Episode 208: Beowulf (with Maria Dahvana Headley)
/Bro! Gather round the mead hall, because we’re gonna tell the story of Beowulf, talk the nuance of translation, and gush over warrior queens with author Maria Dahvana Headley.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of murder, violence, toxic masculinity, misogyny/sexism, rape/sexual assault, and xenophobia.
Guest
Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling author of eight books, most recently BEOWULF: A NEW TRANSLATION (MCD x FSG). THE MERE WIFE (MCD x FSG), a contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, was named by the Washington Post as one of its Notable Works of Fiction in 2018. You can follow her on Twitter at @mariadahvana.
Housekeeping
- Recommendation: This week, Amanda recommends Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib (and listen to his interview on My 90s Playlist here). Check out our previous book recommendations, guests’ books, and more at spiritspodcast.com/books
- Merch: Check out our new digital merch, including the Cool Cryptid Compendium, at spiritspodcast.com/merch!
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- Skillshare is an online learning community where you can learn—and teach—just about anything. Explore your creativity at Skillshare.com/spirits and the first 1,000 people to use our link will get a free trial of Skillshare Premium Membership. This week Julia recommends “Plants at Home: Uplift Your Spirit & Your Space” by Christopher Griffin.
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Transcript
Amanda: Welcome to Spirits podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore. Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I'm Amanda.
Julia: And I'm Julia.
Amanda: And this is Episode 208: Beowulf with Maria Dahvana Headley.
Julia: Amanda, you need to redo the intro because you need to say your full title.
Amanda: Oh, Julia, don't embarrass me. First, I go on vacation for a week.
Julia: Hmm.
Amanda: And then I swing back and I'm like, “Oh, hello, I am 30 Under 30 Media Luminary, Amanda McLoughlin.
Julia: Yes, that's correct and we cans say it every time.
Amanda: I mean shout out to Morgan Jerkins. A shout out to Jarvis, our friend and sad boy. Shout out to Molly Ostertag. Several of my friends and people I admire – in Morgan's case, we're not friends, but I'd love to be – who are also on the Forbes List. It is fully meaningless, guys. I, I put money in my savings account for the first time in more than two years today. So, it doesn't – it doesn't equate to rich and fame and all that stuff. But it is – it is quite nice. And I, I hope that everybody is – I don't know – as amazed as I am that the word Multitude is in Forbes.
Julia: I'm just gonna put a shiny crown upon your head. It doesn't mean anything, but it looks nice.
Amanda: Thank you. Thank you so much. I, I got – I saw it on the internet about 10 minutes before I had to take a COVID test and now I'm here. So, it's been a whirlwind of a morning.
Julia: Yes, it really has. But let's talk about our new episode.
Amanda: That's right. I was – I'm also – this should be the highlight of the week because I saw screenshots on Twitter, as I'm sure many of you did, a few months ago about a Beowulf translation that uses the word bro, which is incredibly fun, and wonderful, and, actually, beautiful, and evocative, and tragic, and lovely, and smart. And, so, I shot my shot and emailed Maria's publicist and she got back to me. So, we got to talk with Maria all about her translation of Beowulf, about the work of translation in general, what the heck this text is because I didn't – I hadn't actually read it before. And, so, I was like, “Wait. Is this just about, like, peasants and stuff?” And she's just like, “No, it's like an ancient tale of kings.”
Julia: Mhmm.
Amanda: And it was wonderful.
Julia: Yes, I'm very, very excited. We had such a fun conversation with Maria. And I would have her on the show or have a drink with her any day.
Amanda: Absolutely. That's definitely the test we put to our guests. It’s like, “Would we have a drink and have you back?” And she passes with flying colors.
Julia: Just like our new patrons, Amanda, Skylar and Marie.
Amanda: Welcome, guys. You join the ranks of our supporting producer level patrons; Uhleeseeuh, Allison, Debra, Hannah, Jen, Jessica, Keegan, Kneazlekins, Landon, Liz, Megan Linger, Megan Moon, Phil Fresh, Polly, Riley, Sarah, and Skyla.
Julia: As well as our legend level patrons; Audra, Drew, Frances, Jack Marie, Ki, Lada, Mark, Morgan, Necrofancy, Renegade, and Bea Me Up Scotty.
Amanda: Thank you all for using your hard-earned human dollars to support us on Patreon. As the – you know, making money as an independent person in media is absolutely terrifying and challenging. And the only reason that we're able to be podcasters full time is because of your support on Patreon. So, we really, really appreciate it.
Julia: Or your hard-earned Cryptid dollars. I don't know who you are.
Amanda: True. That's true. That's true.
Julia: Amanda, what have you been reading, watching, listening to lately? I feel like I've been hogging the recommendations lately the past two weeks.
Amanda: Well, thank you for, for coming through for me. So, I could take a week offline, which was amazing. And, part of that week, I spent rereading a book by one of my favorite authors, Hanif Abdurraqib, who wrote a book called Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest.
Julia: Ooh.
Amanda: And the reason I reread this wonderful book, which is about Hanif’s personal relationship with the music of a tribe called Quest and its influence on culture, is because, in my 90s playlist, the show that Multitude produced in partnership with Sony Music, we did absolutely wonderful episode on tribe. And Hanif was our guest. I could listen to him talk for hours and hours and hours about this band. But, instead, you can listen to the audio book or read this book because it's fantastic. Everything he writes is an absolutely brilliant mix of poetry, analysis, memoir, and, like, personal relationships in the material and just – I don't know – a way of viewing subject matter in the world that I think will really, really stick with you. So, check out Hanif’s works on our list of all of our book recommendations at spiritspodcast.com/books.
Julia: And, speaking of my 90s playlist, hey, you know, Multitude makes a bunch of shows – a multitude of shows one would say?
Amanda: We do. Julia, remind us about some of the shows.
Julia: Ooh, let me see. What do I want to recommend? I have been absolutely loving Mike's new season of Meddling Adults. I'm very jealous that I keep getting Encyclopedia Brown when I could be getting Scooby Doo, which I feel like I would master.
