Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)

poetryfoundation.org

Beowulf translation is a whole academic field, the translation has been debated ad nauseum for 100s of years, Tolkien had his own translation and opinion, which differed from others. One additional scholar adding his own interpretation doesn't necessarily overturn anything. There is not enough detail in this article to know how compelling the case is or what the counter arguments would be.

The article references a forthcoming publication that I can't find a draft of. Here's an older publication on the topic by the same author: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2013_hwaet.pdf

Edit: Oh, the PF article is from 2013, so this must be the actual publication after all.

The paper (someone else linked it) makes a pretty strong argument with quite a bit of evidence.

It does seem quite likely that the translation that begins "What!" (with the exclamation mark being inserted by translators) was just an error by early translators who were over-indexing on Latin grammatical patterns which weren't at all common in Old English.

> There is not enough detail in this article to know how compelling the case is or what the counter arguments would be.

The only real way to make the case compelling would be to discover new Old English texts. So there is enough information; the case is not going to be compelling.

May I suggest Old Frisian (& Old Saxon) as well

https://xcancel.com/thijsporck/status/1395838213198127111

Video from this week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs&t=12m57s

Addresses Shakespeare's objection

Commenters there point to German translations that open with "Wie.."

https://archive.org/details/beowulfdasltest00beowgoog#:~:tex...

(Karl Simrock, 1859)

Check out the paper - someone else linked it. It has several examples from Old English and other related languages which support its case. It seems pretty compelling to me.

The fact that earlier translators had to break up the original sentence and insert an exclamation point after "What" is already a bit suspect. Walkden's interpretation actually makes more sense, when you see examples like "Hwæt stendst þu her wælhreowa deor?", meaning "Why are you standing here, cruel beast?"

This may be a case where early translators over-indexed on e.g. Latin patterns and made a mistake which was then just accepted by subsequent translators.

I used to use this (still do really) as a technique when starting undergraduate lectures. They’re there, ready to listen, but chatting away and need a moment to focus their attention.

*SO* let me tell you further fun facts about carbonyl chemistry…

Works. Those Anglo-Saxons knew what they were about.

On the first day of class in undergrad, most professors are handing out the syllabus and talking about class requirements and basically doing zero lecturing. Not my Philosophy 101 prof. The minute the class was scheduled to start, he opened the door and walked into the room saying, "The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world."

I don't remember the rest of the lecture, but his opening phrase is burned into my memory three decades later. Because in one fell swoop, he simultaneously said the following:

1. This class starts promptly. I expect you to be in your seats on time and ready to listen.

2. I have a lot of material to cover, so I'm not going to waste time talking about the syllabus. You're in college, I expect you to be able to read.

3. The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world.

(He did actually talk a little bit about the syllabus later on that day).

Unfortunately, cataloguing all the knowledge in the world created new knowledge, leading to a sort of Zeno's paradox of cataloguing.

Then they tried to catalogue which knowledge had not yet been catalogued, and it all went to hell.

I remember Arthur C. Clarke quoting someone saying that the universe was designed to keep scientists and astronomers in work. I liked that.

Which Greeks? What project is this?

The Greek philosophers (Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, et al), and the project was, as my Philosophy 101 prof said, that they wanted to learn everything there was to know. An impossible goal, obviously, but they were dreaming the impossible dream.

I’m wondering if a Greek historian would agree with that summary. Aren’t the texts we have pretty fragmented?

I could be wrong about him meaning the Greek philosophers (since I don't remember the rest of the lecture), though since it was the intro to a Philosophy 101 class that's who I assumed he meant at the time.

As for fragmented texts, at the time when the Greek philosophers were alive there were a lot more texts available to them than we now have. A lot was lost over the years, including when the library at Alexandria burned (48 BC, I believe). We know they had access to many texts we don't because they quote from them, referencing material that we no longer have access to.

But this is a side issue. The main point of my comment was how the prof managed to communicate two or three things at once by the simple action of walking into the classroom, already lecturing, precisely at the scheduled start of the class.

Might have been the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty, and the Library of Alexandria, part of a project dedicated to the Muses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria?wprov=sf...

Larry Page was president of the Beta Epsilon chapter of the Eta Kappa Nu engineering honor society... that's not really a frat but maybe still counts as "Greek"?

I had a history professor who would often use a similar preamble phrase. His was "And SO IT IS that we see that..."

