‘that dark permanence of ancient forms’ It is the movement backwards to a grounding ‘scop’s|twang’that is central. And one
cannot help but draw attention to the play on the word ‘twang’ as both the dialectal,
rooted, non-standard, non-RP version of the language but also, more distantly and
perhaps provocatively, the Protestant Ulster nasal sound.^23 This fascination with
the asperities of a certain variety of English is one of the major thrusts of Heaney’s
work, and it is one that explains what might otherwise seem the marginal incident
or accident of his translation ofBeowulf—explains, perhaps, how a fascination
with the world and word ofBeowulfis at the genetic heart of his work, as is his
engagement with the poetry of Ted Hughes, or indeed the complex overlapping
of Christian and pagan that one finds in the Old English epic itself. As Heaney
himself suggests in his introduction, he is, in his translation ofBeowulf, ‘mooring’
himself in ‘that complex history of conquest and colony, absorption and resistance,
integrity and antagonism’—with perhaps a play on two meanings of ‘moor’.^24
One of the major characteristics of his translation is the deployment of ‘Hiberno-
English Scullion-speak’.^25 Heaney nationalizesBeowulfby constantly ‘Ulsterizing’
the language, an aesthetic strategy which is not systematic in his work, as Heaney is
far from being a dialect poet like, for example, that other great admirer of things
Anglo-Saxon, William Barnes. It is, nevertheless, such rooting in a familial and
regional past that one finds in such passages as
And now he won’t be long for this world.
He has done his worst but the wound will end him.
He is hasped and hooped and hirpling with pain,
limping and looped in it.^26But of course, however ‘English’ this might seem (to the point, almost, of pastiche),
it is important to recall that the English used in Ulster dialect is not the product or
the possession of the (Catholic) nationalist community. It is something Protestants
and Catholics share. Whatever one might think about the aesthetic successes or
failures of this strategy, its political import and paradox seem to be clear. This
language may be rooted in a particular place, but, at the same time, it generates a
much larger mythical community: the North, title of one of Heaney’s major texts
and a space which includes in its turbulent heartland not simply Catholic and
Protestant but a certain Ireland and a certain England.
It is thus not surprising that the reader should enterBeowulfthrough a dedication
to Ted Hughes, a dedication that places the translation in the shadow or the light of
a particular view of language (see Hughes’s ‘Thistles’) and dream of nation. These
are inheritances of nineteenth-century nationalism and its reading ofBeowulf,
(^23) See theOED’s definition: ‘The modification of vocal sound by its passage through the nose; nasal,
as formerly attributed to the Puritans, now esp. as characterizing the pronunciation of an individual,
a country or a locality.’ 24
25 Heaney, ‘Introduction’, inBeowulf(London: Faber, 1999), pp. xxii and xxx.
Ibid. p. xxvii.^26 Ibid. 31.