“[In] Old English or Anglo-Saxon, the language of the Beowulf-poet, the word for poet was scop which is related to the verb scippan which means to shape or create. The poet is a shaper of stories.“
The story of Beowulf is thought to have been written down in Old English at around 1,000 CE. It has the form of an epic poem of some 3,000 lines but probably existed as spoken word a few hundred years before the manuscript. The narrative contains many themes, including bravery, loyalty and reputation. You have written a series of poems after the work, what specific themes drive your writing?
The poetry collection that I’m working on is a feminist adaptation of Beowulf, uncovering and giving voice to the women in the original poem who were silenced, marginalised, and in the case of Grendel’s Mother (Beowulf’s second antagonist) made troublesome and monstrous by the original poet. Only one woman speaks in Beowulf and that’s Wealhtheow, the Queen of the Danes, but no one speaks back to her. And the remaining women, some of whom are not even named, do not have a voice. It is the aim of my poetry to imagine those voices, to explore the emotional situations that those women face – as the mothers, daughters, and wives of the heroes and kings whose actions determine the dominant narrative of Beowulf^ – but also to open up the original poem to experiences and situations that expand on the predominantly masculine world-view that the original poet created. This poem, ‘Turn of Tide’, is a little different, however, as it’s written in my voice as the modern poet encountering the ‘wordhoard’ left on the shore once the ship of Beowulf has set sail for its next masculine adventure. This poem is the result of my poetic beach-combing!
What are the “driftwords ……. of this story” in Turn of the Tide and how did you choose them from the long text of Beowulf?
Many of the ‘driftwords’ in my poem are from Beowulf itself (although there is some flotsam and jetsam from other Old English poems too– the ferðloca or ‘life-enclosure’ from The Wanderer, for example, that in this context put me in mind of a ship enclosing the lives of men). I wanted to choose some words that are controversial and have become sticky with all the scholarly attention over the years: the salt-barnacled aglæca, often translated as ‘monster’ when referring to Grendel or ‘fierce fighter’ when referring to the hero himself. Beowulf is poem that turns on moments of edhwyrft or a sudden change of fortune, such as when Grendel attacks Hrothgar’s hall or Grendel’s Mother arrives to take her revenge. (The prefix ed- also means to ‘renew’ or ‘make new again’ and I rather like that possibility!) I also wanted to think about the role that fate or wyrd plays in the tales that survive and find their ways to our shores. Stories and words become tidfara or time-travellers that create poetic reputations or fame. Lastword is the Old English for reputation but a last is more literally a track or trace, a footstep. At the end of the poem I wanted to throw such words back into the sea of stories because Beowulf’s final word is lofgeornost (‘most eager for fame’) and his fame crowds out the stories of women in the poem. Lofgeornost is not a ‘mapword’ for the female poet, and here I’m deliberately alluding to Eavan Boland’s wonderful book A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Female Poet. I wanted to encourage the reader to listen for other ripples, other words, other directions…
How did your interest in Old and Middle English come about? Did you have an epiphany moment?
My passion for medieval texts was cemented in the first lecture that I went to as an undergraduate at the University of Durham – Prof Corinne Saunders on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it was utterly spell-binding! I immediately fell in love with the plots, characters, and mythological elements of medieval texts– from the dragon in Beowulf to the supernatural Green Knight in Gawain – but it was always tied up with the language for me too. The mesmerising sound of the alliterative lines, the imaginative poetics of kennings, that opening call to attention in Beowulf – hwæt! Medieval texts have this compelling quality in their storytelling, we cannot help but listen.
But as I began to teach medieval literature, I realised that another crucial element in medieval poetic practice is that authors like Chaucer or the Beowulf poet are retelling stories that are already known and already have power in the literary imagination. If medieval texts can offer a new spin on existing material and encourage their audiences to rethink old stories, modern authors, including myself, can do the same! And that’s an opportunity that’s available not just to creative writers but also to students as I encourage my undergraduates to make the poems their own as they write about them in their essays. That can be very empowering for a reader, I think.
My poem is also dedicated to another important influence from my time at Durham University, the late Michael O’Neill, a professor of Romantic literature and a very fine poet himself. Professor O’Neill encouraged me so much as a poet when I was a student and I hope he might have enjoyed this poem. He is much missed.
What does Old English have to offer us today?
So much! There are so many evocative and atmospheric poems that are ripe for retelling– the female voices of The Wife’s Lament and the eternally ambiguous Wulf and Eadwacer, for example. The Old English riddles are also an incredible resource for playful poetic techniques and humorous double entendre (the key riddle from the Exeter Book, for example, teases us with a cheeky alternative solution to the ‘wondrous thing that hangs by man’s thigh’!). Learning about Old English vocabulary encourages us to pay close attention to the language we use every day in the modern world and to think about the rich and exciting history of that language in literary works, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf!
How did “scop” evolve into “poet”?
Poet comes from the Greek, meaning ‘to make,’ and in Chaucer’s fourteenth century, poets were also called ‘makers’ in Middle English. But in Old English or Anglo-Saxon, the language of the Beowulf-poet, the word for poet was scop which is related to the verb scippan which means to shape or create. The poet is a shaper of stories. I love the Old English words for poem as they remind us of the oral performance context (leoþ means ‘song’ as well as poem, for example) and of the deliberately enigmatic nature of poetic language (gied means ‘riddle’ as well as song or lay, for example).
Laura Varnam
Laura Varnam is the Lecturer in Old and Middle English Literature at University College, Oxford. She was one of the three winners of the Nine Arches Press Primers competition in 2023 and her poetry sequence ‘Grendel’s Mother Bites Back’ was published in Primers Volume Seven (2024).
How I Write a Poem is our interview series digging in to the nitty-gritty of poetry writing. Explore the full series here.