It worked to get our attention partly because of the time it took to say all that, and partly because it was so idiosyncratic that it sorta became a running joke.

I remember one session in particular.

This was a summer class, and as such each class session was around 2 hours long. The professor would typically give us (and himself) a 10-minute break in the middle of the class, and generally if you hung around the room, he'd strike up a more casual conversation in the room.

This was also not long after Michael Jackson died. The conversation got onto him and his life and his mixed legacy of scandal, went on for a while, and somehow made its way to one student observing that (and I quote): "he lived the American dream – he started out as a poor black boy and grew up to be a rich white man."

The room sorta hung in uneasy suspense at how the professor would respond.

"...and SO IT IS that we see that the Mongol conquest...", he said, launching noticeably-abruptly (and with a bit of a knowing grin) back into the course material.

He was generally a good-natured dude like that. His voice sounded a little unusual, and I guess some students thought he sounded like Kermit the Frog. He came back into the room after a bathroom break once to find someone had drawn Kermit on the whiteboard behind where he usually stood when speaking. He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road" (or whatever it was were about to cover; it's been quite a few years and I don't remember the specific topic).

> He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road"

Optimal play from the professor.

Maybe good pedagogy, but the point is that's not what the Anglo-Saxons were doing. What they did (in Beowulf, and seemingly most of the time they started their sentences with hwæt) would be more like starting the lecture with: "How fun carbonyl chemistry is!"

I'm confused, isn't this the exact usage that TFA is refuting?

> Yet for more than two centuries “hwæt” has been misrepresented as an attention-grabbing latter-day “yo!” designed to capture the interest of its intended Anglo-Saxon audience urging them to sit down and listen up to the exploits of the heroic monster-slayer Beowulf.

Same purpose, different grammatical structure.

Heaney's famous translation begins "So. The Spear-Danes ..." with that "So" being an interjection, a thing that could in principle stand on its own. (You might say "So." and wait for everyone to settle down and start listening.) Even more so with things like "Yo!" or "What ho!" or "Bro!" or "Lo!". (Curious how all the options seem to end in -o.)

This is more like "So, the Spear-Danes ..." where the initial "So" has roughly the same purpose of rhetorical throat-clearing and attention-getting, but now it's part of the sentence, as if it had been "As it turns out, the Spear-Danes ..." or "You might have heard that the Spear-Danes ...".

I think the theory described in OP makes the function of "hwaet" a little different, though; not so much throat-clearing and attracting attention, as marking the sentence as exclamatory. A little like the "¡" that _begins_ an exclamation in Spanish.

Of course a word can have more than one purpose, and it could be e.g. that "hwaet" marks a sentence as exclamatory and was chosen here because it functions as a way of drawing attention.

> SO let me tell you

all about how...

Oh no, now my brain wants to play the whole song in my head before allowing me to move on.

That's great. Similar trick I've picked up is to say "blah blah blah ... is as follows:" followed by a pause and then your explanation, which is always more than the one or two words the listener might have otherwise been expecting. This technique allows you to keep the talking stick and express an idea that takes more than a few words, without someone jumping to an immediate conclusion or interrupting you.

To close the loop, I had a chemistry professor who linked concepts together in lecture with the phrase "Meaning what?" E.g., "In the alkyne molecule, the carbon atoms share a triple bond. Meaning what? Meaning that the bond is much stronger than in alkanes or alkenes..." It was less a technique for getting attention and more for holding it through a chain of reasoning. But it worked.

I remember one of my friends in college pointing out before lecture that the professor would always start by saying "OK, So."

I have had to train myself out of doing that when recording videos. The best I've managed is that I can do it sometimes, and most of the rest of the time I leave a long enough pause after that I can cleanly edit it off.

I’ll share another great version of Beowulf- Bea Wolf. Based on kids, with fantastic artwork and a great story/version. My kids absolutely love me reading this and I absolutely love reading it as a large passed down story of battles.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60316971-bea-wolf

Cool, that was enough to intrigue me, but for those on the fence perhaps it’ll help to note that the author is none other than Zach Weinersmith of SMBC fame.

Regarding the topic, this graphic novel begins “Hey, wait! Listen to the lives…”

It's a whole lot of fun.

