The passage in question is from the XIXth fitt (chapter) of the poem, and spans lines 1282-87. Night has fallen upon Denmark, and King Hrothgar’s hall is filled with sleeping warriors. They have spent all day celebrating because the monster Grendel, who used to terrorize them in their own hall, has just been defeated by the Geatish hero Beowulf. Unbeknownst to them, however, Grendel’s mother has risen from the mere in which she lives and is making her way to the hall with a mind to avenge her son. And as she enters the building to seize the first sleeper she finds, the poet makes the following comment (Old English text copied from Klaeber’s Beowulf: Fourth Edition; translation mine):

Wæs se gryre læssa

The horror was less

efne swa micle / swa bið mægþa cræft

By even as much as is a maiden’s strength,

wiggryre wifes / be wæpnedmen

A woman’s terror, than that of a man

þonne heoru bunden / hamere geþruen,

When the binded blade, beaten by hammers,

sweord swate fah / swin ofer helme

Blood-spangled sword, on the boar-crest helm

ecgum dyhttig / andweard scireð

Sheareth homeward with its sharp edges.

What’s the problem with this? First, Grendel’s mother turns out to be much more difficult for Beowulf to defeat than Grendel himself. Whereas the son is trounced and put to flight in a one-sided battle at King Hrothgar’s hall, when Beowulf encounters the mother in her own hall he is not only outwrestled by her but also comes close to being killed by her dagger. Thus the statement seems to make no sense, since one would think the poet ought to be explaining why Grendel’s mother is more terrifying and formidable than her son, rather than telling us in what proportion she is less so.

Second, why does the poet choose this very moment to remind his audience of the physical inferiority of women with regards to combat? Although the concept of ‘sexism’ (briefly mentioned by Gavin) should have no place in our considerations, it is simply bad storytelling to diminish the threatening stature of a monster at the very point when it ought to be raised to its height. Something, in short, is ‘off’ about this passage, and many editions contain a note on it to this effect.

Gavin’s proposed solution draws not only from the evidence of the text but also from his direct practical knowledge of swords and armour. First, he notes, modern stress tests of metal helmets show that swords are not actually likely to cut right through them. Second, the verb sc[i]eran (third person singular scireð) means to cut something but does not necessarily mean to cut through something – an ambiguity still reflected in our modern use of shear with regards to sheep. After reviewing some more details, he concludes that the sword in this passage should be envisaged as cutting against the helmet uselessly rather than shearing straight through it – and that the purpose of this image is to make the point that Grendel’s mother stands equal to her son in strength and terribleness, just as a helmet would stand equally strong against any attempt by an armed man or woman to cut through it with a sword.

It’s bold, it’s ingenious, and it’s rooted in practical knowledge. But I have to say that I’m not convinced. Since this is a relatively quick post (I wasn’t going to write about this crux here until I saw Gavin’s video, and I’m bunking off the hard task of deciphering the palimpsest in the last third of Beowulf), I shall lay out my objections in lazy listicle format.

1. Although the text doesn’t say explicitly that the sword cuts through the helmet, or even that the woman is the one holding it, this is the most obvious implication of the language and is nowhere contradicted outright.

2. The reader is bound to associate the hypothetical armed woman with Grendel’s mother (the only female in the poem who does any fighting), so the image of a martial maid hopelessly trying to cut through a helmet does more to diminish the horror of Grendel’s mother than does the conventional interpretation of the text.

3. Much later on in Beowulf (lines 2977-80), the Swedish king Ongenthew is slain by a sword-stroke that unambiguously breaks his helmet: ealdsweord eotenisc entiscne helm brecan ofer bordweall (“[by] the ogrish old sword the entish helm was smashed o’er the shieldwall”). Other heroic poems such as the Song of Roland also attest to the breaking of helmets by swords. All in all, it cannot be said that the poet’s contemporaries would have understood the blows of a sword upon a helmet to be futile in the absence of any explicit statement to this effect.

4. Though I lack experience with swords and helmets, my hunch is that the testimony of the poets more or less accurately reflects premodern reality. Modern re-enactors and larpers armed in medieval style do not hit each other over the head with full force, and stress tests of helmets against swords typically involve a limited number of strokes. Migration-era helmets handed down from one generation of warriors to another would have been hit at full force many more times over the years (as well as rusted by rain, bebrittled by frost, etc.), and so it should come as no surprise that they are represented in poetry as being split or shattered by the blows of swords.

We could go on, but I think that’s enough deboonking. As usual, my business here is to propose an alternative solution to the crux. The one that I have in mind hinges on a reinterpretation of the phrase be wæpnedmen.

At first glance, we can translate this hyper-literally as ‘by [a] weaponed-man’. This word can be taken as meaning either an armed man or a man as opposed to a woman, since Old English mann meant ‘person’ (a sense still preserved in mankind, the lot of man, etc.) and the ordinary meaning of wæpnedman was ‘a male’ in the sense of ‘a person armed with a phallus’. In this context, the wæpnedman seems to be both armed (at least, he is wearing a helmet) and contrasted with the woman – something that induces most translators to hedge their bets by translating the word as ‘armed man’, although it need not carry this meaning.

The use of the preposition be ‘by’ and the inflection of wæpnedmen in dative case (that is to say, as indirect object) present no fewer problems. In R.M. Liuzza’s translation, the phrase be wæpnedmen is translated as ‘than an armed man’ (i.e. a woman’s might is less than that of an armed man), which reflects the most common scholarly understanding of its meaning. But the ordinary way to express a comparison in Old English was to use þonne ‘than’ and a noun in nominative case (that is to say, as grammatical subject) – as seen for example in King Hrothgar’s comment (line 469) that his deceased elder brother was betera ðonne ic ‘better than I’. Tom Shippey, while retaining the standard interpretation, manages to clear up the case problem by rendering the phrase as ‘against an armed man’ (i.e. the horror of Grendel’s mother is less in the same proportion as is the strength of a woman against an armed man), but this still leaves the odd use of be in a context that ought to call for wið (the ancestor of with, but originally used in the sense of ‘against’).

All of this induces us to examine this phrase more closely; and the first thing we learn is that our view of it has been much prejudiced by the assumptions of Frederick Klaeber and other editors, who are responsible for its being rendered almost everywhere as be wæpnedmen. In the original text, handily available in full at Kevin Kiernan’s Electronic Beowulf, it looks much more like bewæpned men:

This, admittedly, may not count for much, since spacing in the manuscript is fairly arbitrary and may itself be the work of scribes who comprehended less of the original poem than do modern editors. All the same, the look of these words in the manuscript can only induce us to think of the phrase bewæpned man ‘a disarmed man’ (from the verb bewæpnian ‘to disarm’), and to wonder whether bewæpned men should not rather be read as Kiernan reads it: ‘to a man without weapons’ or ‘to one disarmed’. There’s nothing wrong with the use of dative case to express such a meaning, and there are no out-of-place prepositions, but does it make basic sense?

The answer, I would say, is yes. Our poet does not say that the horror of Grendel’s mother was less than that of Grendel; he simply says that it was ‘less’ (wæs se gryre læssa) and leaves the comparison to Grendel implicit. In the same way, when he brings up the fighting-strength of a woman as an analogy to this difference, he does not have to say explicitly that he is comparing it to that of a man or that the comparison is not in the woman’s favour. Instead, he says something more interesting: that the horror or terror of Grendel’s mother is less than that of Grendel vis-a-vis the Danes in the same proportion that the strength of a woman in battle is less than that of a man to someone without weapons. Obviously, if a man is disarmed and a fully armed woman is coming at him, it is cold comfort for him to think that at least she is only a woman and cannot kill him as hard as would an armed man.

In sum, then, the relative differences of battle-strength between Grendel and his mother are more or less irrelevant to the Danes, because they stand to these monsters as unarmed men stand to fully armed ones. So much for the idea that this passage diminishes the threat of Grendel’s mother.

