The Bear

I have finished reading my selection of Icelandic sagas, and in keeping with my excursion into medieval literature and folklore, I have started Seamus Heaney's .

Heaney makes a fascinating point in the introduction. As an Irishman, he had always felt some resistance to translating an Anglo-Saxon poem into modern English; he did not feel that it sat well with his Celtic heritage. Heaney describes his epiphany regarding the interconnectedness of language as follows:

The place on the language map where the Usk and the uisce and the whiskey coincided was definitely a place where the spirit might find a loophole, an escape route from what John Montague has called "the partitioned intellect," away into some unpartitioned linguistic country, a region where one's language would not be a simple badge of ethnicity or a matter of cultural preference or official imposition, but an entry into further language. And I eventually came upon one of these loopholes in Beowulf itself.

For me the excitement of Heaney's translation is not just his acclaimed verse, but the continued interweaving of the strands of Irish myth and Norse folklore that I have been reading. One of the remarkable features of the Icelandic sagas is the amount of interaction that the Icelanders had with the British Isles, where they raided, traded, and pledged fealty to various English (and Irish) kings. Here, now, is an English poem recounting, in part, the adventures of the Geats, from England, and the Danes. The inspiration for this literary detour, and the point to which I mean ultimately to return, is the poetry of William Butler Yeats, so it fitting that I continue the journey under the guidance of another Irish poet.