I agree with Dr. Walkden here. While it was used as an interjection at times (just as it is today when someone exclaims, "What?!") in the context of the opening line of Beowulf "hwæt" is more likely being used to reformulate a statement in order to convey a sense of emphasis. An example in modern English would be something like, rather than saying "That was a gorgeous sunset!", one says "What a gorgeous sunset that was!". (Notice that the verb has now moved to the end of the sentence. In fact if you look at the last word of the line in question, we have the verb "fremedon" which means "performed", so indeed the placement of "what" at the beginning of the line facilitates the restructuring of the sentence in such a way that makes it "sounds right".)

Yeah—I'm reminded of the opening sentence of Slaughterhouse Five, which goes, "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." Kurt Vonnegut isn't worried that you're not listening; he's trying to create a sense of intimacy and emphasis, as one who is taking you aside to tell you something crucially important which he fears you may dismiss out of hand.

It seems intuitive to me that the "hwaet" functioned more as a literary device than as a simple call for attention. It is, after all, a poem.

People are saying that the interjection interpretation is influenced by its use as interjection in Shakespeare’s time. By that time what/hwæt was being used differently than the way it was when Beowulf was authored hundreds of years before.

Nevertheless I do think it is safe to say that such interjections were used, at least on a day-to-day basis. (Bear in mind that relatively few Old English texts survive to this day and almost certainly not many were produced to begin with. Old Norse itself was for the most part a spoken language, unlike Latin for example, and its predecessor which developed in England only started to be written down because of external influences.) Point is, all of the Nordic languages employ interjections akin to "Ah!", "Oh!", "Why?!", "Indeed!", "How?!", etc. So there really isn't any reason to think that such things wouldn't exist in OE as well.

Those aren't interjections in other Germanic languages, they're called modal particles. Norwegian:

"Det er sant." That is true. "Det er vel sant." That's true, I suppose (resigned). "Det er nok sant." That's true, I suppose (serious). "Det er da sant." That's true, come on.

German also has them, though I'm not confident enough to explain the fine difference between "Das ist wahr" and "Das ist noch war".

English maybe has some remnants of them, but they're rare and probably a bit more archaic. You can say "That is yet true", and the "yet" there doesn't necessarily imply that you think it might not be true in the future. You probably understand what I mean if I say "That is but true" but it sounds very archaic. Usually you have to invoke a full adverb to signify mode in English ("That's actually true")

Black American English has "true dat", which before it was a 1990s catchphrase was also used to express both emphasis as well as resignation to a state of affairs, eg "I need to get a job!" "True dat"

It could also have been both, as well. In the immediate moment it functions as an interjection and as the rest of the sentence develops it fills in a pronoun gap. Like starting a shanty with a loud, slow single syllable to get attention (and maybe catch others on to the key) and that still being also a part of the first line of the song.

It took me a few minutes to track down the original source of this. It is a paper by Dr George Walkden published in 2013 called "The status of hwæt in Old English" You can access the pdf from the link below [0].

The abstract reads:

>It is commonly held that Old English hwæt, well known within Anglo-Saxon studies as the first word of the epic poem Beowulf, can be ‘used as an adv[erb]. or interj[ection]. Why, what! ah!’ (Bosworth & Toller 1898, s.v. hwæt, 1) as well as the neuter singular of the interrogative pronoun hwa ̄ ‘what’. In this article I challenge the view that hwæt can have the status of an interjection (i.e. be outside the clause that it precedes). I present evidence from Old English and Old Saxon constituent order which suggests that hwæt is unlikely to be extra-clausal. Data is drawn from the Old English Bede, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints and the Old Saxon Heliand. In all three texts the verb appears later in clauses preceded by hwæt than is normal in root clauses (Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.0001 in both cases). If hwæt affects the constituent order of the clause it precedes, then it cannot be truly clause- external. I argue that it is hwæt combined with the clause that follows it that delivers the interpretive effect of exclamation, not hwæt alone. The structure of hwæt-clauses is sketched following Rett’s (2008) analysis of exclamatives. I conclude that Old English hwæt (as well as its Old Saxon cognate) was not an interjection but an underspecified wh-pronoun introducing an exclamative clause.

[0] https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/413d...

Graham Scheper has a recent video on this topic. He also believes that "Hwaet" is not an interjection, but more like Red Riding Hood's "What big eyes you have!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gZKCPk40WI

You seem to have linked the wrong video (yours is about the meaning of the name Beowolf), the right link about Hwaet is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs

I watched this video a few days ago after it was randomly recommended by YouTube. Definitely found it very interesting and he has a load of other videos about learning Old English, so I'll be checking out more of them soon.

