paul volsik
but they are readings which enable Heaney to negotiate the contemporary—the
Troublesin Northern Ireland. ForBeowulfpresents him with a world of violence,
but a violence that is contained by ritual, the formalities of war bands encountering
each other, the ‘big talk’^27 about which Longley is so reticent. The epic in this
sense becomes the noble face of violence—not only is the goal of the violence
acceptable, consensual, but the poem itself ritualizes its content by its formality and
symmetries, the manifestations of the courtesies that Heaney has always admired.
This does not mean that the sombre side of the epic world is forgotten—far from
it. It is the reality and the constant shadow of death and destruction that give
epic grandeur to the world in which Beowulf finds himself—a world haunted by
creatures of the night and darkness whose violence seems endless and manifests
itself both internally within the group and externally without.
But beyond this, and at a more explicitly ideological level, Beowulf maps
communities, includes and thus excludes, inscribes dreams of homogeneity, and
does so through language. The text is a translation in which Heaney has taken
a variety of Old English words (cynn: ‘kind, kin, species, family’;folc: ‘people,
crowd, army, nation’;leod: ‘people, soldiers, country’;maeg: ‘kinsman, kin’;theod:
‘nation, race’) and translated them non-systematically. This gives us a poem
where words like ‘race’, ‘nation’, ‘people’, ‘sept’, ‘clan’, ‘tribe’, and ‘kin’ form
overlapping ‘ totalities’ whose ‘phantasmal boundaries’^28 are necessarily uncertain
and whose notional content is extremely plastic. Such words encourage the late
twentieth-century reader to read from his or her own historical ground—just as the
events described (the process of translation covered many years of conflict) echo
contemporary events, generating powerful anachronisms. So, to return toBeowulf,
if one puts aside the word ‘race’,^29 the presence of which in Heaney’s work deserves
to be analysed in detail, one could look briefly at particular occurrences in the
introduction, in the translation, of two words: ‘sept’ and ‘nation’.
The word ‘sept’ occurs in Heaney’s translation ofBeowulf in the lines ‘Never
need you fear|for a single thane of your sept or nation’.^30 The word ‘sept’ is
traditionally used in English of Ireland—Heaney is here ‘Irishing’ his text. The
OEDdefines ‘sept’ as ‘a division of a nation or tribe; a clan, orig. in reference to
Ireland’—a definition which itself uses as apparent synonyms ‘nation’ and ‘tribe’.
It is perhaps not surprising that Heaney should do the same, albeit in a historical
and aesthetic context (the Troubles in Ulster) fraught with political turbulence,
where the word ‘nation’ is a semantic minefield. Similarly, at the end ofBeowulf,
in that part of the poem which describes the hero’s funeral pyre, Heaney writes
of the ‘keening’ of the Geat woman, who sees in the death of the great warrior
the beginning of disaster—such is the world of epic, a world where peace is an
accidental interlude and the death of the successful warrior a disaster. At the
(^27) Heaney,Beowulf, 31. (^28) Ibid. p. xv.
(^29) Ibid. 56 and 95. (^30) Ibid. 54.