But if the reading as bewæpned men works so well, why has (to my knowledge) every editor and translator except Kiernan opted to reject it and go on trying to torture be wæpnedmen into some sort of sense? I suspect it is because, given the subject matter of this passage, the appearance of wæpned man therein without its ordinary meaning of ‘a man, a male’ seems unlikely and strangely coincidental.

And this is where my take on this crux goes a bit beyond that of Kiernan. In my view, the style of the Beowulf-poet is wry and ambiguous, and the most likely reason for the coincidence of bewæpned men ‘disarmed one’ and wæpnedmen ‘man’ is that the word is a deliberate pun. In my view, it should be read as one word, bewæpnedmen – in nominative or subject case, bewæpnedman – literally meaning of course ‘unweaponed-man’, that is to say ‘disarmed one’, but also connoting ‘castrate’, ‘eunuch’, ‘man deprived of his phallus’. (Yes, I’m afraid the Beowulf-poet has gone far beyond ‘sexism’ here!)

This of course could only reinforce the meaning of the passage: Grendel’s mother stands to the Danes as an armed woman against an unarmed man, or by secondary implication as a martial maiden against a eunuch.2

In light of all the above, we might retranslate the Old English lines as follows:

Wæs se gryre læssa

The horror was less

efne swa micle / swa bið mægþa cræft

By merely so much as is a maiden’s strength,

wiggryre wifes / be wæpnedmen

A woman’s war-shock, to a weaponless man

þonne heoru bunden / hamere geþruen,

When the binded blade, beaten by hammers,

sweord swate fah / swin ofer helme

Blood-spangled sword, on the boar-crest helm

ecgum dyhttig / andweard scireð

Sheareth homeward with its sharp edges.

(The only problem with this is that the pun on ‘weaponless man’ does not really come across in modern English; for this reason, I would perhaps prefer a less literal translation as to one unmanned, by which is meant a man who has ‘gone to pieces’ on the battlefield and lost his will to fight.)

At this point Gavin might reasonably object that we have talked round this crux for 2000-odd words and yet failed to solve the problem with which we started, which is that the poet’s description of Grendel’s mother as less terrible than Grendel clashes with her much more impressive battle performance against Beowulf. But I think that this statement can be retained without any real error in continuity.

Let us take a closer look at the context in which Beowulf trounces the son and struggles against the mother. The Grendel fight begins in King Hrothgar’s hall, with Beowulf lying in wait for the monster, who enters unawares and is allowed to devour a sleeping man uncontested so that Beowulf can spring his trap. When he does so, he is said to have ‘locked the arm’ or ‘braced against the arm’ of Grendel (this being the probable idiomatic meaning of wið earm gesæt, usually mistranslated in literal wise as ‘sat against the arm’), which may mean that Beowulf held Grendel in such a way as to prevent him from striking back with his other arm. Having been ambushed thus, Grendel quickly loses the will to fight and spends the rest of the ‘battle’ trying to get away, which he accomplishes only by losing his arm and incurring a mortal wound.

By contrast, when Grendel’s mother approaches the same hall, she holds the advantage of surprise and proceeds much more cautiously. Having encountered a group of warriors, she does not slay them thirty at a time as her son used to do, but seizes one man in his sleep and flees back to her mere in fear for her own life – heo wæs on ofste, wolde ut þanon, feore beorgan, þa heo unfunden wæs (“she was all in haste, wanted out of there, to preserve her life, now she discovered was”, lines 1292-93). Since Grendel’s mother later turns out to be impervious to sword-strokes just like her son, the obvious explanation for her behaviour is that she is afraid of meeting Beowulf in the hall in the same way that Grendel did.

But she is evidently not afraid to meet him on the ‘home turf’ of her own mere. Having slain her victim, a beloved thane of King Hrothgar, she places his head upon the cliff that overhangs the mere and then disappears into it as if to bait Beowulf into a trap. After he has swum to the bottom of the mere, she ambushes him in the water with a crowd of ‘sea-beasts’ (sædeor) and drags him into her ‘abysmal dwelling’ (niðsele). It is only at this point that the fight proper begins, and once it proceeds to wrestling, it is perhaps telling that Grendel’s mother is not described as overpowering her foe with superior strength; rather the phrase used of Beowulf is oferwearp þa werigmod ‘he tumbled down weary-hearted’.

Some of these events are of course open to speculation. When Grendel’s mother attacks the Danes, they wake up and arm themselves (something that never seems to happen with Grendel), and perhaps her subsequent flight indicates the poet’s conception of her as an evil spirit that kills men only in their sleep. Perhaps the reason why Beowulf cannot overcome her by force is that she is magically energized by her evil mere-dwelling (or, alternatively, that he is enervated by it); perhaps she is also conceived in semi-allegorical wise as representing the spirit of vengeance, which only grows stronger from tit-for-tat blows.

But none of this is inconsistent with the observation that Grendel’s mother proves more dangerous than her son because of her cunning, and the fact that Beowulf encounters her in her own element, and not because she exceeds him in wiggryre ‘battle-horror’. Thus there is nothing wrong with the Beowulf-poet’s statement that Grendel’s mother is less terrible than her son, just as an armed woman is less terrible than an armed man to an unarmed man, etc. It’s not what you’ve got that counts, but what you do with it, unless of course you’ve got nothing.

Tip Jar

The couplet appears in the second ‘fitt’ or chapter, which narrates the terrible descent of Grendel upon Heorot, the hall of King Hrothgar of the Danes. We are told that Grendel visited the hall every night and killed anyone he found there; that men avoided the hall thereafter; that Grendel would not accept tribute from the Danes or pay recompense for the men he killed; that he ruled the misty wastelands inhabited by initiates of hell; and, finally, that he haunted the empty hall in the dead of night. And then, just before a change of subject to the suffering of King Hrothgar, the poet adds the following enigmatic words (lines 168-9):

No he þone gifstol  /  gretan moste
maþðum for metode  /  ne his myne wisse

The first line is the simpler. A certain he, presumably Grendel, may not (no…moste) address or approach (gretan) the ‘gift-stool’ (gifstol), by which is almost certainly meant a throne. It is the second line that complicates things. This begins with the words ‘treasure for the measurer’ (maþðum for metode) – with for perhaps used in the sense of ‘before’ and perhaps in that of ‘for’, and the word metod used apparently without regard to the context, since it is ordinarily a word for the Christian God. And it adds the phrase ne his myne wisse, literally “nor did [he] know his mind”, which is perhaps to be taken as meaning that Grendel lacked knowledge of God.

There is thus an apparent shift of emphasis, and even one of scene, from the first of these lines to the second. In the first line, we are still in King Hrothgar’s haunted hall, with Grendel for some reason unable to approach the throne despite having taken over the building in every other respect. In the second, it seems that the throne Grendel cannot approach is no longer that of Hrothgar but that of God. But which of these understandings is the correct one?

Before we lay out an answer, let’s see what scholars have made of the couplet. In his early, posthumously published translation of Beowulf, Tolkien came down on the side of the theological interpretation and rendered the lines as follows:

Never might he approach the precious Throne of grace in the presence of God, nor did he know His will.

Other translators and editors tend to favour this interpretation, although they disagree on lesser points such as the translation of myne. Howell D. Chickering, for example, translates the lines thus:

He could not come near the gift-throne, the treasure,

Because of God – he did not know His love.

And Tom Shippey’s new translation, which one imagines will be regarded as the authorized one for some time to come, produces yet another variant on the theme:

The Lord would not let him go up to the gift-throne,

Nor did he know the favour of the Lord.

Before we set about revising this interpretation, let’s take a deeper look at the reasoning behind it. For this we need look no further than Tolkien, who gives a detailed account of the crux in the scholarly notes appended to his translation (which were written much later than the translation and are much more representative of his considered views on the poem).

