Beowulf and The Mere Wife

Maria Dahvana Headley wrote a book called The Mere Wife in 2018, and then a rather famous translation of Beowulf in 2020.  The translation from Old English made a big splash when it came out last year for being a “feminist” version and one of the few translations by a woman.  Headley’s translation is gloriously readable, as she has updated the language - famously translating the tricky first word “Hwæt”  - often translated as “listen”, “ho”, “behold” and so on to “Bro”.  Makes perfect sense - how else do men get each other’s attention these days?  Check this out:

Old English, anonymous, 8th or 11th c.

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,

þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,

hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Seamus Heaney, 1999:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

Maria Dahvana Headley, 2020

Bro! Tell me we still know how to

talk about kings! In the old days,

everyone knew what men were:

brave, bold, glory-bound.

If you haven’t read Beowulf recently, it’s 3182 lines of Old English alliterative poetry (meaning the first sounds often start with the same letter).  The first manuscript was created between 975 and 1025 but the story takes place in 6th century Scandanavia.  The story is pretty simple:  This king’s castle is being raided every night by Grendel who kills and eats some people and fucks off before anyone can even injure him.  So Beowulf, a nearby dude, takes a boat over to this castle, tells everyone he’s going to kill Grendel, so they throw a big party, and that night, Grendel shows up, immediately eats a someone, and then Beowulf cuts his arm off and Grendel runs off.  Another big party.  The next night, Grendel’s mother shows up, eats a guy and fucks off to her cave.  Beowulf follows her, dives into a deep lake (a mere) to reach her, has a big fight and eventually kills her.  Cut to: 50 years later, a dragon is harassing a village.  Beowulf fights it, manages to kill it but is mortally wounded and dies. The end.  

Toxic masculinity, amirite?  Well, yeah. And what I love about Headley’s translation, aside from the exuberance in the language, is it emphasizes the Hoo-Rah exaltation of male violence and, in doing so, allows the reader to see more clearly who is being subjected in this narrative. In her forward, she writes that Beowulf is “a poem about willfully blinkered privilege, about the shock and horror of experiencing discomfort when one feels entitled to luxury.”  Instead of Beowulf emerging as the iconic hero and Grendel as the disgusting invading monster, it’s like, hold it, what if Grendel is defending his native lands and folks in the castle are the invading party?  Headley also makes the most of the few lines that are devoted to the female characters in the story to show just how much they are turned into absolute outsiders - whether she is the privileged queen of the castle or the mother of Grendel (without so much as a name of her own), the marginalization of their very existence is made clear.

The Mere Wife is a modern interpretation of Beowulf and I know you’re thinking… how do you even DO that???  It’s damn remarkable, and Headly makes it work beautifully. To briefly summarize, Dana is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan - she returns from war with a baby, Gren. Fiercely protective of her son, and suffering from traumatic stress, she hides her small family in a cave on the edge of an affluent suburb.  Her son, desperate to live in the world, sneaks into town and, following a misunderstanding, they become hunted.  I won’t spoil it anymore.  

I love how in both stories, she flips the narrative and turns the most identifiable characters into the perpetrators, causing the reader to question the so-called heroic actions of the strongest and wealthiest people. Taken from that angle, it looks much less like manifest destiny and more like aggressively murderous conquest and needless destruction.  In both stories, the characters we readers are most likely to identify with - the ones that live in homes, not caves, and enjoy wealth and comfort and physical beauty are NOT the heroes of the story.  So, it really made me think, why do I continually want to turn the colonizers in the story into the heroes?