My men moreover will be made to guard so that none may harm it your newly tarred keel on the sand to keep it safe till it bring the bold back to their loved ones —on the ocean currents the carved wood— to the coast of Gautland those good warriors to whom it be given in health to survive in one piece the peril of battle.

This one sentence from the coast-guard's speech is like a wood-carving. It shows how the Beowulf-poet is much concerned with energy and containment, motion and direction. The poet's sense of form can be compared to the artistry of the shipwright who worked the curved prow of the Viking longship and who bound its wooden planking with strong rope. His story moves forward, held in place by a flexible formality, like those ships. This aesthetic tension delights me, and I have tried to keep it from becoming lost in translation. The poet makes this connection, of ship with story:

Now the king's thane who kept in his memory recalling at will legends and lays who was laden with speeches and knew virtually all of the venerable sagas found instead another story to tell. He launched an account lashed securely The Voyage of Beewolf and with verve he brought his craft up to speed.

Syntax mirrors action in this poem. When the monster Grendel escapes from his encounter with the hero with a mortal wound, the warriors track the creature to his last refuge by following the blood on the trail. The passage mirrors stylistically Grendel's faltering step:

Certainly no one was aggrieved by the fate that had greeted the killer— not a man who beheld there the ignominious trail where weary at heart away from that place undone by his wounds to the demonous lake dead on his feet his last footsteps had brought him.

The lines alternate, referring to Grendel's death-mood and then to his destination, left, right, left, right, left... right. The form of passage embodies the monster's brute determination to get back to his hiding place; the alternating lines show his dying exhaustion, and then his determination to reach his lair:

In addition to this sort of "carved" syntax, there is the so-called "appositive" style of the original, the use of two descriptive phrases one after the other, often taking the form of twin epithets:

This sort of formality might sound strange to a modern ear accustomed to the conversational nonchalance of much contemporary poetry, but it has a purpose: the stately Huugleik's thane, Gautland's hero is a hero's introduction. I have assumed that you would like to be shown how such stylistic features inform the poem and would not have me ignore them in order to make for a more straightforward, prosaically readable translation. So I reproduce quite faithfully the formalities of the original, to the best of my ability, including such apposition, while at the same time attempting to be faithful to modern idiom. You'll adjust to this strangeness quite quickly once you see it a few times, and the adjustment you are called upon to make will have been well worth your trouble, for you will have attained a fuller sense of the style, and I hope, a better appreciation for the artistry, of the original.

Where the Wood Meets the Water