He begins by noting that the passage does not appear to be corrupt or otherwise in need of emendation:

This couplet is perhaps the most difficult in Beowulf. ... But the couplet does not appear to be corrupt: no one has seriously attempted to find relief in emendation, at any rate no emendation worthy of consideration has ever been proposed. The crux is one of translation. ... The difficulties are these: what are the references of hé [in line] 168, his [in line] 169? hé = Grendel, Hrothgar, Metod, gifstól, maþðum? Also the exact sense of grétan, of maþðum, and of myne wisse are all in doubt.

Now at first sight it looks as if hé was Grendel, and the gifstól was Hrothgar’s throne, and a contrast is intended between the normal behaviour of a loyal thane in the hall and the conduct of the wicked intruder who did not recognize the lawful authority of the king. And in favour of hé = Grendel is the fact that Grendel has been the subject since [line] 164.

Here Tolkien touches on an aspect of this poem that merits more emphasis and explanation. It is not just in this passage that the poet seems to draw a contrast between the behaviour of Grendel and that of a loyal thane; the same idea recurs in many others. Earlier in this fitt, line 142, he is called a healðegn (‘hall-thane’); much later on in line 790, when he draws near to the hall to attack Beowulf and his men, he is described as a rinc siðian (an ‘adventuring warrior’, or more idiomatically, an ‘errant knight’); when he wrestles Beowulf, in line 770, the two are called renweardas (either ærnweardas ‘hall-guards’ or regnweardas ‘wonder-guards’), a turn of phrase that almost equates the one to the other. The idea seems to be that Grendel is a shadow, antitype or degraded parody of the wandering hero, and a reference to the fact that he cannot hail the throne like a ‘normal’ thane would certainly fit the established pattern.

grétan means fundamentally ‘hail, address, greet’, but in Old English, through the usages ‘accost, address oneself to’ it may be used (as a litotes) for ‘assail’; or it may come to mean or imply ‘set hand to, touch’... But we perceive that the most natural sense of gifstól grétan is not ‘touch’ but ‘hail, address the throne (of gifts)’. maþm means a gift, and so can of course repeat or refer to the gif-element in gifstól; but it cannot refer to the whole gifstól – it cannot mean ‘the throne’. Maþm is a thing given in exchange or as reward (‘a precious thing’ only secondarily); and kings, even in fairy-story, do not give away their thrones. It is however a thing that a king on his throne might give...

Here Tolkien departs from the many translators who take maþðum to be a circumlocutory repetition of gifstol, that is to say another reference to the throne. And I would say he is correct in this. The Old English word maþm (restored by Tolkien to modern English as mathom) refers to the sort of movable property that can be hoarded as a treasure or given to someone else as a gift; that it should refer to a throne set into a hall and regarded as an inviolate symbol of kingship is out of the question.

myne is a noun related to munan as cyme [‘coming’] is to cuman. munan means ‘think of, have in mind or purpose’. myne thus means ‘thinking of (a person or thing) – intention, will – recollection’. Actually elsewhere it is mostly recorded in a good sense, so that contextually it may mean ‘good will (towards), kind thought (of)’. Now witan in Old English can be used with verbal nouns in the sense ‘know, feel’: as witan ege ‘feel fear, fear’. So witan myne could be taken to mean ‘have thought or memory (of).’ But the usual sense in verse is purpose, wish... So that clearly ne his myne wisse is most likely to mean ‘and did not know his purpose/wish’. But it might mean ‘and did not have thought for/of him’. ...

We shall return to this phrase witan myne below; for now let us only note that, according to Tolkien’s account of its components, its meaning could be interpreted as ‘feel goodwill towards someone’ or ‘have a kind thought for someone’ in addition to the other options such as ‘know somone’s mind’.

With these preliminaries it will at once be found that the throne cannot be Hrothgar’s. ‘Grendel could not touch (or approach) the bountiful throne, receive a gift in the presence of (or because of) God, and knew not His purpose (or took no thought of Him).’ ... But could it be? Why could Grendel not approach the throne, when he was in sole control of Heorot all night? There was no magical or divine protection over the throne any more than over the hall or its inhabitants, and no doubt Grendel could have sat in the king’s throne and gnawed bones there... And it is no solution to reply that what is meant is that Grendel could not come before the throne and get a maþum, like an honest þegn [thane]. For he could have done so, if he wished. ... Had he desired peace or truce the Danes would have welcomed him…

It becomes plain therefore that the language is theological. gifstól is God’s throne, and is an example of the frequent use of heroic language with theological import; gif- (and its equivalent maþum) refers to divine grace or mercy…

Try again. ‘Never (or in no wise) could he have recourse to the gracious throne and its bounty in the presence of God (or because of God, i.e. because God did not allow this); and he knew not His will.’

We need follow Tolkien no further than this explanation of his old translation, because from this point on he throws it out and embarks on a radical reinterpretation of the couplet in which it is Hrothgar who cannot approach the throne of God. This has not convinced the majority of Beowulf scholars, and I am not convinced by it either. But nor do I find the usual translations convincing; and I can see why the older Tolkien might have been dissatisfied with his early conclusions, aware that something was not right, and willing to entertain more tenuous suspicions about the couplet (specifically, that some monkish scribe saw a chance to have a dig at a heathen king and clumsily interpolated it).

Having allowed The Don to lay out a basic map of the territory and provide some interpretative tools, let us take what we can and leave what we must, and embark upon a new solution1 to the crux. We shall have to cross some rather thin ground, and I am not as expert guide as I would like to be, so any constructive criticism is more than welcome. When there’s a will, though, there’s always a way.

Tip Jar

One word that neither Tolkien nor anyone else seems to want to dispute is metod, the standard translation of which is ‘measurer’, and which in practically all interpretations of this couplet is simply assumed to mean ‘God’. Admittedly, there is a good reason for this: practically all instances of the standalone word metod in Old English verse refer to God, and the only other attested meaning of the word in compounds is ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ (as in e.g. metodsceaft, ‘fate-decree’). The Old Saxon word metod is used throughout the Heliand in the same dual sense of ‘God’ and ‘fate’, whereas the Old Norse cognate mjǫtuðr seems to mean ‘fate’ and has been extended from this meaning into that of ‘bane’, ‘death’. In the face of such a chorus of corpus readings, there is surely no case for saying that opinion is divided on this subject.

The problem with this logic is that poets – particularly those gifted with skill and subtlety, as the Beowulf-poet was – do not always use words according to their common meanings, or at least do not always use them solely in accordance with these meanings. Perhaps in nine cases out of ten the ‘democracy’ of the corpus will give the right judgement; but in the case of a crux that has vexed scholars for two hundred years, one would think that it is high time we consulted the minority report. That is to say – it is time to engage in the risky business of applying logic, reading between the lines, niggling over details and haggling over interpretations, and so on.

To lay out my conclusion before my argument, I suspect that metod could technically be used to in the sense of king or ruler, and that the gifstol that Grendel cannot approach is therefore technically that of King Hrothgar. In support of this, I appeal first to the same corpus that has given us the majority verdict. This is a sample of what the Bosworth-Toller dictionary gives us by way of examples for the use of metod in the sense of ‘God’:

The first example, metod engla, lifes brytta ‘measurer of angels, dispenser of life’, strongly resembles formulaic expressions describing kings (to make up a typical example, drihten Geata sinces brytta ‘ruler of Geats, dispenser of treasure’). The second is found next to cyning ‘king’, as though the meanings were equivalent or similar, and the same basic word association is found in the sixth. But how are we to understand the fifth example, middangeardes meotud ‘middle-earth’s measurer’?