Amanda: Yeah, you’d be very, very good.
Julia: But, if you like children's mysteries, and you like feeling smart about solving children's mysteries, or being stumped by children's mysteries, Meddling Adult is a great show. And they just finished up their second season.
Amanda: I've also been loving Exolore, which is the podcast by Moiya McTier, who you heard in are absolutely fantastic, I thought, Advice from Folklore Episode last week. And, if you want to hear Moiya every other week talking about fantastic new worlds, wonderful guests, reviewing worlds that are already out there, and many other kinds of fascinating intersections of science and storytelling, check out Exolore today.
Julia: Yes, I was on an episode. Not to plug my own stuff, but I had a great time. And I think, if you want an entry point that has a familiar voice besides Moiya, you can listen to that one.
Amanda: And, of course, if you just put the word Multitude into your podcast player, all of the shows we make will come up; Horse, Potterless, Next Stop, Waystation, Rep, Join the Party, and, yours truly, Spirits. So, please enjoy and thank you for, for doing your part. If you can't contribute to us financially, which we totally understand, a really, really good way to support Multitude is to recommend shows to your friends. So, recommending a, a show that you think your friends in particular would enjoy is a great way to go ahead and support us.
Julia: And, speaking of ways you can contribute to Spirits, you can contribute your urban legends. We're looking to do something really exciting for January. So, if you have written in a urban legend and you have a follow up for that, we would love to hear from you. Hopefully, before the first week of January.
Amanda: Yeah, if you could get back to us sometime in the next two or three weeks with an update what has happened since you wrote in, that could include if we haven't read your urban legend yet. You can write back and say, “Oh, hey, I wrote in about X, Y, and Z and this is an update because we want to circle back. We want to give you some updates. We want to do the thing I love, which is where a story that you heard has a new or definitive ending. And we're trying to bring you a whole bunch of those very satisfying stories. So, hit us up. Go to spiritspodcast.com/contact, where you can also leave us questions for Advice from Folklore and suggest episodes or movies for us to do. Everything you need, spiritspodcast.com/contact.
Julia: Send us stories.
Amanda: Well, we hope you enjoy this ancient story of Beowulf. So, without further ado, enjoy Spirits Podcast Episode 208: Beowulf with Maria Dahvana Headley.
Intro Music
Amanda: We are so delighted to welcome our, our bro – I feel like we're gonna be bros at the end of this conversation – Maria Dahvana Headley, who wrote an absolutely fantastic translation of Beowulf that just came out. She's also the number one New York Times bestselling author of novels like the Mere Wife, Magonia, Airie, Queen of Kings, and the Memoir of the Year of Yes. Welcome, Maria, to the show.
Maria: Thank you. Thank you for having me on.
Julia: It is our pleasure. I'm very excited. As someone who, like, studied a lot of mythology and a lot of history and stuff, I will admit, Beowulf is not my specialty. So, I'm really excited that we brought on an expert to talk about it.
Maria: I love that. I think Beowulf – I also had studied a lot of mythology and folklore. And Beowulf kind of goes off to the side of much of what I personally had studied and much of what is sort of in that – in that category for a lot of people. So, it's been really fun to try something totally different and new and in a different language.
Amanda: Great. And can you – for, for the many of us who never read Beowulf, can you explain what the story is and what the poem is?
Maria: Yes. Beowulf is a story about a court – sort of fancy court that's attacked by a monster. A big hall is built. A monster lives nearby. He's already there. He's like, “I can't stand it. You're so loud.” And he goes out the hall and starts killing people every night. For 12 years, he kills people every night and this is King Hrothgar’s hall. And news spreads all around the world. And this young warrior named Beowulf hears about it and comes to be their monster killer. Lots of people tried. And Beowulf comes and kills their monster and gets lots of gold. Then everybody thinks he's awesome. And then, in the night, after the big celebration of him killing Grendel, the monster, Grendel's mother shows up as a bad surprise. Nobody realizes that Grendel's mother is hardcore. And, so, she comes and takes one of – a sort of revenge. One guy, kills him. And then the next day Beowulf goes and comes after her. He goes into her own hall and he wins, ultimately. And then goes forth and 50 years past – we have a 50-year time jump. And we have an old man, Beowulf, who goes to fight a big dragon that's been battling against his, his country, which is – he's a Geats. So, he's, he’s Swedish. His situation is old man king wants to fly by himself. He goes and fights the dragon. And the dragon kills him and he kills the dragon at the same time. And that's the end of the story. That's what Beowulf is about. It's an Old English poem. It's about 1,000 plus years old in terms of when it was written down. It exists probably before it was written down. It was written between, like – in, in about the early 10th century, but it was – I'm sorry – 11th century. And it probably exists in a sort of considered way, maybe from an oral tradition, up to, like, three centuries before that.
Amanda: Amazing. So, people would experience this as a thing that was recited to them over the course of multiple nights?
Maria: Well, I think that's what the poem lends itself to. It's – it's 3,182 lines. It's a big chunk of time. It's like a – you know, a four-hour-ish reading and maybe longer if you're talking about drunk reading. We don't really know. We don't know – there's one manuscript of the poem. It just exists in one copy. And we don't know what its history really is. So, there is lots of debate about whether it's an oral, a poem that came from a full-on oral tradition and it was around the campfire and around the mead hall or whether it was just invented by monks in a scriptorium, which I think is unlikely. But that – I have to say that that thought does exist for a lot of people. They, they like this sort of distinguished nature of that thought. And I like the dirty nature of the mead hall version myself. And that's what this translation that I've done is, is kind of based on an idea like that.
Julia: Listen, I know Grendel is supposed to be the bad guy. But, as a person who has lived near bars before, I understand. I get it.
Maria: Right. It's like living upstairs from a bar that's just loud and everybody's singing inside of it all the time. Like, it's bad. It's bad news. You want it done.
Julia: Not a good time. Not a good time for anyone.
