021 and a thousand years past, nobody would know who I was. They wouldn't know that I'm like 21st century grumpy feminist activist screamer in the world. They wouldn't know that they would potentially think I was a man or that I was maybe a soldier or maybe a former soldier. Like you could think anything about the identity with the numbers shaved off. So I founded sort of opening into this by thinking about the person writing this poem as a much wider category of gender identity and of any kind of identity of sexual identity of the whole racial identity, the whole thing. Because we just don't, we don't have any information about that. And that's like kind of a wonder to me and a delight to me. And it offered some space for me to kick in the door a little bit and go, okay, this can be a story that I'm going to translate. And it is a translation. It's like a line by line translation, but also recast and recast our angle on it so that we can see different things that we've always seen in this translation, hopefully. And some people are going to hate that. There are people who probably wouldn't like me if they met me on the street. But I hope that it also opens the door for a lot of different readers to go, oh, the history of story is actually pretty broad and full of all kinds of people and all kinds of storytellers telling stories about each other and about their imagined versions of the world, which is what this is, an imagined version of the world. And the nice thing is that people who wouldn't like you if they bumped into you in the street, we can simply disregard those people. The good thing is there are loads of other books. They can just read one of those. I don't think this gets emphasized enough. There are loads of other books. Read a different book if you like. You're welcome. I've got other tips for you. That's the main one. Can I remind you, everyone at home, that we will go to your questions in about seven or eight minutes. So if you have a question, please do send a tip unless it is boring or annoying, in which case just don't bother. Go and do something else. You're welcome. Let me help you out with that as well. I will obviously not be the person who decides whether or not it's boring and annoying. So don't worry. My tolerance is famously high. You're welcome for that too. We should, of course, talk a little bit about the poetic conventions, which are such an important part of this poem. The way the rhyming alliteration works in this poem, the Kennings, those beautiful built words, and how you've taken those concepts, phenomena, I suppose, I should say, and put them into your translation. One of the beautiful things about the Old English is that it's sort of untranslatable into contemporary English. You can translate it, you can translate it literally, but it gets really fat because you have to translate multiple meanings of phrases. But one of the things that's really cool is that there's an alliterative tradition in the Old English, which is really different from what I used here. I used alliteration in a way that it's not used in that language, because it can't be. It's not possible to, well, it's possible. It's possible, but it's not pretty. I guess it's not pretty. It doesn't feel good when you're reading it aloud. I mean, are you sure that's not what you'd prefer? Are you absolutely sure you wanted to go with, you know, fun to read as opposed to a legend? Are you certain? I was uncertain at one point during this translation. I was like, I'm totally going to do a translation using the Old English alliterative meter. And I did a little piece of it and went, no, I'm not. No, I'm not going to do a version that way. And even Tolkien's version, he did a chunk of the Beowulf that way and he didn't want it published and it's never been published, even though everything he's written has been published, this was not. And I assume it's because it just feels wrong. It doesn't work. So I used alliteration in a different way. I used alliteration to leap from line to line and keep us grounded in the story going forward. Like we were always feeling like we were connected to an alliterative syllable or to a rhyme that went back, sometimes several lines. I wanted to use a kind of rhythm that I somewhat invented just for this. I was not like I was using a classic metric structure. I wasn't. But it gives it a tremendous feeling of movement that we're constantly, as you say, we'll go back a couple of lines to find the antecedent of the rhyme we have in this line. And it gives us that sense of, it is very much like a battle that it has that to and fro pull to attention which it really works, I think. Yeah, I mean, I'm a child of the 80s. So I was listening to hip hop and like to also spoken word poetry in the 90s. And I was like, okay, those are ways to make an audience pay attention. And that's the reason those kinds of rhythm and meter cues are used. And so I used some more contemporary things for that reason because I wanted to, I don't think I've ever known a storyteller that wants the audience to go to bed. And the problem with Beowulf or the complexity of Beowulf, maybe I'll say, is that there are long lists of ancestral battles. There are long lists of the father of this guy who did this and that, this, and you hear it for a while. And some texts have even more than this one does. But this one has like chunks where you're just like, this is not very exciting and it's a recap of last night's story which is why I think it's definitely an oral transcription. It's the idea of, let's tell us about the Grendel and