The real question is, what is the literal meaning of metod? The old translation ‘measurer’ is obscure and ambiguous, hence often confused with ‘maker’, ‘creator’, or ‘divine architect’. But what it really means is dispenser (in the sense of ‘one who measures out’); a closer translation yet would be meter, in the sense of ‘one who metes out’, since the noun metod comes from the verb metan ‘to mete’. The Bosworth-Toller entry for this word is also quite enlightening:

In the second example from the Anglo-Saxon Psalter, the Latin metibor comes from Psalm 59:8 in the Latin Vulgate, and refers to Solomon’s intention to “divide Shechem and measure off the valley of tabernacles” (partibor Sichimam et convallem tabernaculorum metibor). Here, then, metan is used of a king’s parcelling out land in his role as a dispenser of all things within his kingdom; and so also the fifth example, which reads ‘sometimes with his hands he [i.e. Satan in hell] meted out woes and afflictions”. Even the fourth example, has some relevance to the proper role of a ruler, since it comes from Matthew 7:1-2: “judge not, that ye not be judged, for with what judgement ye judge ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete it shall be measured unto you”.

It would seem, then, that the act of meting or dispensing was associated with (among other things) the distributory and judicial roles of a ruler, and that a meter or dispenser would have been implicitly understood as being synonymous with a ruler. Thus middangeardes meotud (used of Christ on the cross in the poem Judgement Day) could be translated as ‘middle-earth’s measurer’, but also as ‘middle-earth’s lord’ (or, if we want to retain the chime of sounds, its master or commander), albeit in the specific aspect of dispenser of goods unto its inhabitants. Indeed the change in sense of Old English metod from earthly to divine power may well be said to resemble that of modern English lord, although the lack of written material from older pre-Christian society would have ensured that the shift was more decisive.

We could continue scrutinizing the fine sense of metod as applied to God, or seek out more usage examples for metan, but let us confine ourselves to just one more example. The poem called the Wanderer opens with the following words:

Oft him anhaga / are gebideð

(The one who is alone ever waits for favour)

Metudes miltse…

(The measurer’s kindness…)

A close reading of this poem (I’m afraid my own translation is far from adequate, though I have done better with the Seafarer) will show that it consists of one long analogy between the traditional lordless exile and the fallen seeker of God, in which the heroic exile theme gradually falls away to reveal the underlying Christian homily. Except (apparently) for this early use of metud, direct references to God are avoided through the beginning and middle of the poem, so that it reads like a heroic lament from an exiled warrior mourning his lord, friends and feast-hall and seeking out new ones. Then the perspective shifts to a meditation on worldly impermanence – also couched in traditional themes of ruin, desolation and heroic moral wisdom – and only at the very end do we find an unambiguously Christian statement of faith in the ‘Father in heaven (Fæder on heofonum). From this point we can look back on the earlier verses and, perhaps, conclude that not all of them are what they seem to be.

Quite clearly, this poem has been crafted with care according to a definite plan, by a skilled poet whose purpose may or may not have been to ‘hook’ the readers of pagan lays into a disguised Christian homily. Are we to suppose that such a master cackhandedly gave his game away at the beginning with a word, metud, that unambiguously meant ‘God’? Is it not more likely that he hinted at his true purpose with a word that could mean either God or a dispenser of goods?

This little discussion of metod would not be complete without a brief look at its Old Norse cognate, mjǫtuðr (and since I know next to nothing of Norse, I am indebted to Konrad Rosenberg for clarification of the meaning). The Wiktionary entry for this word, which originates from Geir Zoëga’s Old Icelandic dictionary, presents us with a tempting red herring:

‘Ruler’? ‘Judge’? Confirmation bias intensifies. Alas, Zoëga’s dictionary gives no examples for these latter two definitions, and it would seem that only the first one ‘dispenser of fate’ stands on any sort of firm ground (perhaps the latter two were meant to read as appendages to it, in the sense of ‘dispenser of fate, ruler thereof, judge thereof’). The Cleasby-Vigfusson dictionary gives some inconclusive examples, but some of these (according to Rosenberg) most likely refer to the mjǫtviðr ‘measure-tree’, i.e. Yggdrasil; and although Johan Fritzl’s Old Norwegian dictionary defines the word as ‘ruler, one possessing power’, it cites Anglo-Saxon material in support of this. Mjǫtuðr in Old Norse seems if anything more obscure than metod in Old English, and I would rather not hang any part of my argument directly upon it.

What I will say is that the divergence in meaning between the Old English/Saxon cognates and the Old Norse one is interesting, and suggests that the the original of both (reconstructed as Proto-Germanic *metōduz) had some concrete meaning that was abstracted and analogized in different ways. Either this was simply fate (i.e. the noun was an abstraction like Old English wyrd ‘eventuality’ and orlæg ‘fate, destiny’), or else it referred to a personage (as does its descendants), in which case the referent could be adumbrated as one on high who dispenses things good and ill. A god, perhaps? Or, as I suspect, a ruler in some pre-Christian sacral aspect (such as sacrifice) that was wiped from Germanic culture after Christianization and survived only in analogies? At this point we are in the realm of wild guesses.

This is about as far as we can come to proving our case, and I would be the first to admit that we are not all of the way there. So let us rather show that the proposed meaning ‘king, lord, dispenser’ for metod, once granted provisionally, gives us the best possible chance of making sense of the Beowulf couplet.

Of course there is no question of the poet’s randomly choosing to use the word in such an obscure sense; in all likelihood, he knew what he was doing. What we have here is not an awkward turn of phrase, nor a cackhanded shift from narrative to homily, but a case of intentional ambiguity. At the lower, physical level, Grendel cannot approach the throne of King Hrothgar in Heorot; but at the higher, spiritual one, it is the throne of God in Heaven that is denied to him. This, perhaps, can be entered into evidence for the theory that Grendel is predestined to damnation. But according to patristic lights, a spiritual meaning does not abolish a literal one; and so how, as Tolkien asks, is Grendel disbarred from approaching a throne in a hall over which he exercises sole and total mastery?

In my view Tolkien’s case for the unlikelihood of this is quite overstated. In the Beowulvian world, it is God’s ban on Cain and his kind that has hitherto kept Grendel confined to the ‘moors’ (moras, possibly ‘marshes’), despite his being invulnerable to weapons and apparently strong enough to take on any number of armed men. For some reason known only to the Lord, Grendel is permitted to overstep his bounds and to attack Heorot and its inhabitants for a time; but something, presumably the divine ban, prevents him from ranging further to devour the men in their own houses (which, as we find out when Beowulf finally visits God’s vengeance on Grendel, stand close enough to the hall for those within to hear the noise of battle). For all his monstrous physicality, Grendel’s behaviour resembles that of an evil spirit hemmed in by invisible borders, and there seems no reason why one of these should not prevent him from defiling a symbol of kingship (especially one that may have had sacral elements).

Having said all that, there may be a more prosaic reason why Grendel cannot ‘greet the giftstool’. If gretan means just ‘touch’ or ‘approach’, surely only God could prevent Grendel from doing that during his nightly hauntings; but if it entails some sort of ritual salute to the throne for metode ‘[be]fore the measurer’, and extends also to at least one maþðum ‘treasure’, then the obvious reason why Grendel cannot do it is that King Hrothgar has vacated the hall and probably taken his hoard of maðmas with him.

These arguments would suffice to make basic sense of the couplet; but since the extension of gretan to a single maþðum is awkward, I would go further. Although, as Tolkien remarked, emendation has never been a popular solution to this crux, it seems to me that a change of maþðum (singular, subject) into maðþmum (plural, indirect object) would result in much better sense. This entails the restoration of a single m, which might have been dropped by the first Beowulf-scribe due to his notorious incomprehension of what he was copying, or else due to his carelessness (note that he misspells Grendel as Gredel in line 591, brimwylf ‘sea-wolf’ as brimwyl ‘sea-wool’ in line 1506, etc.) The result in the present context is first that Grendel is no longer unable ‘to hail the giftstool, the treasure’, but is rather unable ‘to hail the giftstool with treasures’, and second, that for metode can now be interpreted as ‘for [the sake of] the measurer’ as well as ‘before [in front of] or because of the measurer’.