Amanda: I thought I had this thing in my head conflating Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales in some way.
Julia: Hmm.
Amanda: And they are as different as two things could be. It's --
Maria: They’re really different.
Amanda: Yeah. And you write too, in your introduction, which I love in an introduction to a book. And I feel like yours was particularly great in helping me understand, like, where Beowulf translations have come from and, like, where yours is situated in currently. So, can you tell us a little bit about the language of the poem and sort of how different folks have approached it in translation and how you've translated this version?
Maria: The, the original language is Old English, which is really different from contemporary English. It's not something that most of us can just – well, none of us can really just sit down and read it. It's not like that. It's a language in which words even that look like some of our contemporary words don't mean the same thing. So, it's – but you can kind of get a feeling for it if you – if you look at the Old English. But it tends to be a language in which a lot of the words have, like, a dozen possible meanings. So, when you're translating, you kind of – or, if you're me, you open up a dictionary, and then another dictionary, and then another dictionary because the nature of the process of this poem being translated into English over the past 200-ish years since about 1820 is a very patriarchal tradition of translation.
Julia: Mhmm. Mhmm.
Maria: And there's a lot of, I think, narrow perspective when we're talking about what these dictionaries represent as far as what a word might mean. Frequently, only a small series of possibilities have been offered. So, there's lots of scholarship about a lot of this. There are also newer Old English dictionaries. And I read them all at the same time. I, I’m not a – I'm not a scholar. I'm a novelist. So, I came from doing an adaptation of Beowulf, which is called The Mere Wife, which I started working on -ish, like, 2014, 2015. And it's a modernized contemporary Beowulf. And I thought, “Okay. I will just go wild. I did as many wild things as I could with, with this content of the original poem and the content of what people have thought about the poem over the past 200 years. But, when I was doing the translation, I was really thinking hard about what the history of translation of this poem has been. The, the 200, 300 other translations, I read a ton of them because I was curious about the impact the poem has had on our culture today. So, this is a translation that is as much about reception as it is about what it really says. There's, like, a literal way of translating Beowulf. And people have done that. There are plenty of literal translations. There's also, like, a way where you try to mimic the Anglo-Saxon meter, and alliteration, and rhyme --
Julia: Mhmm.
Maria: -- and do it “accurately.” And that is often messy because it doesn't really work in contemporary English. I did a version that is a – very full of alliteration, full of rhyme. I wanted it to feel like a text that you could shout out right now over a loud bar full of people, but it has Archaic words in it. It also has contemporary slang in it. It has slang from the past 600 years of using English, which is a lot of our language is slang. And I think people don't necessarily realize how much of our language – this language is slang because it just has gotten absorbed into the grabby, grabby English language. Yeah, that, that was – that was a wild, large compendium statement about --
Amanda: Yeah.
Maria: -- how I did this. But I did it in a very messy, crazy way basically. I just was surrounded by piles of books for two years, and, and gobbling information from all of them, and then sort of translating it through myself, who, you know – I mean through the person that I am and what I'm interested in. And I'm interested in the female characters. I'm interested in equality. I'm interested in ways of discussing masculinity, which is part of why I was interested in doing this to begin with.
Julia: Well, you came to the right podcast to talk about that kind of stuff.
Amanda: Absolutely. Yeah. And I, I think a lot of our, our audience probably heard about your book through a wonderful screenshot of a passage including the word bro on Twitter. So, can you tell us a little bit about – I don't know how to pronounce the, the Old English word, but the, the word that various people have, have said like Hark, so, and you thought that, bro. And I agree it’s a fantastic way to translate that. I like that.
Maria: So, the first word of Beowulf is a word that is – that is called Hwæt. And it's – it’s sort of pronounced like cat and what combine to each – with each other. It is a word that nobody really knows what it actually means. It's – it's – the only place that occurs is at the beginning of Beowulf.
Amanda: Whoa.
Maria: And it – yes. So, it's been translated in many different ways. It's been translated as hark or as lo or as so by Seamus Heaney, very famously. And I decided to translate it as bro. It's the kind of word that you use to say, “Shut up. I'm talking. I'm going to tell you a story.” And I feel like, for the past 20 or so years of the English language in America, specifically, bro is a word that you might use for that. Although, I struggled a lot with wanting it to be bros because he's clearly talking to a crowd But bros isn't the right – isn't a word that we use. So, I said, “Okay. Fine. Fine. Bro, singular.” But bro, singular, pains me because I'm like, “The big collective noun for a group of bros doesn't really exist and should exist. And I don't know what it is – what it should be.” But you're welcome to, to consider that possibility. That's what I wanted.
Julia: I think, if you're trying to get the attention of several bros at once, just saying bro will make all of them turn their heads. So, I feel like you're in a good place there.
Maria: I agree. I mean it's definitely a word that implies familiarity. And it also implies a fraternal relationship. It implies a lot of things. It's – it's interesting working on it because people – so many people don't love that I did this, right? This is a – this is a choice that is transgressive. But it's a choice that a lot of people who've studied Old English are like, “Well, that's about right. That's what it means. It means – you know, it's – it's slamming your beer down on the bar and saying I'm, I’m about to tell you something major.” But it's – it's been discussed quite a bit because people feel like it's not dignified enough. And that's an interesting artifact of some of the previous translations, which had in them kind of tone of, “In the days of kings, we didn't like this. And it was so dignified and noble.” And that reflects much more on the lots of very famous previous translators than it does on what's actually in the poem itself. It isn't necessarily about glorious noble masculinity. It's a – it's – a lot of it is about dirty masculinity.
Julia: Yeah, exactly. And, like, also, who says it has to be noble and, like, uptight and stuff like that? Like, this does feel like – the story of Beowulf does feel like a story that you would tell, like, around with your friends while getting drunk. I, I'm, in my mind, picturing, like, a bunch of bros at a Boston bar talking about the shit Tom Brady got into over the past couple of months during the offseason.