Beowulf battle again because we were drunk last night at the end of the night. We don't really remember it. So here audience, let me tell you what happened yesterday. But I wanted the language and the style of poetry to reflect the same thing, to be like, okay, let's grab a listening audience and let them make the rhyme themselves. Sometimes in classic stuff, Emily Wilson talks about words or phrases like wine, dark sea and how repetitive those things are. And we did an event together and she was talking about that phrase specifically. And we talked about how it's almost a moment for the audience to sing along, for the audience to say, I know what you're, we're all part of the same community. I know what you're going to say. I know how you're just going to describe this moment and to let them, to let them rhyme along like it's Sesame Street or like it's children's programming because really we're all, even though we're adults listening to Beowulf mostly, we were trained up on children's rhyming songs and on things that enabled us to store it in a sort of deeper part of our memory. I mean, we're all children when we hear a story, aren't we, at least a bit of us? I hope, unless we're dead inside, no thanks. Exactly, exactly. So I use stuff like that too. The sing song rhymes are from that tradition there. I used style from the last thousand years of English language storytelling, basically. I think I have time to ask you one more question before we have Gemma's final reading and then audience questions. You have really emphasized the women in this translation, not just Grendel's mother, but all of the women. And obviously you'd encountered them before writing The Mere Wife. I wondered if you might talk just very briefly about mod thrift because I like the moment where you want to tell us all what a piece of work she is. It's just so much fun. Yeah, she is one of, she's a sort of thrown in character who's not part of the main action. She is brought in as an example of a woman who was a lot, like a woman who, so my narrator says, remember her? Very bad. And this is a woman who is a princess and she doesn't like men looking at her. So if men look at her, she has them killed. And in some translations, this is because she's a monster. And indeed in some scholarly work, she's depicted along with Grendel's mother as a monster because she doesn't follow the rules of society, she does bad things. And I wanted to really investigate in this translation of why she might do that. Like what is wrong that makes her want to use the power she has to smash? And the narrator here is like, I mean, shouldn't we be allowed to look at women? Shouldn't we be allowed to ask them to smile, essentially? Shouldn't we be allowed to just critique their appearance and everything about them? Yes, we should, we should be allowed to do that. Why is only monsters would not let us do that? And that just seems so relevant to our contemporary society and the constant bullshit of it. The I should be allowed to do anything I want because I'm a man and you're a woman, so you have to just be nice to me. Yes, put up with it to your monster is really a perfect description of how that narrative always works and has done historically. Yeah, it's running through, it runs through everything and the sort of transition to monster hoods of women who are often victims of sexist crimes is really runs all the way through it. It's often like, oh, you were raped by a God, now you're a monster or you were grabbed by every man in your father's court, now you're a monster. And if you react or say, I can't stand it, I'm going to, I'm going to rain fire on you, monster. Yeah, different category of monster, happy to help. So the mother's character transitions into the dragon character in this translation. She, the sort of critical mass of female rage grows and grows and grows through the poem. And I feel that it's actually in the original. It's like women are burying their children. They are hiding from rapists. They're trying to maintain, they're trying to survive and can barely do it. And finally it ends in my version of female dragon who just goes and rains fire because I just think that's fair. Let that be a lesson, almost seems OTOs now. We'll have Gemma's last reading which will focus on one more woman from right near the end of the poem, if we could, Gemma. The geese began the pyre, howling over Beowulf, their best brother, hanging horde helmets about it, shields and steel shirts as he'd insisted. They placed him in the center of all this treasure, their lost love and built a bonfire worthy of men's ends. Storm smoke shuddered from the blaze thick and dark and the flames keened louder than any man's weeping. The whipping winds momentarily stilled until Beowulf's heart helm broke. His bones blackened as his boys bellowed their grief. Then another dirge rose, woven uninvited by a geetish woman, louder than the rest. She tore her hair and screamed her horror at the hell that was to come, more of the same, reaping, raping, feasts of blood, iron fortunes marching across her country, claiming her body. The sky sipped the smoke and smiled. Thank you, Gemma. Those were wonderful readings. Maria, I have questions for you from the audience watching us at home. The first is from Emma Creasy who says, it's a fantastic translation and she loved the read-through that was released during December. You could hear the mugs, she says, bouncing off the mead benches. Her question is, what old English words were the hardest to translate and do you have a favorite old English word or words