Heaney In Beowulf

Heaney may embellish – thus, personalise/claim – the text through translation; however, this was not something which came naturally. Initially struggling to translate Beowulf, it was not until Heaney located the verb þolian (‘to suffer/endure’) – an Anglo-Saxon etymon of the Ulster verb thole bearing the same definition – within the text that he considered ‘Beowulf to be part of [his] voice-right’. This acknowledgement tying Ulster vernacular to Anglo-Saxon is playful, Heaney enacting the same compounding in ‘voice-right’ that is essential to Anglo-Saxon poetry. Yet the rendering of þolian and its cognates appears unsystematic. Not only does Heaney translate the noun ‘fyrenðearfe’ (‘dire distress/need’) as tholed in the half-line ‘[God] knew what [the Danes] had tholed’ (l.-14) – thus altering the word class from noun to verb to make the thole-ing more active – but, furthermore, þolian is not seen in the text here.
While the Anglo-Saxon reads ‘ond for þrea-nydum þolian scoldan-|-torn unlytel’, Heaney renders this ‘the hard fate they’d been forced to undergo, |-no small affliction’ (ll.-832-33). Heaney’s phraseology is, here, paradoxical: the ‘hard fate’ is diminished to ‘no small affliction’. Consequently, Heaney renders þolian as ‘to undergo’ which, while firmly within the semantic field of intensive labour, it also bears (as is evident here) positive, rewarding connotations. Heaney, therefore, assimilates þolian’s translation to his/the Ulster