Maria: Yeah, exactly. That's – that's absolutely what I intended it to be. I wanted it to feel like this is a guy who is famous and we don't quite know him, but we feel like he's our guy, Beowulf. And I was looking for something that would give us that tone so that you could speak – the narrator could speak with affection of this hero. But the hero is one of us. He's one of our boys, you know. And, and I think we have a way in Western culture of talking about men that way frequently; our boys, our guys. Like, as, as familial, when, in fact, they are not. I mean women don't get talked about this way. We don't get talked about as, like, embraced is one of the family no matter how badly we fuck up. That's not something that, that there's, like, language for in the language of femininity and English. So, it's – it's an interesting thing the way that Beowulf is forgiven his trespasses and forgiven and forgiven. And I think a familiar thing to contemporary, contemporary Americans and English speakers around the world. And maybe not just English speakers. Maybe everyone. There's definitely forgiveness for masculine fail across the board in the world.
Julia: Yeah.
Maria: And you hear a lot of stories about it. But I don't think we always point at the fact that something is being forgiven. We just point at it as, “He did something heroic. That's much more important than the, the, you know, blast radius of the heroic act.”
Amanda: Yeah.
Julia: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now, I’m thinking about the – like, the parasocial relationship between, like, myth tellers and the focus of their myths. And I got to, like, think about that more, but that’s just a thought that’s in my head now.
Amanda: Yeah. And I, I think a lot of the project – obviously, I'm not a actual historian. But I feel like so much of the project of looking for marginalized histories, whether that's women, of queer people is, is a negative space. And seeing what's not written, what's not said, what was going on that nobody – like, the who – like, who, you know, made Shakespeare's meals, you know. Like, there's --
Maria: Yeah.
Amanda: There's a lot of context around these works that we are not told to look for or that people often mention.
Maria: Yeah, the – my whole career has been about investigating the gaps in the history because I have always been really interested in the gaps because I fall into the gaps. And I'm like, okay, where – but, since I was a little kid, I was like, “Where, where's the story of somebody like me? Oh, there isn't a story of somebody like me. Okay.” But it must be there. Like, this isn't just lone dude. Like, I – my world isn't lone dude. So, it's – it's been an interesting thing to look at who the stories were written about and look at the people. In, in the case of Beowulf, there are lots of female characters. They're all over it. But the women, especially in translation, have often been kind of made more normal than they actually are. They're made more acceptable, more like what you would think a wife of a king would be like when, in fact, there's often in the gaps and in, in the lens itself. In the subtext of the lines, there's a lot of, like, power underneath happening, which is something that I've always found really interesting in terms of the epics. And we – if we’re talking about the Odyssey, it's there. If we're talking about the Iliad, it's there.
Julia: Mhmm.
Maria: It's all over. Like, there, there are female characters with their own ambitions throughout all of these projects. And, in some cases, you get to see some really interesting activity from those characters. And, in, in Beowulf, you do. You see a female warrior who actually fights. But, in lots of them, you don't. You don't see the battles. You don't see somebody coming in. I mean it's very interesting to have an intellectual life. But I think intellectual life is hard to depict in epic poetry and in literature – in everything.
Amanda: Yeah.
Maria: It's hard to explain somebody who's been sitting around thinking even though lots of the work of women changing the world has historically been women sitting around thinking.
Julia: Yep.
Maria: Yeah. And changing things radically as a result of it. But I think it's hard to depict, especially if you are a narrator and/or a creator who isn't even aware that that's happening, which is a lot of the history of literature.
Amanda: [Inaudible 21:27].
Maria: And the present. We're still there.
Amanda: Yes, absolutely. And I remember too in, you know, like, English literature classes learning about how when the novels came about as a phenomenon, men in power. We’re like, “Ah, don't read these. They’re gonna give you ideas,” because, for arguably, the first time somebody sitting around thinking was captured and, like, interiority was, was featured.
Maria: Yes. Yeah.
Midroll Music
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Amanda: Aww.
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Amanda: It's a great recommendation, Julian, and I would love this class. I really love Christopher's sort of focus on plant care as self care and something that isn't stressful or, you know, self judgmental. But, instead, a way to, like, connect with, you know, your environment and to make your home really homey. So, it's a great recommendation and some is recommendation of Skillshare. I think it's a great kind of mix of a practical gift, but a gift that's also a gift and not like a new toilet brush or whatever --
Julia: Mhmm.
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Julia: An experience gift, which I think are, a lot of times, way better than a physical gift.
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Amanda: Thanks, Skillshare. Speaking of Plant Queen, one of the things that they talked about that I love the most is the fact that, like, not every plant is good for every house or every person. And there is something that, you know, will work for you particularly in your particular space. And that is totally true of personal care products as well. And today's second sponsor, Function of Beauty, is absolutely a great way to get customized hair care that is just for you. They have a quick but thorough quiz, where you tell them about your hair goals, your hair type, if you, you know, are looking for support or a kind of product in one way or another. And you can even choose the color of the bottle and the product and a fragrance as well as the strength of fragrance, which we all know that I'm a huge fan of.
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Amanda: And, now, let's get back to the show. Can you tell us about some of these amazing women of the book, Beowulf? I hate that it's the guy's name, the, the epic of Beowulf. Can you tell us something about these awesome women?
Maria: I can. And, interestingly, Beowulf isn't even titled Beowulf. In the original manuscript, it doesn't have a title. It – you would not know – I mean somebody, at some point along the way, was like, “I mean, Beowulf, there's a lot of Beowulf in here. I guess we're gonna call it Beowulf.” But you could easily call it Hrothgar or you could call it Problems with a Dragon. Or, you know, there's – there's plenty of room for different titles. It’s – it was just a sort of decision of scholars and, and dudes. It was a decision of dudes. So, Beowulf is called that for that reason. And I had to call it that because then, otherwise, no one would have known what I was talking about although there are novels called Mere Wife.
Amanda: For searchability.