Does this make sense? Some might say it is more natural to assume that Grendel, were he an “honest þegn”, would be going to the gift-throne to get a mathom rather than in order to give some to the king. But there is at least one ritual occasion on which a good thane would be giving the mathoms rather than getting them, and this is of course after victory in battle and taking of spoil. Moreover, since the king was not to then hoard this loot for himself but to distribute it according to merit (a convention most likely settled upon in order to prevent an army on the battlefield from degenerating into a mob of looters spoiling the dead), it is precisely in this context that his role as ‘dispenser’ might be emphasized. It is in accordance with this tradition that Beowulf, after triumphing over Grendel and his mother and receiving a wealth of horses, weapons and gold from Hrothgar, relinquishes almost all the treasure to his own king Hygelac and receives his own lands, hall and throne in return.

Recall that at the beginning of this fitt, or chapter, Grendel has made his first attack on the Danes and slaughtered thirty of them before carrying some away. As he makes his way back to his moorland lair, he is described as huðe hremig ‘exulting in spoil’, a darkly ironic reference to the corpses that he will feed upon at his leisure; and when the sun rises on the blood-stained Heorot, it is said to reveal Grendel’s guðcræft ‘war-craft’ or ‘battle-might’ to men. Thus, as we have said, does our poet portray Grendel as a shadow or degenerate parody of a bold young warrior.

The idea that this anti-thane cannot, after all his victories, offer his grisly prizes to King Hrothgar and receive the proper gifts in return would be fully in keeping with this theme. The only slight difficulty is that Hrothgar would probably like to have some of his liegemen’s corpses returned so that he can give them proper funeral rites, and might be willing to pay for them quite handsomely. But the very nature of Grendel (which extends to his whole race, and is ultimately a result of the divine ban) makes this an impossibility, and so it remains true to say that it is not granted him to offer gifts before the throne or to participate in any of the other rites of warriorhood.

And this brings us nicely to the last piece of our puzzle: ne his myne wisse.

The Bosworth-Toller entry for the word myne gives three definitions: ‘the mind’, ‘desire’, ‘will’ or ‘purpose’, and ‘love’. Note, however, that the sole two occurences of witan myne – which one would think to be a set phrase with an idiomatic meaning – are arbitrarily split across two of these definitions, the ‘will’ or ‘purpose’ one and the ‘love’ one:

The first instance is of course the one from Beowulf, and the second is from the Wanderer, which as we have said consists mostly of a sombre meditation on the theme of heroic exile. The phrase appears in the context of the exiled protagonist’s long, apparently fruitless search for a new lord and new friends (by which we are, perhaps, to understand religious conversion and monasticism):

Sohte seledreorig / sinces bryttan

([I] sought, hall-sick, a sharer of treasure)

hwær ic feor oþþe neah / findan meahte

(Where’er I might find one, or far or near)

þone þe in meoduhealle / [min2] mine wisse

(One who in the mead-hall [my] myne wisse)

oþþe mec freondleasne / frefran wolde

(Or wished to comfort one quit of friends)

Whatever the dictionary says, it seems unlikely that min myne wisse in this context means ‘felt love for me’, and nor is it likely to mean ‘knew my purpose’. The exile is unlikely to find anyone who loves him in a world of strangers, and his purpose is not at all unclear to others; what he is searching for is someone who feels sorry for him, who is kindly disposed towards him, who has a care for him. If this was the idiomatic meaning of witan myne, it is one that applies just as well to its use in Beowulf – since, as we have said, Grendel can neither greet the throne of King Hrothgar nor that of God, and Grendel has no care either for King Hrothgar or for God.

At this point we have written some 5000 words on these two lines, and done about all we can to shed light on them. All that remains is to retranslate them according to our new understanding. First, we might try a relatively literal translation:

Though he was never allowed    to salute the gift-stool
With goods for the measurer –    not gave any thought to him.

This is not ideal, because the word allowed is not right, and the double meaning of metod is obscured by that old fossil measurer. Goods also does little to emphasize the ritual giving of precious gifts. Let’s try again, then:

Though it behooved him not    to hail the gift-throne
With presents for the lord –    nor did he pay any mind to him.

Better, perhaps; but while lord might seem suitably ambiguous in theory, it does not actually reproduce the effect of metod, because lord in the secular sense is far less obscure and unlikely to lead to any double takes. Perhaps, then, we should choose analogy over literalism, which in this case means giving an old mistranslation a second chance. Although metod does not mean maker, this word carries the same strong association with God, yet also applies to King Hrothgar in this context since he is the maker of Heorot and its gift-throne (having ordered the building of the hall early on in the poem).

Here’s how this might work:

Though he was never privy    to approach the gift-throne
With presents for its maker –    nor paid any mind to him.

Although the phrase is not quite as lucently ambiguous as for metode or for the lord, in speech (at least in my dialect of English) it is an easy matter to erase the audible difference between for its maker and for his Maker. And it should go without saying, easy as it is to forget, that writing is secondary to speaking when it comes to poetry.

I am thus inclined to plump for the third of these translations, but I would be interested in hearing the opinions of others, as well as (to repeat myself) any critiques of the arguments outlined above.

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By ‘sooner’ I mean, day over lent tea, the end of this year. I mention this by way of warning to my readers that I may be writing rather a lot about this one poem during this time. Be assured that the specialization is only temporary.

Of course Beowulf would hardly be worth writing about were it not connected to all sorts of wider and higher things, such as oral poetry, Germanic legend and Christian tradition. Conversely, it is only in the light of all these that the poem can be interpreted. But it is easier to concoct vague theories about Beowulf on the basis of everything surrounding it than to start by penetrating the harder ground of the text itself, and I forbear to do things the easy way. Although I do not have the expertise on the Old English language or the discipline of philology that I would like to have, I have learned what I can and studied the text closely with the aid of several scholarly editions, and I have my reservations about some of the prevailing theories. Some of these are probably wrong, but that is all the more reason to post them on this blog, since any pushback can only lead to my making fewer blunders in the finished book.

Let me pick an example that demonstrates the natural progression from text to wider context. One thing about Beowulf that has fascinated many, and which encapsulates its marriage of Germanic and Biblical tradition, is that it traces the descent of the ogres or giants known in Old English as eotenas and in Old Norse as jǫtnar (i.e. ettins, jotunns) to the figure of Cain in Genesis. The ogres, elves and other supernatural entities are members of ‘Cain’s kin’ or ‘Cain’s race’ (Caines cynn), doomed to roam the wilderness and live at odds with humanity due to the original exile of their forefather.

The poem establishes this background story in its first ‘fitt’ or chapter, which introduces King Hrothgar of Denmark and his ogrish antagonist Grendel. We shall start by excerpting the relevant lines from the text, along with a fairly close translation that follows the conventional understanding. Then we shall take a look at what may or may not be wrong with both.

Wæs se grimma gæst    Grendel haten
(This grim ghastly spirit    was Grendel hight;)

mære mearcstapa,    se þe moras heold
(A rank border-crosser    ruling the moorlands,)

fen ond fæsten.    Fifelcynnes eard 
(The fen and fastness.    That fief of monsters)

wonsæli wer    weardode hwile
(He had haunted awhile,    a wight unblest,)

siþðan him Scyppend    forscrifen hæfde
(After the Creator    had erst condemned him)

in Caines cynne.    Þone cwealm gewræc
(Midst the kin of Cain – whose killing of Abel)

ece Drihten,    þæs þe he Abel slog.
(Was punished thus    by the Eternal Lord.)

Ne gefeah he þære fæhðe,    ac He hine feor forwræc
(He frowned on the bloodshed;    far did the Measurer)

Metod, for þy mane,    mancynne fram.
(Banish the murderer    from the brood of men.)

Þanon untydras    ealle onwocon
(And there woke from his seed    all those wicked offspring:)

eotenas ond ylfe    ond orcneas
(The ogres, the elves,    the Orcus-corpses;)

swylce gigantas,    þa wið Gode wunnon
(And suchwise the giants    who with God contended)

lange þrage.    He him ðæs lean forgeald.
(For a lengthy while –    til their reward He gave them.)

