A (Modern) Reader’s Guide to Medieval Poetry

My recommendations for texts, translations, and reading practices.

After three essays that explored poetry as the first language of the soul, the centrality of the Psalms in the medieval poetic experience, and the classical poets who inspired medieval poets, we can conclude this introduction to medieval poetry with some practical recommendations.

This will be a two-part post. In this first part, we’ll cover some general issues relating to the difficult but wonderfully rewarding task of reading medieval poetry, and we’ll also discuss the first two texts on my list. These are the ones I would recommend if I were approached by hypothetical individuals who had no interest in reading more than two medieval poems. In the second part, I’ll round out the list with the next group of poems—i.e., the ones I would recommend to these hypothetical individuals after the first two had left them thirsty for more. As John Donne wrote in one of his sonnets,

But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed,
A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet.

He was not, I concede, referring to medieval literature here. He was referring to God. But the two are not unrelated. One is infinite Beauty; the other is a garden of beautiful language. One is eternal Truth; the other makes true wisdom alive to our minds. One is perfect Goodness; the other sings to us—enamors us—of that which is good.

As we would expect from a one-thousand-year era encompassing all of western Europe and inhabited by cultures whose entire mode of life was deeply poetic, the corpus of poetic literature from the Middle Ages is vast and diverse. The list of poems given below is painfully abbreviated, and the commentary on each poem is also painfully abbreviated. That’s the only realistic way to write a post like this, but more importantly, I’m really trying to share medieval literature with the broadest possible audience. To do that I’m working from one assumption and one premise. The assumption—a safe one, I think—is that most people have not the time or the desire to dedicate their lives to the study of medieval poetry. The premise is that medieval poetry should, nonetheless, be widely read, because it holds immense potential to enrich the lives of non-specialist readers. However, this potential is not so easily realized as is that of, say, a Dickens novel or a Shakespeare play, because there are two wide chasms that separate the modern reader from medieval poetry.

The first chasm is a cultural one: psychological, social, political, ideological, and aesthetic conditions have changed so drastically that reading medieval literature can feel like walking through ancient ruins in a fog bank. But you don’t have to live in medieval culture to start burning off this fog and seeing monuments instead of ruins; you just need to understand medieval culture—and especially medieval spirituality, which underlies and permeates all the art and literature of the Middle Ages. Fortunately, this is precisely what the Via Mediaevalis newsletter helps you to do, by bringing you into meaningful contact with authentic texts and rigorous historical scholarship, and by connecting you with like-minded folks from all over the world.

The second chasm is a linguistic one: Fluency in Latin is a rare thing these days, and the various vernacular languages have changed a lot. If you speak modern English, Old English is unintelligible and Middle English is exhausting at best. If you speak modern Italian, some of Dante’s fourteenth-century Florentine verse is still a serious challenge. If you speak modern French, the Song of Roland will probably give you a grammatical headache instead of poetic pleasure. And so forth. Thus, there’s no getting around the need for translations, but I know from experience that reading medieval poetry is still worth it—especially when the translated version is chosen carefully, and when the original language is used to enhance the new language in whatever ways are possible for a given reader.

The arc of heaven, the personification of Wisdom, and God the Creator; twelfth century.

The Divine Comedy
It is simply one of the greatest achievements in the history of human thought. I’ll quote from my earlier post on Dante’s inquiring yet ever-faithful mind:

Stanza after stanza, canto after canto, Dante sings of a spiritual journey that fuses poetry, narrative, psychology, and philosophy into a uniquely compelling and cosmic vision of the human experience. So supremely artistic and yet so keenly intellectual, the Divine Comedy leads us into rare moments of resonant union between heart and mind. To read it is to behold the breadth and depth of the beauty that is within man’s reach; to study it is the work of a lifetime.

Despite my appreciation for Longfellow and for archaic style in certain types of poetry, I’ve never been enthusiastic about his translation (now in the public domain) of the Commedia. Anthony Esolen, a well-known literary scholar and Substack writer, published a translation about twenty years ago, and though I assume it is excellent, I’m sorry to say that I’ve never had an opportunity to read it.