Maria: That's why. So, the women of Beowulf are pretty amazing group. They are Grendel's mother, who is a warrior queen. In my translation, she – that's what I translate her as. Lots of previous translators translated her as a monster hag. That's something I've talked about quite a lot surrounding this. And it's one of the reasons I decided to do a translation, although not all translators translate her that way. And there's tons of scholarship from people going, “No, she's really more like a Valkyrie or she's like – she's – she's not – there are no words that signify that she's a monster.” But it's also very tempting to have her be a monster, especially because her son is. Her son is described monstrously. But her – the father of her son is not even mentioned. So, I mean he's mentioned as, “Who is his father? Nah, we don't know.” So, yeah. So, is she a monster? I think she's not. I think she's a female warrior who has been the queen of her own kingdom, which looks different from Hrothgar’s for as long as Hrothgar has been King, which is 50 years. So, she's an older woman who's a fighter. And she has a big armory of stuff. She's got swords. She has all kinds of gold. She's got all kinds of stuff, which, presumably, because there's no mention of her stealing it from anyone and there is elsewhere in the text if something like that is revealed, it's hers. She won it or inherited it, but it's, like, it belongs to her. She's not a thief.
Amanda: Wow.
Maria: So, she's a really interesting character. She has Grendel, who's her son who is super sensitive. She – sensitive and has bad judgment.
Amanda: Very relatable.
Maria: She's a single mother with a difficult child. And, so, we have her. We have Wealhtheow, who is Hrothgar’s wife. And she is, like, the peace weaver – the main mentioned peace weaver within the text of the poem. She does a lot of – she, she actually speaks. She's – I think she's the only woman that speaks in the poem because Grendel's mother doesn't speak and doesn't have a name, but Wealhtheow does. She gives a speech. She gives a speech about – to Beowulf saying, “Welcome. Come here. Yeah, we're gonna give you some gold. Here's your stuff. Rewards. Rewards. Don't cross me, I will have you killed.” And that's all in the subtext, but I think it's right there. She's like, “Everyone in this hall is loyal to me. Don't do me wrong. If you do me wrong, there will be problems for you. If you do me right, you'll get a lot of gold. Keep on with it. Do me right.” So, there's that. There is Modthryth, who's a woman who's frequently cut from Beowulf. She is a woman who's really angry. She is a daughter of a king. She has men executed if they look at her. You would imagine there's a reason for that, right? Like, I, I think that the reason is not given. She's just crazy. But, you know, living as a woman this long, 43 years, I'm like, “No, she probably had a reason.” Like, it's not – it's not just a chill thing to have a bunch of dudes killed. And she suddenly gets better when she leaves home. I wonder why. What was wrong? So, she gets better. She gets married. All is well now. It's mysterious. She's, like, so nice now. We have her. And she's, sometimes, described as a creature in the scholarship. Her – Grendel's mother and Modthryth are sometimes together, the two monsters – the female monsters even though she's clearly human.
Amanda: Yeah, they're just like – they're – they're women who lived old enough to have done things other than be someone's, like, daughter or wife. And it's – it's so – oh, my gosh, I can't get over. I can't get over the, like, monster hag designation.
Maria: Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean – and this states – I mean Seamus Heaney did it. He, he called her monster hag exuberantly and hell bride. Like, he, he added some extra of his own because he was, like, into the idea, you know. And the idea is interesting. Female monster is interesting. But we, certainly – I mean, as women, we also know a lot about being a female monster. And I think most of us do. So, I was originally interested in Grendel's mother because she was a monster. I thought, “Oh, she's powerful.” But, now, I think it's more interesting to not be a monster and to be battling against that designation within your culture.
Julia: But it's also the women always fall into, like, one of two categories when they are a monster. It's either the succubus or the crone. And you always keep running into those same dynamics every time and it just gets boring after a while to be quite honest.
Maria: Yeah, it's boring. And Emily Wilson talks about the designation of Calypso and Circe as, as witches when the word that represents them is actually goddess --
Julia: Mhmm.
Maria: -- you know. And just translation. Like, people were like, “You know what makes a lot more sense to me? It’s that this is a very bad person.” But goddesses are often really precarious in their impulse across the board in literature as our gods. As we well know, the gods just spend all their time raping.
Julia: Yeah, they do.
Maria: They really do. And, you know, I mean, I think, the goddesses don't do as much of the raping, but they do do some things that are that are wildcard things. And it's interesting that, in the past few hundred years, we just decided that, if a woman does something that's a wild card thing that defies the structure of patriarchy and hierarchy, she instantly be – she grows scales, or she becomes possessed by the devil, or you know – and we have lots of different ways to describe transgression. And most of them are – frequently, they're supernatural even, even different kinds of hell bitch kind of things. But they're like – often the transgression is just for survival.
Julia: Mhmm.
Mara: And, so, frequently, monsters come out of women who are like, “I'm just trying to, like, have an herb garden and raise some food for myself and deliver some babies. Like, fuck off, leave me alone. I'm not a monster.” But then, you know, sometimes, you have more power if you say, “Yeah, I’m a monster. You better stay back.”
Julia: Yeah. Sometimes, it's better to embrace that.
Maria: Yeah.
Julia: But, like, I, I hate that the idea that, if a goddess is, like, something other than, like, you know, the pure Hestia version of the Greek gods, all of a sudden, they are a monster. Like, god forbid, these gods – haha. God forbid these gods actually have, like, emotions and be like humans and we consider them still gods. You know, the, the men can do that. But the goddesses can’t and it's beyond frustrating studying mythology.
Maria: It's so frustrating. And you can see the ways that, that, like, sort of wide-scale consumption of the Bible in translation created a situation where we were like, “Well, there's only one guy who's really unpredictable and he's in charge. And he's really very forgiving and very kind,” but has a lot to say about transgression. Like, he's a massive transgressor.
Julia: Yeah.
Maria: Like, Book of Job is just all transgression. But I think a lot of the feminine stuff in the Bible got redacted, redacted, and redacted until it became, like, nice girl or, or whore. And you ended up with just like these, these leavings that probably were not and we know they're not – they're not all that was there. So, we ended up with just a, a thing that reflects our society, our trouble [Inaudible 35:05] in equal society that we continue to mythologize and to justify with our – with our folklore as we continue forward as humans.