from Beowulf? That's me just biting my lip and like running through the whole catapult. Wait, all the words were hard and my favorite is all the ones I eventually found a way to translate. Yes, that's basically what it is. There were things I thought would be easy that were so difficult. I was going through just trying and I didn't say, but I should say, maybe the way that I did this is that I'm not like a formally trained old English scholar of any kind. I went through this with a- That's so weird, because you dress exactly like one. That was just the oddest thing. Somebody offered to make me a sort of Tolkien suit and I was like, I would make the Tolkien suit. I would take them like glitter patches. So I had the pile of dictionaries and I was doing a literal translation of my own and I translated into this poetic version, which was the literal translation was hard because it was the possibilities, but the joy of it also is the same as the hardship. So it's the wide range of possibilities per word. And as far as like difficult and joyful, they were both like everything in it was difficult and joyful. I was working and questioning myself the whole time and I couldn't go too deeply into individual word scholarship, although I did some of that because I thought, oh no, I'll be lost forever. This will take 14 years to do it or I'll be like Tolkien and I'll never publish it. So I don't have any like deep favorites. I love all of the sort of prosaic words as much as I love the glorious ones. I love the kind of all of the words relating to the dragon doing, working on the dragon section was really fun because the dragon is depicted as both monstrous and respectable. The dragon is the poet, depicts the dragon as someone who is fairly rational, which I think is interesting in translation. The dragon's not usually depicted that way. The dragon's like bad monster and sometimes still it's grafted on to the end of the bale of story. So in this translation, I really used, I used analysis of the words and sort of interpretation of the words that are in the Old English to suggest that the dragon is part of the story. The dragon is actually the end of a logical and to the bale of story of a man who's like I will go in and conquer every monster all by myself without any armor. I'm the best, I'm the biggest. And I did a lot of like running through it. I did, that was a good king, that was good gold, that was good, that was bad. Occasionally that happens in the original and I use those original words to kind of like find common ground throughout the story. So the moments when I got to do that were my favorite moments, I guess. Sometimes I got to do things like, dude that was what they call a blood feud, which is one of my favorite things I've ever gotten to do. And it's like really simple and dorky, but I got to stick to it in a bale of translation. So, you know, I mean, any moment which there's like that kind of depiction of masculinity that I could just put my finger on and go, that is, we can find familiar ground there. And a feminine to me too of like the wealth of speech where she passive aggressively kind of comes at her husband Rosgar and says, I'm actually running this court, but you don't know it. I know you're so good. I know you're such a good husband. You're so, you always do the right thing, but let me tell you what the right thing is. Like there are just moments like that that I felt like they were there in the old English. There are the possibility for them was there in the old English. So I decided to like anywhere where there was a gap where I could find possibility. Those are my favorite parts. Oh, that's lovely. So actually in a way it's an absence, which is where you could flourish the most. That's wonderful. Teresa Pilgrim says, hi Maria. I love your feminist translation of correct, Teresa. I love your feminist translation of Beowulf and the celebratory perspective you take of Grendel's mother within it. Do you see Grendel's mother as a victim of gender-based or sexual and gender-based violence in the battle of her demise? I also loved your novel, The Mere Wife, where you characterize her as a vet suffering from PTSD. And this seems to reflect this view. So I'd love to hear more. Yes, I mean, I love the Grendel's mother character. I love that she has this, she lives in a kingdom that is a mystery to everyone in the poem and also to the poet that the poet is pretty interested in it. He or they depicted pretty extensively in this poem and depicted in the Lush language. Like it's depicted fully described. We get a real sense of the creepy slash wondrous characteristics of the place where she lives. And I feel like she's part of that. She's someone who lives in a wonderful, difficult place. She lives underwater. She's like, she has a carefully engineered roof over her head that makes her place waterproof. I love that. And also I love that she, if we're using the translation, formidable to describe her. And the idea that she like Beowulf is a soldier, that she's a warrior. In The Mere Wife, I depict her as a soldier, who has had some agonizing battle experiences. And I feel like that's pretty relevant to the entirety of everyone who's in Beowulf. Everyone there has fought and fought and fought to the death very frequently throughout the poem. We see people standing and they're the last survivor. They're burying all of their friends, often the gold of all their friends as well. And it's cursed by blood. This is a violent society. And it's not like we've changed. Like we are still a violent society. So this is, to