There’s a great deal of interest in these lines – in particular, ‘ogres, elves and Orcus-corpses’ (eotenas, yfle ond orcneas), on which I hope to say more in a later post. For the time being, though, all that concerns us is the portion in bold: “since the Creator had erst condemned him [i.e. Grendel] midst the kin of Cain” (siþðan him Scyppend forscrifen hæfde in Caines cynne). By condemnation is meant, presumably, a ban of exile that forces Grendel to haunt the wilderness; the word used in the text is the relatively uncommon forscrifen ‘forshriven’, past participle of forscrifan ‘forshrive’, defined by Wiktionary and the Bosworth-Toller dictionary as ‘to proscribe, to condemn’.

There are two puzzling things about this phrase.

First, the surface meaning seems to suggest that God has passed His proscription directly upon Grendel (and, recalling the preceding line, that his haunting the moors began from the date of this event). This, of course, is not so; as the rest of the passage clarifies, the proscription was passed upon Cain alone and inherited by his descendants. Since Grendel has a living mother who is said elsewhere in the poem to have ruled her realm for ‘a hundred seasons’ (hund missera), that is to say fifty years, he clearly stands at the tail end of this line of descent and would not have been around to follow Cain into exile at the beginning of the world.

Such objections can become a bit obtuse, at least in cases where the approximate meaning is not in doubt. As Frederick Klaeber explains, “originally, of course, it was Cain who was proscribed and exiled, but, being one of Cain’s offspring, Grendel is included in the condemnation”. And indeed this is implied by the phrase in Caines cynne, which means what it appears to mean: ‘in Cain’s kin’. This is usually interpreted as equivalent to mid Caines cynne ‘among Cain’s kin’.

There’s a problem here as well, though, albeit an ‘academic’ one.

Without going into too much detail, Old English verses (i.e. half-lines) are shaped according to regular metrical categories known as Sievers Types. These are usually respected by the Beowulf-poet, and can thus be used to gauge the likelihood that a given verse is authorial or corrupt. The half-line in Caines cynne happens to be extremely strange in metrical terms (though not technically illegitimate); according to Leonard Neidorf in his article on ‘Cain, Cam, Jutes and Giants’, the verse is “an anomaly, finding no secure parallel in any of the other 6000-plus verses in Beowulf”. He finds it so strange that he is prepared to read it instead as in Cames cynne ‘in Cham’s kin’ – that is to say, among the kin of Ham, the son of Noah who was banished by his father for ‘uncovering his nakedness’ and identified in several traditions as the progenitor of a cursed race. This corrects the metre all right, but at the price of making the poem contradict itself, since as we have seen the phrase in Caines cynne is directly followed by a reference to the murder of Abel.1

Might there not be a better solution?

The simplest one that springs to my mind would be to lop the final -e off the word cynn ‘race’, so that the verse reads in Caines cynn. This, I think, would produce a wholly normal type of verse according to Sieversian scansion.2 But how would it alter the meaning of the phrase?

Again without going into too much detail, the function of the final -e on the noun cynn is to mark it as a location (for which the dative case, signifying the indirect object, was used). We are assuming here that the -e was added by the scribe because he didn’t understand what he was copying, saw the preposition in and made a wrong assumption on the basis of its most common usage.3 Deleting -e turns the noun cynn into a destination (for which the accusative case, signifying the direct object, was used), and this alters the meaning of in from ‘in [a location]’ to ‘into [a destination]’, so that the phrase now carries the meaning ‘into Cain’s kin’.

Siþðan him Scyppend forscrifen hæfde in Caines cynn would thus come to mean “since the Creator had ‘forshriven’ him into the race of Cain”. Does this make any sort of sense?

The answer depends on what we make of the verb forscrifan, and whether we accept the limitation of its meaning to ‘proscribe, condemn’. “Proscribed into the race of Cain” makes little sense; “condemned into the race of Cain” is a little better; but something like “forlotted, ill-ordained, malignly assigned into the race of Cain” would be the most desirable interpretation. Although the dictionaries tell of no such meaning for forscrifan, the base word scrifan ‘to shrive’ could mean ‘allot’, ‘ordain’, ‘assign’, etc., and the usual function of the for- prefix is to add a negative or pejorative meaning that is quite appropriate in this case.4

The authorial meaning, then, could be that Grendel has haunted the moors ever since his Creator (Scyppend, a word nowhere else used for God in this poem) doomed him to the race of Cain – that is to say, ever since he was born to his Cain-descended mother. Doubtless the phrasing is strange, and I do think it likely that the poet wished to evoke the idea of a divine proscription or banishment passed on Grendel himself, but this is not the literal meaning of his words.

Let’s see how this might work in translation:

...Fifelcynnes eard 
(...That fief of monsters)

wonsæli wer    weardode hwile
(He had haunted awhile,    a wight unblest,)

siþðan him Scyppend    forscrifen hæfde
(After his Creator    had erst fordoomed him)

in Caines cynn.    Þone cwealm gewræc
(To the kin of Cain –    whose killing of Abel)

ece Drihten,    þæs þe he Abel slog.
(Had been punished thus    by the Eternal Lord:)

Ne gefeah he þære fæhðe,    ac He hine feor forwræc
(He frowned on the bloodshed;    far did the Measurer)

Metod, for þy mane,    mancynne fram...
(Banish the murderer    from the brood of men...)

We might well have used condemned or just doomed instead of coining the word fordoomed, but the point is to evoke the meaning of foredoomed – that is to say, ‘pre-doomed’, or predestined. And here we encounter the final obstacle to our argument, one that obliges us to negotiate it by going beyond the text.

Grendel is described by the Beowulf-poet as an ‘enemy of God’ (Godes andsaca), who ‘bore God’s anger’ (Godes yrre bær) on the night of his death, after which he laid down his ‘heathen soul’ (hæþene sawle) and was received by hell (him hel onfeng). At no point is it suggested that any sort of redemption is available to this reprobate creature. He acts according to the ways of his kind, and gets his just deserts when God decrees that his bloody sojourn on earth should be ended by a hero (i.e. Beowulf).

That Grendel was nevertheless brought into the world by the will of God is an almost inescapable inference from the general worldview of the poet, who attributes even the coming of spring to the will of God. But to imply, as we have done, that he consciously conceived of Grendel as having been doomed to hell from the time of his being ensouled on earth is as much as to say that he was a believer in ‘double predestination’ – the idea that some are brought into the world to be saved and others to be damned. And this is associated, at least in the modern mind, with Puritan-Calvinist doctrines that far postdate Anglo-Saxon England.

But there is no difficulty in proving that the basic idea of double predestination (at least, we might say, the embryo from which the Calvinists developed it) was formulated early on in Christianity and would certainly have been available to English Christians in the Anglo-Saxon era. And as it happens, there is also reason to think that they would have closely associated it with the story of Cain and his descendants.

Prior to researching the matter of this post, I was aware that the subject of predestination had been treated in St. Augustine’s City of God, but was not sure whereabouts in this huge tome to find it. An internet search pointed me to Book XV, Chapter 1, which begins with a clear statement of the doctrine:

Yet I trust we have already done justice to these great and difficult questions regarding the beginning of the world, or of the soul, or of the human race itself. This race we have distributed into two parts, the one consisting of those who live according to man, the other of those who live according to God. And these we also mystically call the two cities, or the two communities of men, of which the one is predestined to reign eternally with God, and the other to suffer eternal punishment with the devil.

On these two cities, Augustine goes on to say the following:

Of these two first parents of the human race, then, Cain was the first-born, and he belonged to the city of men; after him was born Abel, who belonged to the city of God. … Accordingly, it is recorded of Cain that he built a city, but Abel, being a sojourner, built none. For the city of the saints is above, although here below it begets citizens, in whom it sojourns till the time of its reign arrives, when it shall gather together all in the day of the resurrection; and then shall the promised kingdom be given to them, in which they shall reign with their Prince, the King of the ages, time without end.