Amanda: Yeah. And that kind of, like, bravado is definitely something that I see as, like, excusing male behavior where you're like, “Oh, that king, he was so centric. Oh, he was so fun. Oh, he had such weird hobbies. Oh, he, like, you know, was so unpredictable.” And then a woman, like, you know, renovates the herb garden to be more productive and is, like, wasteful. And I’m talking about Michelle Obama.
Maria: Yeah.
Amanda: That's the discourse. Yeah, that was – it was a whole thing.
Maria: Yeah.
Julia: So, I know Grendel isn't really, really particularly described other than being, like, large and strong and whatnot. Is there like a sort of mythological equivalent to, at least, how you picture him or how other interpretations of Grendel have pictured him? I'm very curious about, like, the logistics of it.
Maria: Well, it's interesting. I think that, in terms of how he's described, he's described – yeah, he's described as big. He can, like, kill 30 at one blow kind of, as can Beowulf by the way. So, like, that's an interesting parallel between them and it's mentioned 30. Okay. Well, are you human, Beowulf? No. If Grendel's not, you're not. But, like, I think that the mythological parallels are basically giants. Like, he's a – and that kind of character shows up throughout a lot of different – in a lot of different places. Like, you see that in Irish mythology from around the same time. You see, like, the sort of Finn McCool stuff. There's a – there’s a giant that is – that likes to sing. He puts everybody to bed by singing. So, it's kind of the opposite. It's like the reverse turned inside out Grendel, who's like, “Stop singing!” And this one is singing and then kills everybody while they're sleeping just as Grendel does, which is really similar. Yeah, that's – that's what I would, would imagine. In my – in – when I was thinking about it, as I was working in Mere Wife, especially, I thought of Grendel as he's tall. Like – and what I was thinking about with Mere Wife was the notion of bothering your neighbors, the notion of, like, putting up a wall between your hall, your suburb, and the rest of the scary world in there. Everybody out there is bad, but you guys are good inside. And I thought a lot about American race politics in regard to Grendel and his mother in terms of that book. But, in terms of the poem itself translating it, I mean that stuff is all – it's there. It's there. The notion of, like, you are others. You're not from the same culture we're from. We – that means you're monsters and very dangerous. And we’ll kill you. But, also, we’ll kill you in order to arrive at peak masculinity, which is, “Hey, we're still there. We have not changed.” We are like, killing – killing the other in order to arrive at peak masculinity is exactly what we're dealing with in America right now. And we're dealing with, like, a long standing tradition of peak masculinity training that arrives at killing the “monster” and becoming a hero. So, so, yeah, that's – I don't remember what the question was. I was just thinking about my rage.
Julia: These descriptions of Grendel and if there were any mythological comparisons, but giant is great.
Maria: Yeah, that's what it is. And descendant of Cain.
Julia: That was gonna be my next question.
Maria: Yes, you get – you get all of the sort of biblical stuff, which possibly is grafted in by the scribes later --
Julia: Mhmm.
Maria: -- after – like, after it's been written, there's a whole bunch of sort of Christian panic that’s, like, stuck into the poem that's, like, actually – because they're – they’re not talking about a Christian society. The poem is about a pagan society. So, there's, like, a lot of – and, you know, it's Cain. It’s Cain. Don't even think about it anymore. It's Cain.
Julia: Don't worry about it.
Amanda: Well, it worked.
Maria: But it has a little bit of --
Amanda: We’re monks.
Maria: -- everyone who descended from Cain has problems because God doesn't love them. God has banished, banished that line. And it's monsters. It's elves. It's gnomes. It's, like, a whole pile of problems over here. And Grendel has descended from that. That's what the assessment was.
Julia: We have a saying here on the show, “Lol, it's not pagan. It's fine,” is the full slogan of Christianity.
Maria: Yes.
Amanda: Bunch of monks are at work.
Maria: Yes.
Amanda: They're like, “Ahh, I really want to – if we're going to spend five years writing something down, I feel like this is a fun one. But, you know, the bosses are gonna want us to put some moral lessons in there.
Maria: Yeah, there's – there's, like, a panicky God stamp that shows up periodically in the margins and with scribbles. Like – and it's – yeah, it's monks.
Julia: It’s always monks.
Amanda: I feel like we also forget that people in history had entertainment and, and, like, told each other's stories for fun. And I guess, looking back, it's sort of easy to assume that, like these, you know, epic tales are, like, historical records. Like, we looked at them for the purpose of learning about the past. But, at the time, like, this story is just, like, for fun and it is, I'm sure, saying a lot about people's morals and society and kind of all of that in the way that every story any person tells does. But I, I just love that there is, like – there is a hero. There is a villain. There are time jumps. Like, there is so much in this that makes it a really dynamic story that someone chose to tell and not just kind of, like, a manuscript we look at for some learning about the evolution of the English language.
