What does Beowulf have to say to us today? Among other things, that life inevitably turns chaotic and that death waits for us all, Jacob Howland writes in The New Criterion:

The only good thing to be said about really rotten times is that they are clarifying. The shock of rising floodwaters returns us to the first, most fundamental things. Set spinning in strong currents, we feel for a foothold and scan the sky for stars to steer by. Luckily, we human beings—uniquely privileged and vulnerable hominids—have long experience with catastrophe. Some old and durable writings may help us to reckon with the ruinous tide.

Take Beowulf, than which few books could be more timely. As J. R. R. Tolkien observed in his landmark essay ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,’ written in 1936 when rough beasts were on the prowl, the poem is an elegy more than an epic. Its ancient theme, Tolkien writes, is the general tragedy of human existence: ‘that man, each man and all men, and all their works shall die.’ Its mood is antiquarian: pious respect and intense regret for a buried world. Its narrative, hewn and fitted into well-joined Anglo-Saxon verse, is an A-frame, rising and falling with the power and fortune of the eponymous hero and his people, the Geats. Beowulf tells of noble pagan Northmen: great ruling houses and clans of sturdy fighters, all now swept away, with all their spears and shields. Yet that dead way of life, deposited in the flow of ages and sedimented in memory, forms the packed ground—newly covered in his time with green sprouts of Christian hope—on which the poet stands, and into which he casts his spade. Beowulf is positively geologic.

Especially in Seamus Heaney’s fresh and powerful translation (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, from which I quote), Beowulf conveys an overwhelming impression of weight and density, of compactness. This is the effect of a great accumulation of essential human experience, shaped into poetry that is as much law as song. (The Greek word nomos means both.) It’s as though centuries of struggle and suffering to defend an ordered common life against surges of chaos and violence have solidified into concrete words replete with unfathomed meanings. The poet’s muse—the Muse, queen of them all, and older by far than the Christian God—is Mnemosyne: Memory. He repays his debts with dug-up treasure: the hard currency of the past, deeply felt and imagined.

And hard it is. Beowulf sounds gloom and doom with the eagerness of wrought iron plunging into heaving surf. Heorot, the great mead hall built by Hrothgar, king of the Shieldings, is a place of light, warmth, fellowship, and cheery decorum: libation-pouring and gift-giving. A splendid microcosm of civilized existence, Heorot ‘stands at the horizon, on its high ground,’ a Nordic city on the hill ‘meant to be a wonder of the world forever.’ But outside the wallstead is nasty weather: gray seas and sucking bogs, slouching monsters and keening women—the world of Cain, as the poet sees it. Disaster is a foregone conclusion. We are told barely eighty lines in that Heorot awaits ‘a barbarous burning . . . the killer instinct/ unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant.’ And at poem’s end, after Beowulf, abandoned by the Geats and poisoned by a dragon, has died, a grieving woman unleashes ‘a wild litany/ of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,/ enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,/ slavery and abasement.’

Shot through with violence and limned with dire prophecies, Beowulf is nevertheless bracing in its unshakable grasp of fundamental realities. The poem confronts horror and catastrophe directly, taking in whole epochs and discerning the most basic patterns of human existence: ineluctable rhythms of rise and fall, flourishing and decay, energy and entropy. Laden with words as serviceable as helmet and mail and launched, like the packed funeral boat of Shield Sheafson, founder of the Spear-Danes, ‘on out into the ocean’s sway,’ the poem would be a boon to a people looking to gird itself for long battle under lowering skies. Like any book, it can be salvaged only by the readers it finds. Yet who, today, could refuse this providential cargo, which survives, against all odds, in a single fire-damaged codex?

In other news: I was sorry to learn this morning that the photographer Elsa Dorfman has died. She was 83. Elsa and I maintained an irregular correspondence. She founded The Paterson Society, which was a short-lived organization to help poets arrange readings on university campuses across the United States in the 60s. She collected statements from poets like Frank O’Hara, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, and others, and we looked into publishing these together a few years back, but we never found a publisher. Kind, generous, and intellectually curious, she will be missed.

John Wilson reviews Michael Connelly’s new novel, Fair Warning: “Many current crime novelists regard themselves not simply as storytellers but as historians of the present, telling us what is ‘happening’ with an immediacy and an imaginative depth that ‘the news’ can’t match. Michael Connelly has been doing that for a long time, even before it became fashionable, and there is no one who does it better.”

The fall publishing season is jam-packed. Is that good for writers? “Books scheduled for release this spring and summer are now on track for fall, when authors will be fighting for attention in the midst of a presidential election and an ongoing crisis.”

Lauren Weiner reviews Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas: “Stephen Budiansky, a journalist and independent scholar, knows that his subject has been fawned over quite a bit. By pointing that out, and by including in the book both the major criticisms of Holmes as well as plenty of the questionable things ‘the Magnificent Yankee’ did and wrote, Budiansky intends to set up his own view as the impartial one. It’s not, but by offering a less lickspittle view of Holmes, and by organizing his epistolary, biographical, historical, and legal materials so deftly, he has produced a survey of the man and his times from which admirers and critics alike can profit.”

The forgotten folk collectors of the New Deal: “It was October 1935, and the Resettlement Administration was in trouble. The experimental agency—‘RA’ in the New Deal lexicon—was tasked with moving those hardest hit by the Great Depression onto government-built homesteads, but their early efforts were undermined by discord among the new homesteaders—a mix of farmers whose land had failed, jobless urban workers willing to return to farming, and unemployed miners and other workers whose jobs had disappeared. The Special Skills Division, which had been created as a service division to make furniture and print materials for the RA, was charged with helping to develop recreation programs and activities to alleviate social tensions on the new settlements. Clubs were set up and programs introduced. But after visiting four RA homesteads in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, Special Skills staffer Katharine Kellock submitted a report warning that instead of a solution to the homesteads’ social problems, the clubs had become ‘hotbeds of discontent.’ At meetings, unhappy participants steered the agenda toward ‘a serious contemplation of their economic problems which they had no power to solve.’ Kellock characterized this discontentment as ‘an emergency situation’ that was tearing apart the communities that the RA had worked hard to build. So who did the government call on to rescue their faltering social experiment? ‘The Special Skills Division,’ Kellock announced, ‘is sending in leaders of music.’”

Photos: Missouri

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