Cain is thus identified as the founder of the earthly city and the first progenitor of the damned – specifically, the pre-Flood or ‘antediluvian’ generations. In the apocryphal Book of Enoch, these antediluvian Cain-descendants are identified as giants, and it is clear that the Beowulf-poet also identified them as such (hence his wry statement that the gigantas got a lean or ‘reward’ from God, that is to say the Flood).5 Although Augustine denied the canonical status of the Book of Enoch, he goes on (in Chapter 9) to lend some support to it on this point:

Wherefore no one who considerately weighs facts will doubt that Cain might have built a city, and that a large one, when it is observed how prolonged were the lives of men, unless perhaps some sceptic take exception to this very length of years which our authors ascribe to the antediluvians and deny that this is credible. And so, too, they do not believe that the size of men’s bodies was larger then than now, though the most esteemed of their own poets, Virgil, asserts the same… thus declaring his opinion that the earth then produced mightier men. And if in the more recent times, how much more in the ages before the world-renowned deluge? But the large size of the primitive human body is often proved to the incredulous by the exposure of sepulchres…in which bones of incredible size have been found or have rolled out. I myself, along with some others, saw on the shore at Utica a man’s molar tooth of such a size, that if it were cut down into teeth such as we have, a hundred, I fancy, could have been made out of it. But that, I believe, belonged to some giant. For though the bodies of ordinary men were then larger than ours, the giants surpassed all in stature. And neither in our own age nor any other have there been altogether wanting instances of gigantic stature, though they may be few.

This passage is relevant to Beowulf on three points. First, as we have said, it identifies the antediluvian Cain-descendants with giants (albeit cautiously, but the identification is strengthened in later passages6). Second, it identifies them as city-builders; and although the building of cities might seem quite foreign to the savage Grendel and his mere-dwelling mother, it is well known that the traditional (or literary?) Anglo-Saxon imagination associated the ruins of stone cities with the ‘old work of ents’ (eald enta geweorc). Third, it mentions relatively gigantic men in later history, two examples of which would be Beowulf and his uncle Hygelac (a real king of huge stature whose bones were supposedly preserved and shown to travellers).

Later on in the discussion (Chapter 20), Augustine returns to the subject of Cain, and says that the direct line of his descent was wholly extinguished by the Flood:

Some one will say, If the writer of this history [i.e. Genesis] intended, in enumerating the generations from Adam through his son Seth, to descend through them to Noah, in whose time the deluge occurred, and from him again to trace the connected generations down to Abraham, with whom Matthew begins the pedigree of Christ the eternal King of the city of God, what did he intend by enumerating the generations from Cain, and to what terminus did he mean to trace them? We reply, To the deluge, by which the whole stock of the earthly city was destroyed, but repaired by the sons of Noah. For the earthly city and community of men who live after the flesh will never fail until the end of this world, of which our Lord says, “The children of this world generate, and are generated.” But the city of God, which sojourns in this world, is conducted by regeneration to the world to come, of which the children neither generate nor are generated.

The line of the damned who belong to the ‘earthly city’ is thus interrupted by the Flood, which destroyed the giant descendants of Cain, and continued afterward by the sons of Noah (dicussed in book XVI). These are of course Shem, Japheth and the cursed son Ham, whose descendants Augustine identifies with the Jews, the non-Jewish nations and the ‘tribe of heretics’ respectively. Except for some references to Ham’s descendant Nimrod, the ‘giant on the earth’ who founded the city of Babylon, the discussion of giants falls away after this point. Assuming (as seems likely) that the Beowulf-poet was influenced by Augustine, it could be argued that he conceived of the ‘kin of Ham’ as a continuation of the giantish ‘kin of Cain’, but it seems more likely that he associated giants and other inhuman entities with the latter and believed some part of their race to have survived the Flood.

I envisage at least two sequels to this post. One will investigate the various creatures encompassed by the ‘kin of Cain’ (e.g. eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas, ‘ogres and elves and Orcus-corpses’), and may take some time to research and write. Another, which will likely get done a lot sooner, will reinterpret another part of the text that seems to refer to Grendel’s congenital inability to turn to God.

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NOTE: this post originated as a Substack Note that I had to divide into a first, second and third part because of the limits on length. I didn’t want to write it up as a full post, because that would oblige me (at least in my own mind) to research the topic more deeply and revisit certain books on it, which would take too much time away from the Beowulf translation that I am trying to get finished. But since a long three-part comment is an awkward thing to read, I’ve decided to write it up as a post anyway and only slightly amend and expand it. It’s not as researched or as refined as I would like it to be, but perhaps that makes it all the more appropriate to its target; you don't need a silver bullet for a zombie.

So I’ve been reading the Rape Gang Inquiry Report commissioned by Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain, and I’m sorry to say, this isn’t good. Of course nothing about Britain’s grooming gang problem, or its long enablement by the ‘anti-racist’ media and extended government, can be called good; but at least the online right used to be able to say that we were right about this, that we forced this ‘racist conspiracy theory’ into public consciousness by telling the truth about it, and thus that we at least indirectly helped some of its victims to get justice. Now, with the release of this shoddy and deceptive Report to a chorus of acclaim, it is as if that same online right has detonated a giant shit bomb over the whole issue and destroyed its own credibility in the process.

I daresay that I will make some enemies by writing about it on this site. Lowe and his little helpers, the Lotus Eaters, have built up this Inquiry and Report as the definitive statement on the grooming gangs issue; and now that it’s out there, and anyone can read it and see that it’s junk, their followers have resorted to dogpiling anyone who dares to point this out. The worst of that sort of thing has gone on at X, as usual, but even here on Substack there have been some furious reactions.

As we saw with the AI-distorted image of Henry Nowak’s arrest, a great many people on the right will defend any amount of lies and fakery on the grounds that they constitute ‘good propaganda’ and therefore ‘good strategy’. All that they really mean by this is that this sort of thing is good entertainment – the sort of sub-tabloid trash that they like to consume, that is bound to attract others like them, and in which they can only indulge with a clear conscience by demanding the silence of anyone more concerned with quality and accuracy.

In fact, of course, the release of this Report is a strategic and propaganda godsend to the media, which need only allow it to spread and then use it to discredit the whole issue of grooming gangs (or at least the online right position on it). Thus, whether you are primarily concerned with truth or with strategy – and in reality, the two are not in conflict, because the truth is the only strategy – the best course of action is to reject this Report and Inquiry in the most uncompromising terms.

That is what we will be doing here. Let us deal with each of the charges in turn.

Dodgy Statistics

The flagship claim of the Report, that 250,000 English girls were victimized by grooming gangs, has been thoroughly debunked at Heretical Insights. I have nothing to add to their argument, and would only point out further that the incompetence of the Report’s writing is such that it undermines the 250,000 number in its own words. In the Executive Summary, the number is traced to its source, a statement by Lord Pearson of Rannoch in the House of Lords in May 2019:

“Do the Government accept that if we extrapolate nationally the Jay report on Rotherham and other reports from Telford and Oxford, there appear to have been upwards of 250,000 young white girls raped in this century, very largely by Muslim men, usually several times a day for years?” (p.12)

The problem with this number, as Aaron of Heretical Insights pointed out, is that there are no reasonable grounds for extrapolating victim numbers in heavily-affected towns like Rotherham to the rest of the country. But you don’t need an ounce of his statistical acumen to work this out from the Report itself, since the following ‘heat map’ of grooming gang activities appears just two pages after the reasoning behind the 250,000 number is explained, and reveals that only 149 local authority districts in Britain (out of a total of 361) have seen known or suspected activity:

When the number appears again in the Statistics section of the Report, the own-foot-shooting is even more egregious:

The 250,000 figure is not a precise count. No such count exists because the British state has failed to record it. But we may regard it as a conservative estimate that accounts for the organised, repeated nature of the abuse (many girls raped hundreds of times by multiple perpetrators) and decades of institutional concealment. (pp.113-14)

So now we have shifted the goalposts from an estimated number of victims (“250,000 young white girls”) to one of victims, perpetrators and separate incidents of rape (“many girls raped hundreds of times by multiple perpetrators”). This display of open deceit and gross incompetence gets the blood boiling all right, but for all the wrong reasons.