Maria: Yes, I, I mean that's what's – when I first encountered Beowulf, I was in high school like most of us were or in early college. And – but, in America, it's taught often in high school. So, like, 10th grade, 11th grade. And I remember thinking, “Wooh Oh, it's going to be exciting. It has a dragon in it and it has a female warrior.” And we read a midcentury translation, which wasn't Raffel. It was something – possibly, Chickering. I'm not sure what it was, but it was dry. It was very dry. I wanted always, as a reader, to recapture the sense of vigor that happens in – like, why would you tell a boring story? Nobody wants to tell a story. And no one in the history of humans has ever wanted to tell a boring story. So, I was like, “Okay. Like, why would we be adding some baggage of boringness on to the words that are being used here in order to make them seem dignified? Like, why would – why would anyone do that?” No writer would do that. Like, that's not – that's not juicy. And, certainly, no, like, standup comic would do it, which is kind of the equivalent. Like, an oral storyteller in the medieval period is like – wants the audience to be there with him, like – or her. It would be nice if that was the case, probably less so. But, like, we dream. But, like, you, you want the laughs to land. You want the jokes to hit. You want the choral phrasing to be repeated by the people who are listening to you. So, I did a lot of work on this translation to make it juicy like that because I wanted – I mean not to, like, add events or do anything like that. But I wanted to add language or use language, not really add. Like, translate language using the choices I had to make it feel like something that you would – you want to turn the page because I think it's an – it's an old world page turner. You know, like, it's – it's like a juicy pulpy situation where there's – there are supernatural creatures and lots of armor. And periodically, like, you get an advertisement for the armor for a while. And, like, then somebody's like, “Here's genealogy.com. Let me, like, show you my, my chart here. Here's my family tree.” Like, to me, that feels appropriately – like, what I just said is a joke, obviously, but that's – that's really what the text is like. It's like – it's full of all the things that it's always been full of, that storytelling has always been full of. And then, now, we watch it on TV or whatever. But it's the same kind of mode, where you want people to keep tuning in. And, and, also, in the text, there are recaps. There's like, “Last night, Grendel showed up and he did some horrible shit.” And, and, like, it's literally right there in the text. It's a long repetition of the battle that we just watched. So, I think that's – you know, it's Tonight on Twin Peaks essentially. Like, it’s the – you know.
Amanda: I, I remember talking about the – about, like, ancient Greek texts as well, where individual characters will have, like, that descriptor that is always set in front of them. You know, like, proud Odysseus and something like that.
Maria: Mhmm.
Amanda: And a thing that I loved in, in your translation too are those kind of compound words of, you know, the sky-candle or the, the whale-road.
Maria: Mhmm.
Amanda: Can you tell us a little bit about what those are and kind of how you thought about which ones to reproduce and which ones to kind of simplify into one word if that happened in your translation?
Maria: Yeah, they’re – those are Kennings. So, those are, like – yeah, the compound words that are used to just give a poetic spin on something that we already understand. Like, the ocean is the whale-road. The sky-candle is the sun. And they're all over Beowulf. They're also all over all, all kinds of English – Old English poetry. I love them. They're – they're great. But, often, they're pretty repetitive. Like, you'll get – you'll get the same word over and over again. And, so, I made it less repetitive. I think other people who've done classical translation from ancient Greek, et cetera say the same thing. They're like six times a page. There's, like, a wine-dark sea. Okay. We don't necessarily need it six times on this page. And it's the same with old English. It's like we don't need that same Kennings for whale-road. We don't. But the beautiful idea of the natural world entwined with the human world is all through Old English poetry. And I wanted to keep that. I wanted to – I wanted to make us feel the wilderness around us the way that it is felt in the poem. But I made up a whole bunch of new Kennings. I like – I stuffed new things in all throughout. So – that weren't Kennings originally or that a little literal translation. There'd be, like, three different translations in a row. Somebody attempting to, like, give you the full spectrum. And, sometimes, I kept three different things in a row and left them like that, like, as a literal translation would rather than a poetic translation. I did a – I did a mixed bag of things here. I, I just – I didn't have any, like, overriding one must in my soul about this. And I think a lot of people have had it one must. And they also gave themselves a structure that they couldn't diverge from. And I didn't do that. I was like, “If it sounds like I want to do it in this kind of meter, that's what I'm going to do. And if it sounds like I want to have extra descriptive passage that's part of the line and a literal translation, I'm going to do it” because I – my goal was just to make it feel – make it clear. Make the story clear. Make us understand what's going on, which I think probably the original audience would have understood. They're not like lost. But, but contemporary audiences listening to Beowulf or reading Beowulf often are really lost. Even if you're translating it, often, you're like, ‘What is happening in this battle? Like, I can't even – I can't understand,” because you're lost in a kind of lost zone of poetic language that's describing things that would potentially have been known to the original readers/listeners of – to the poem. They would have remembered – the history would be known to them. But we don't have it known to us now. So, we have to, like, gently try to make it clear. And I don't have opposition to that. Like, I – some, some translators have been like – it has to feel so weird. The only way we can understand it is if – is if it feels archaic, like, crazy. We need to understand how different the society is to our society. And I don't feel that our society is that different from the Old English society. I'm like, “Well, you, guys, maybe were living at the top end of the society as generally, ivory tower translators who are male in the early part of the 20th century. I don't live there. I'm not from there.” The world actually looks very much like the old English world that is depicted in this poem. We haven't made – we've made a lot of progress in terms of inclusion but not as much as you would think we would have made over 1,000 years of, of being pretty aware. Like, that there were problems. We've just consistently rolled the problems away and put them, you know, under the building. So, yeah, I wanted to really point out how – the stuff that was similar, whether they were stuff that was different. I didn't think that alienation was actually my – the most desired goal of publishing a new translation of this poem. But some – but that's not – that's – some people really do think alienation is the goal of publishing a translation of this poem. And, you know, that's fine. They – those can be read next to this one that I just did. And you can put Tolkien there, and you can put Heaney there, and whatever new translation is potentially going to come out. Like, it's interesting. I think it's all interesting to read it together. But I think that, if you want somebody who's 14 to want to read it and I do, I want the canon to be about self-analysis. I mean that's kind of the goal. And I think this poem is about self-analysis. It's like, “Uh-oh, I got masculinity wrong.” It happens over and over again in the poem. Like, old kings are like, “Let me remind you of the problems that I had because I thought that I was the man.” And I think that's a lesson that we need now as badly as we have ever needed it. So, yeah.
Julia: For sure.
Amanda: 1,000 percent and so often. And we say this, like, probably every other episode, but you kind of have to look at stuff sideways. It's helpful to analyze a problem that you deal within your life or that your bros are gonna deal with as, you know, you're not talking exactly about your woes but kind of getting at them from the side and doing that through a lens of, you know, a tale of kings and monsters is, is in a way so much easier or at least such an easy starting place than kind of trying to dive into those, like, unknown wilds of, of your own inner self.
