Hwæt! How We Have Heard Tales Sung: How Nineteenth-Century Translation Constructs Hyper-Aggressive Masculine Identities in Beowulf.

This paper discusses some of the earliest Modern English translations of Beowulf to assess how these authors have affected scholarship surrounding masculinity. By assessing the violent and emotional elements of early Victorian translation, I am able to unveil how English nationalism is injected into the poem wherever possible. Such behaviours have been carried forth as the pinnacle of Anglo-Saxon or Germanic masculinity, with little room left to assess the contradicting behaviours such as Hrothgar's shedding of tears or his settlement of feuds with gold instead of brute force. By conducting a close reading of the selected translations, namely John Mitchell Kemble and Benjamin Thorpe, I can identify elements of masculine-coded behaviours that translators have attempted to alter in order to construct a more consistently violent rhetoric in critical male characters, such as Beowulf, Hrothgar, and Wiglaf. This has had a profound effect on scholarship which, until the 1990s, excluded any major studies of masculinity, having been deemed too obvious to merit attention. By considering translation choices, we can further explore how masculinity is constructed within the poem and how these choices shape such identities. These translations are compared to one another using Bosworth-Toller online, as, by using a dictionary that was first published in the nineteenth-century, we can contrast translation choices within the confines of their contemporaries where possible, revealing the translators' own self-interests and political ideologies that continue to bleed into twenty-first-century reception and scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]