Is it just me or does this video look AI-generated?

"What ho" as in British English seems like a descendant of this usage

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77151/what-ho-of...

There was a more colloquial translation a few years ago that rendered it as "Bro!"

That's the 2021 translation by Maria Headley

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374110031/beowulfanewtran...

I feel like Lil Jon would remind us that "What?!" still works pretty well today.

I guess "What bro!" is less sexist than "What ho!"

> and more recently “So!” by Seamus Heaney in 2000. This is despite the research suggesting that the Anglo Saxons made little use of the exclamation mark

Seamus Heaney does not use an exclamation.

His version begins:

“So.”

It's an interesting idea, but I'm thrown by "a count" in "should be taken into a count by future translations"

Yeah, weird to see a couple of linguistic mistakes like this in an article about linguistic mistakes. Another is the misuse of "latter-day". The article uses it to refer to an old thing that is analogous to a modern thing: "[a] latter-day 'yo!'" But "latter-day" actually describes something modern. (E.g., the "latter days" refers to the present age. See "Latter-day Saints".)

See also "latterly".

Amusingly, the source article [0] linked to in TFA does not contain the same error:

  > “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into account by future translations,” he said.

0: https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/new...

Is this the Beowulf translation field equivalent of incorrectly correcting someone's correct use of the their/there/they're homophones?

They should of considered that! /s

Not present in the original report at The Independent:

> “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into account by future translations,” he said.

https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/new...

It's possible The Independent fixed it up in an edit after The Poetry Foundation made a copy of it.

Me too, I just thought that I wouldn't trust an article on linguistics with such an error too much.

You could always read the Maria Dahvana Headley translation that starts with "Bro!":

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/beowulf-bro

"Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!

In the old days, everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound.

Only stories now, but I’ll sound the Spear-Danes’ song, hoarded for hungry times."

I know it's unconventional, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading that translation. It felt so alive, and other translations have never engaged me in quite the same way.

It was the only version I managed to finish, unless you count "Eaters of the Dead" by Michael Crichton (which is loosely based on it and mashed up with the story of Ahmad ibn Fadlan).

I think it's a good compromise between staying true-ish to the language, and also making it come alive as an epic adventure story.

beat me to it. another article: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/27/906423831/bro-this-is-not-the...

her adaptation, The Mere Wife, needs to get adapted to film or series yesterday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mere_Wife

Graham Scheper had a good video on this recently. About a quarter of an hour long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs

There are some other videos on Tolkien's translation. He didn't like the phrase "whaleroad" used in some versions because he thought it sounded too like "railroad".

Related: Rumi’s Mesnevî also opens with “bishnav”, “listen” in Persian.

> “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into a count by future translations,” he said.

I think there’s a bit of unintentional humor in this line, like it belongs in “i am the walrus”. The researcher would _like_ to say something, which makes me think the sentence has an implied completion of “but I won’t say it”, which I already find kind of funny. And then of course the quote is tagged with “he said”, lol, almost like the author is mocking him. Idk, that’s so funny to me

How about "Whoa!"? That seems to me like it preserves some of the ambiguous sense (calling for attention vs. remarking upon a discovery).

The issue is really focused on the grammatical function of the word. The researcher is arguing that it's not ever used as an interjection, which "whoa" always is.

I would say the presence of an exclamation mark, in a context where exclamation marks are rare, is strong evidence of use as an interjection. Unless we're arguing that some other mark was mistaken for an exclamation, generally I would say rare typography is "marked" (noteworthy) rather than being likely mistaken. I think the researcher's position is not likely to hold much sway going forward.

The exclamation mark is added in transliterations of the manuscript because it is believed to be an interjection. If you look at the manuscript, there is no such mark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf#/media/File:Beowulf_Co...

Why would you assume the original had an exclamation mark? Indeed the whole symbol was not invented until the 1300s.

The article puts punctuation into its rendering of the original text. That confused me too.

I'll note that it's not this decision is not coming from the newspaper article's writer, it's coming from any common transliteration of the manuscript that you'll find. But it's clearly a transliteration decision made because the people doing this assume it is an interjection, and they're using modern punctuation rules accordingly.

> But it's clearly a transliteration decision made because the people doing this assume it is an interjection, and they're using modern punctuation rules accordingly.

I think that's what I missed.

Bill and Ted kill a dragon.