Maria: Mhmm.
Julia: So you've done a translation of Beowulf. Obviously, you are a fan of mythology, folklore, all that kind of stuff. Now, this is – this might be a controversial question since you just finished your translation of Beowulf. Is there another dream project that you would want to translate?
Maria: I've been really thinking a lot about it.
Julia: Good.
Maria: I didn't know that I – I didn't know that I love doing this. I had never done it before. The only thing I'd ever translated was, like, just a very short poem by an 11th century Spanish poet, who was, was writing in Arabic. And that – I, I translated just that – just a few lines of it for a short story one. So, I was like, “Ooh, that is an interesting thing to do.” But doing 3,000 lines of Old English was also really interesting. So, yeah, I'm thinking about it. I don't know. I mean there are – there’s such a large – there's so many texts that have not – have not been looked at through this lens. There are also lots of other women doing this work right now. So, I'm – I'm delighted by that. I would like the, the sort of translation canon to be wider and wider and wider. Obviously, the querying of the canon and the – I mean what I want to say is, like, anti-racifying of the canon. But, like, it's – yeah, I mean the whole thing is racist, racist, racist. So, I would like to see it not just be all white people doing this work. And there are plenty of people who are not white doing this work, but they're not getting the sort of major translations, which is – and I – the only reason I got it was because I was, like, white, but outside of the system. I'm not from an academic background. And that meant that I could publish it with a mainstream publisher. But, also, all the other reasons that, that I'm also white. Like, all the things and all, all the privileged corner of have access. Yeah, I have a bunch of dream projects. There are a bunch of things that I would feel that I was not the right translator for. Not just because of, like, me not being fluent in the original language, which plenty of people are not fluent in the original language and they do their work. They’re – they're like, “I'm a poet. I don't have – you know, I don't have the ability to translate the inferno from the original. But that's me and the dictionary.” It's like, I think, it's a legitimate means of doing it. It’s slow. So, you know, I'm looking at this sort of stuff that's in the medieval Irish corner. That's always been interesting to me. I, I love the – I mean I love the Finn stuff. I also love all of the Arthurian stuff. There's – there's – I feel like there's a lot of stuff in the Arthurian canon that's like, “What? What is actually happening?” And you read it, in translation, you're like, “Hmm. That doesn't make any sense at all.” And I think it's pretty interesting. I mean the thing that always attracts me to a project is things not making any sense at all to me. That's the only reason that I do the work I do. It’s that I find something that doesn't make sense. And then it makes me itch until I can find a way to make it make sense for myself. So, you – sometimes, it's, like, 10 years of rolling around with hives until I – until I can finally publish the thing that hopefully makes it makes sense to me, which is a selfish and weird way to do a career. But, like – I don't know – I feel like I'm a four year old in the universe, like, all the time, who's just roaming around grabbing stuff and going, “What is it? Oh, my goodness. It's – you know, it's dinosaur bones.” And I'm like, “Is that a giant human? Is it – is it a monster? Is it” – and that's – that's also what's really fun about getting to do projects like this one.
Julia: Incredible.
Amanda: I love that. I mean it, it presumes that stuff that exists existed for a reason. And it made sense at some point or it had a purpose.
Maria: Mhmm.
Amanda: And I just – I think it's – it's so fun. And I would read your translation of any – anything that you wanted. So, I'm here. You have one buyer. You can tell your publisher you got one for sure.
Maria: Good. That's amazing.
Amanda: Well, Maria, thank you so, so much for coming on the show. Can you please let everybody know where they can find you and your books?
Maria: Yes, you can find me most easily – really most easily on Twitter, which is where I'm Maria Dahvana, which is D-A-H-V-A-N-A. That's my middle name. Yeah, best place to find me if you want to just hear me talk all day, which is what I do over there about every topic imaginable. But all the topics I've been talking about here are my normal Twitter topics. I also have a website that's just my name. And, if you want to buy the book or the books, because there are a whole bunch of them, you can go to – most recently to Macmillan, where the Macmillan page has my books and also kind of any, any Indie bookstore where they will order my books for you or hunt them down if you can't find them. And I think you should – also, if you are listening to the – since you're listening to it this way, there's an audio version of this Beowulf, which I think is really good. And it's – I wrote it in order to be both read on the page and to be listened to. So, the audio version is Macmillan audio. It is badass. The, the guy who did it is – his name is JD Jackson.
Julia: Nice.
Maria: He's just an, like, audio award winning badass who went through the poem and caught all of the rhymes that were hidden in the lines and caught all of the alliteration that was hidden that I put in stealthily inside of syllables. So, it's – I think it's a pleasure to listen to it and maybe read it at the same time.
Julia: Incredible. And we will make sure there are links to all of that in the show notes of this episode.
Maria: Thank you.
Amanda: Amazing. Well, thank you again for joining us. And, listeners, remember that, if you stumble across your monster mom's armor hoard, all you got to do is --
Julia: Stay creepy.
Amanda: Stay cool.
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Outro Music
Amanda: Spirits was created by Amanda McLoughlin, Julia Schifini, and Eric Schneider with music by Kevin MacLeod and visual design by Allyson Wakeman.
Julia: Keep up with all things creepy and cool by following us @SpiritsPodcast on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. We also have all of our episode transcripts, guest appearances, and merch on our website as well as a form to send us your urban legends at spiritspodcast.com.
Amanda: Join our member community on Patreon, patreon.com/spiritspodcast, for all kinds of behind-the-scenes stuff. Just $1 gets you access to audio extras with so much more available too; recipe cards, director’s commentaries, exclusive merch, and real physical gifts.
Julia: We are a founding member of Multitude, a collective of independent audio professionals. If you like Spirits, you will love the other shows that live on our website at multitude.productions
Amanda: And, above all else, if you liked what you heard today, please share us with your friends. That is the very best way to help us keep on growing.
Julia: Thank you so much for listening. Till next time.
Transcriptionist: Rachelle Rose Bacharo
Editor: Krizia Casil