Thus, I’m going to recommend Allen Mandelbaum’s version, which is available online and in an Everyman’s Library edition that includes excellent explanatory notes. Though I vastly prefer reading something like the Commedia as a physical book, the online version has the major advantage of placing the English and the original Italian in parallel. If you can pronounce Italian and understand it even a little bit, you might read an occasional stanza and try to get a feeling for Dante’s vivid, energetic, sonorous verse.

Is Mandelbaum’s poetry a fully satisfying substitute for Dante’s? Absolutely not. Such is the harsh life of literary translators, a downtrodden troupe of which I am a member, and whose pitiable fate we shall pause for a moment to consider by reading some words of John Dryden, translator of the Aeneid and one of England’s most revered poets:

We dress the vineyard, but the wine is the owner’s: if the soil be sometimes barren, then we are sure of being scourged; if it be fruitful, and our care succeeds, we are not thanked; for the proud reader will only say the poor drudge has done his duty. But this is nothing to what follows; for, being obliged to make [the author’s] sense intelligible, we are forced to untune our own verses, that we may give his meaning to the reader. He who invents is master of his thoughts and words; he can turn and vary them as he pleases, till he renders them harmonious. But the wretched translator has no such privilege; for, being tied to the thoughts, he must make what music he can in the expression, and for this reason it cannot always be so sweet as that of the original.

Nevertheless—if you read Mandelbaum’s translation carefully and meditatively, consulting notes from time to time (but not too much), Dante will change your life.

Dante and Beatrice, in an illustration for the first canto of the Paradiso; fourteenth century.

Beowulf
It may not be possible to read Beowulf on a screen. I’m not even sure if it’s possible to read it—I mean really read it—during daylight hours, unless you’re in a quiet, dimly lit room. If the room is scented with candle smoke and aged hardwood, all the better.

Beowulf is your chance to sink into the deep lore and strong, sinewy verse of north-Germanic medieval culture. Here you are entering a dreamlike world of mead halls and murky lairs, kingly gifts and dragon hordes, feasts and funerals, heroes and monsters, astonishing valor and utter savagery—all in the bracing salt air of a cold sea, all under the watchful eye of heofena Helm: the Helm of the Heavens.

Finding the right Beowulf translation is not easy. First, there are so many to choose from. Second, translating Old English is a surprisingly difficult task, because to us, Old English seems to be simultaneously English and something else entirely. Anglo-Saxon poetry is thus a mystifying blend of familiar and foreign: so many words are recognizable, and so many are not; syntax is the same as ours one moment, and different the next; key poetic features survived into modernity, and yet the overall poetic physiognomy is that of a complete stranger.

When you try to transfer a poem from this “old” English to our “new” English, strange things can happen. Let’s take the following passage, from an early-twentieth-century attempt, as an example:

The grim and the greedy, soon yare was he gotten,
All furious and fierce, and he raught up from resting
A thirty of thanes, and thence aback got him
Right fain of his gettings, and homeward to fare,
Fulfilled of slaughter his stead to go look on.
Thereafter at dawning, when day was yet early,
The war-craft of Grendel to men grew unhidden,
And after his meal was the weeping uphoven,
Mickle voice of the morning-tide: there the Prince mighty,
The Atheling exceeding good, unblithe he sat,
Tholing the heavy woe; thane-sorrow dreed he

What on earth is this? I admit there is something pleasantly eccentric about it, but is this Beowulf? Is it English?

Seamus Heaney’s translation has become a standard text for college students, and it is excellent. It’s available in an edition with Old English and modern English in parallel, and Beowulf is a poem where parallel-text editions are preferred. Even if you make no attempt to read the Old English, you might enjoy being able to glance at it and ponder it from time to time. Or perhaps just having it there in your peripheral vision helps to make the modern-English version feel a bit more medieval. I also recommend translations by Stephen Mitchell and Michael Alexander.

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I hope the discussion has been helpful thus far. I’ll share the rest of my recommendations on Sunday, when I publish the second part of this post.