I recently made a minor literary discovery, which has been made by others before me, but is still interesting.
A little context: a few weeks back I bought a copy of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf -- the one that was a New York Times bestseller back in 2000. It's a good read and very interesting to anyone fascinated by language as I am.
The book has the original Old English text on the left and Heaney's translation on the right, and it's surprising how much of the Old English one can puzzle out. Note that I'm not talking about "old" English like that of Chaucer or Shakespeare. This is Anglo-Saxon, with passages like:
Hwaet we Gar-Dena in gear-danum/Theod cyninga thrym gefrunon . . .
And yet one can work some of it out, with Heaney's translation to give hints.
None of which has anything to do with my discovery. No, that came in the final section of the poem, after Beowulf has killed Grendel and Grendel's Mother.* After he has become king of the Geats and ruled his people for fifty winters, Beowulf faces a new foe: a dragon. The dragon starts ravaging Beowulf's kingdom after a robbery. Here, I'll let Heaney tell the story (line breaks removed because they're a pain in the neck):
. . . a dragon on the prowl from the steep vaults of a stone-roofed barrow where he guarded a hoard; there was a hidden passage, unknown to men, but someone managed to enter by it and interfere with the heathen trove. He had handled and removed a gem-studdend goblet; it gained him nothing, though with a thief's wiles he had outwitted the sleeping dragon; that drove him into rage, as the people of that country would soon discover.
Sound familiar? Anybody? That's right: it's the chapter in The Hobbit telling of Bilbo's visit to the lair of Smaug.
No, I'm not saying Tolkein "stole" the incident. Obviously he tossed it in as a tip of the hat to the unknown author of a work he devoted his academic career to studying. So when the upcoming film of The Hobbit comes out, you can look very clever indeed by leaning over to your seat-mate and saying airily, "Beowulf did it first."
*What a loser Grendel is: a big monster and he's still living in his Mom's basement.
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