me this was a place to attach our present experience to the past and to really look at the failure to progress that we've had and to think about the ways in which we could progress. So the Grendel's mother character to me feels like a doorway rather than a closed dead monster, which is how she is felt I think in some translations because she felt that way to the translator. She felt like someone who was a relic from an older time. To me, she feels like a consistent character that has run through all our stories as humans for thousands of years. There's always someone like this. And she's not that unusual, like one per story kind of. There's like one difficult, difficult problematic woman who does things that the other women don't do that she's not supposed to do. And often the other women are doing those things they are surviving in a different way. She's surviving in a violent way. And in a trained way, she's a trained soldier in my understanding of this poem and in the way that I decided to look at her character. So yeah, I think she's really modern. She's also really ancient. She's both. She's like in the work that Natalie has done there are female warriors who show up periodically and are really distinct characters. Like you see them and you're like, oh, this isn't like a random invention by the Beowulf poet that there's this female warrior here. This is just, this is a thing that has happened. This is human history. There are female warriors throughout human history of all different kinds. So yeah, so I feel like I may have gotten lost on your question slightly because I love Grindel's mother and I always really, I came to this because of her and I love her. I also, I love that she offers a window into everything. We have more questions that I'm not gonna be able to get to. So I'll go with what looks like it might be a relatively shorter one to perhaps have as our last one. Gwen has mailed to say, do you think that the work of a translator is less difficult than the work of a writer or more difficult? Relevant point, Gwen is a translator. So she's interested in, it's the hardest job Gwen and somebody should give you a bun and a gin for being so industrious in the face of constant translation. That's just from me, the chair. Maria, what do you reckon? I agree with Natalie. It's so hard. I mean, I've had the privileged position of having my work as a novelist be translated all the time. Like it's translated into lots of different languages and sometimes I've talked to the translators and they're like, what do you mean? What does that mean? What does the sentence mean at all? And I feel at the time when I've encountered those questions I've been like, oh, it's really obvious but then I realized that it's an American idiom or it's something that is just not translatable across borders in that way or across language borders. So this was the first experience I've had as a translator and I was jumping across a thousand year maybe 1300 year border to try to imagine what it would feel like to be writing this poem and to be trying to communicate this way. And it was harder. It was hard but also very satisfying. It was like doing a gigantic puzzle and like finding the right piece, finally periodically or not finding the right piece. And sometimes I was like smashing the whole puzzle down onto the ground and jumping up and down on top of it and saying, it will never happen, it won't work, I can't do it. So and as a novelist, I mean, I might add, of course I've done that too. Yeah, that never happens in this flat, don't worry. No one has called it screaming to the floor. Both things are hard but also both things are joyful and I think that the joy of communicating across cultures and across languages and across any border, the joy of jumping a wall is similar for both things and like writing novels and writing stories that are fiction. It's still the joy of jumping the wall between your own lived experience and an imagined experience of someone else. And I think it's the same with the translation. It's the joy of going, I get it. Here I am, I get it. That's the purpose of storytelling, to bring people things that they can understand that aren't their lives and make them understand what it would be like to be someone else. So yeah, that part is the same. And that's the joy and the pleasure of bringing something up from this period of time or from earlier or from right now, from across linguistics quarters and going, well, still here we are humans, all of us. And humans living in different cultures in different times, but like yearning for mostly the same things, like yearning for love and often for status, sometimes in questionable ways, but like often just trying to connect with each other and trying to understand how to be good. Lots of stories are about that, they all wolf this about how to be good and sometimes failing to be good, but that's what it's about. And so I think like finding the core concepts of human storytelling that's satisfying no matter which angle you come at it from. Maria, thank you so much both for your wonderful translation of Beowulf and for joining us here at the British Library tonight. Gemma, thank you for your incredible readings. British Library people being Rebecca and everybody. Thank you so much for organizing it. Thank you all of you for coming. I'm going to finish with one sentence from your introduction. Beowulf is not a quiet poem. It's a dazzling, furious, funny, vicious, desperate, hungry, beautiful, mutinous, maudlin, supernatural, rapturous, shout. Thank you so much. Good night.