I love the phrase "Subtly wide of the mark."

Sound just like "That: [situation or summary]" style. Interchangeable that and what.

> Since then it has variously been translated as “What ho!”

The P.G. Wodehouse translation?

LMAO

(2013)

(circa 1000)

Does it matter? Genuine question-- does this (mis)translation change anything

>According to the historical linguist, rather than reading: “Listen! We have heard of the might of the kings” the Old English of “Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!” should instead be understood as: “How we have heard of the might of the kings.”

So semantically... no difference.

Do you know the joke about the priest who died, and discovered God meant priests to "celebrate", not "celibate"?

It matters to those who care about this piece of literature. Maybe not as much as a lifetime of coital bliss missed, but who's to say?

Not really. It does however help drive home the point that such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale. (On the other hand in Latin and Celtic traditions, interjections were widely used in story-telling, eg. "Ecce!" and "Féach!" respectively). Old English speakers would have been more inclined to used interjections in a responsive context. For example, to the statement "The boat is taking on water!", one might respond "How?!". But to begin a conversation with an interjection, that just isn't consistent with what we see in any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.

> It does however help drive home the point that such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale.

Beowulf was written in Old English, which is not a Nordic language.

> ... any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.

Similarly, Old English didn't develop from Old Norse.

Beowulf has a Scandinavian background to the story. Shortly after "hwæt", it mentions "gar-Denas" or spear Danes. (Old English had become heavily influenced by Norse by the time of the Norman invasions, especially in ita northern dialects.)

There may be a Celtic influence upon it as well, as with some of the Icelandic sagas, but you would have to dig much deeper for that.

The language and style of Beowulf is Old English, though. Old English was a West Germanic language, already closely related to the North Germanic Old Norse and mutually intelligible to a high degree.

But it doesn't make sense to say "such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale" without some sort of explanation for the focus on "Nordic" languages. Subsequent comments have made it clear that the commenter is under the mistaken impression that Old English was a Nordic language. It was not.

Actually, the introduction of Old Norse in Britain began in the early 5th century and by the time of Beowulf, Old English was still more than 90% a Nordic language. The Norman invasion of 1066 changed that dramatically (as Old French became the "new" official language) and to this day Modern English could reasonably be considered mostly French, then Latin, and only in small part Nordic (although the most common words used are by majority derived from Old Norse counterparts.) Oddly enough, only a few Celtic words made it into the language.

Germanic and Celtic languages have been in contact for at least two thousand years. Probably longer. There are Celtic loanwords in English which predate the Anglo-Saxon invasions. After the invasion, English took centuries to expand into areas which spoke P Celtic, and it seems to have profound influences on its verbal structure. Another wave of Celtic loanwords entered English via French.

As for modern English, there are numerous Celtic loanwords and calques in American, Canadian and Australian slang and dialect.

Old English is not considered to have evolved from a Nordic language.

Old Norse was a North Germanic language. Old English was a West Germanic language. They were mutually intelligible to a significant degree, since both were Germanic languages that evolved from the hypothetical common ancestor Proto-Germanic, but saying Old English was "90% a Nordic language" is like saying that humans are 90% chimpanzees. Both evolved from a common ancestor, one did not evolve from the other.

> that just isn't consistent with what we see in any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.

What's up with the phrasing? Old English isn't a language that developed from Old Norse.

When the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons arrived in England around fall of Rome in the early 400s, the "official" language was Latin (as Britain had been a Roman colony since 43 AD) whereas locals spoke various Celtic dialects. The newcomers brought with them Scandinavian tongues and for the next 500 years or so Old English developed with minor changes (with sparse inclusions from Latin and Celtic influences). That all changed in 1066 with the Norman Invasion where Old Northern French became the new official language. (French also began as a Nordic language, but over time only a few hundred or so words remained, with the rest being mostly Latin-based.) As far as Modern English is concerned, while only ~20% is based on Old Norse, those words form more than 80% of what is most commonly used on a day-to-day basis.

English and Old English are West Germanic, Nordic languages and Old Norse are North Germanic. Very close cousins, but neither descends from the other.

You are a crackpot.

I think they're just confusing Old Norse with Proto-Germanic, i.e. the common ancestor of both Old Norse and Old English.

>> French also began as a Nordic language, but over time only a few hundred or so words remained, with the rest being mostly Latin-based.

Oh haha I missed that, thanks. That's quite the theory!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com