Uncorroborated Testimonies

The hundred pages or so of harrowing victim testimony from 30 individuals constitutes the real meat of the Report, as well as the sole value that I am prepared to grant it. Unfortunately, this too is undermined in the worst possible way. Nothing is provided by way of explanation as to how (or whether) the complainants were vetted; nothing is provided by way of factual corroboration, cross-referencing with court documents and other records, and so on; and the general shoddiness and deceptiveness of the Report is such as to lead one to suspect that Lowe and Co. threw open the door to anyone claiming to be a grooming gang victim and took everything said on trust. As a result, the sympathetic but conscientious reader is flying absolutely blind, and is forced to try to sift what he reads as best he can.

In case you think this scepticism unwarranted, note that one of the testimonies is from the mother of a woman (presumably Eleanor Williams) who was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison for lying about being victimized by a gang, and that her word to the contrary seems to be taken on trust:

‘Sally’ is the mother of a daughter who was found guilty of nine counts of perverting the course of justice for lying about being groomed by an Asian grooming gang and sentenced to eight years in prison. Despite this, Sally believes there is evidence to suggest her daughter was a genuine victim of the gangs. (p.40)

A couple of other testimonies contain strange coincidences, dramatic murders of other girls, and other unlikely details that sufficed to move a Counter-Currents reviewer to scepticism – although this writer still ends up defending the Report by means of a contemptible tu quoque argument (perhaps in order to spare the site the financial consequences of unduly pissing off its audience). No doubt the assumption that anyone who would raise evidentiary objections to the handling of these testimonies must be a raging MeToo shitlib makes perfect sense to those afflicted by terminal politics-brain – including, of course, the Restore party staffers and Lotus Shitters who are rumoured to have written up the Report.

In defence of the Inquiry, being a private and crowdfunded project without any official status, it may have lacked the ability to obtain all necessary court records and other corroborating evidence. But at least some of these are in the public domain. This judgement, for example, contains some downright horrifying details (especially on pages 10-11; you shall have to follow the link to the document, for my excerpting it here would cause me to run afoul of the age-gating rules whereby the UK government prevents its people children from learning what they shouldn’t).

Given that the Report insists on throwing the reader into completely unvetted and uncorroborated victim testimonies and forcing him to assess their truth by his wits, including something like this would at least have served to set the right tone and make the point that horrific and disgusting testimony is by no means to be dismissed as unlikely. Instead, I believe, they played to the online right gallery by choosing the testimonies on the sole basis of maximum luridness and emotive impact. This means that genuine victim testimonies provided to the Inquiry in good faith have in a sense been pornographed, as well as tainted by association with false or dubious reports as well as the low-quality slop that constitutes the rest of the Report. I daresay I need not mention the opportunities that they have thereby granted to the media and other bad actors who would dearly like to discredit this entire issue.

Lazy Research

After the testimonies, we get less than ten pages (also partly taken up by testimony) on the important subject of demographics and statistics, in which the main concern of the Report is to establish the disproportionate role of Muslim men in grooming gangs.

The flagship piece of evidence comes from Peter McLoughlin’s book Easy Meat (published in 2016, but apparently updated since), in which he analysed the names of grooming gang convicts and found that 87% of them had distinctively Muslim names. I haven’t revisited this book since I first read it some ten years ago, but it made a strong impression on me back then and I have nothing to say against it here.

What I do wonder is why McLoughlin’s research was not reproduced in full or described in more detail, and why other evidence cited in his book was not used in the Report (since, as we shall see, Lowe and Co. clearly had nothing better). For example, the ninth appendix to McLoughlin’s book (p.330) contains a chart showing an overrepresentation of Asians as perpetrators and underrepresentation as victims in cases of group-based child sexual exploitation (a much wider category than ‘grooming gangs’), as well as the opposite patterns for whites:

Other than McLoughlin’s evidence and the dodgy Lord Pearson count of 250,000 victims, the Report cites the following:

• Analysis of the 264 grooming gang convictions showing that 84% (222 offenders) were South Asian, with the vast majority Pakistani Muslim, and only 7% white and 8% black – this comes from the Quilliam study of 2017, which presumably uses the same data as McLoughlin;

• The statement of Dr. Taj Hargey, an imam at the Oxford Islamic Congregation, that virtually everyone involved in grooming gangs is Muslim, and his estimate that 95% of those involved are Muslim;

• “Multiple examinations, including police data from various forces, national audits and independent reviews, have documented this overrepresentation in group-based offending of this nature, even as some earlier official narratives emphasized no single community profile or sought to downplay ethnic patterns” (p114) - this is footnoted with a link to a Connor Tomlinson article on the Casey Report;

• An incredibly lazy argument to the effect that Britain has seen a rise in rapes since 1997, while Poland has seen a decline, so given that the one has a high immigration rate while the other has a low one the cause must obviously be Pakistani Muslims (no attempt to account for other factors such as the higher rate of population ageing in Poland; no attempt to compare different parts of Britain with and without Pakistani Muslims, or a wider set of European countries with and without them; not a solitary shred of awareness that ‘rape’ is a subjective and politicized crime that feminists are bent on extending into consensual sex, nor any attempt to compare the advancement of this agenda across countries; all in all, worthless rubbish that further discredits the Report);

And that’s it. There end the Statistics, having occupied just two pages out of two hundred. But who needs boring old numbers anyway?

Well…

Over the last 25 years or so the Yookay media has gone from outright denialism on the grooming gangs issue, to snickering about ‘Muslamic ray guns’1, to settling on the party mass line that “science says most grooming gangs are white”. This man-bites-dog statement is achieved by subsuming the specific ‘grooming gang’ mode of operation into the much wider category of ‘group CSE’, or even just generic ‘CSE’ (i.e. child sexual exploitation, which according to the government-approved definition “does not always involve physical contact”). This very sleight of hand is shamelessly advocated here:

The term ‘grooming gangs’, however, is itself a spurious media construct and one that has been heavily racialised from the very start. ‘Grooming gangs’ simply do not correspond to established legal or social scientific categories and the various weak definitions offered up by proponents of this racialised narrative fail to delineate these offenders meaningfully from other groups of child sex offenders. Contrary to stereotypes, there is no ‘grooming’ offence – let alone a ‘grooming gangs’ offence; consequently, ‘grooming gang offenders’ cannot be sensibly disentangled from police recorded crime data or prosecution data. Moreover, and as will be shown later, a relatively small number of high-profile ‘grooming gangs’ cases have been used to claim an ‘epidemic’ of abuse. Despite routinely (and wrongly) being depicted as a ‘specific’ crime type, ‘grooming gangs’ are better understood as a vaguely and inconsistently defined subset of child sexual exploitation (CSE) offenders. Complicating matters further, however, CSE is itself a poorly delineated subset of child sexual abuse (CSA) that spans diverse criminal offences (e.g. rape, sexual activity with a child) – most of which are also used in instances that would not normally be considered CSE. Existing data simply do not enable reliable assessments of the prevalence or correlates of CSE, let alone those of ‘grooming gangs’ – so claims of ethnic or religious disproportionality in ‘grooming gangs’ are just not testable in any meaningful sense.

Once this purely legalistic and definitional handwaving has interposed a thick black cloud of sophistry between mind and reality, evidence can be extracted from it and statistics compiled and studies produced. And since whites are a large majority of the UK population, they are always going to make up at least a bare majority of offenders. This can then be translated into media headlines that equivocate (explicitly or implicitly) between the large category of ‘group child sexual exploitation’ and the smaller one of ‘grooming gangs’, producing the desired man-bites-dog statement without technically resorting to a lie. This mode of operation went into action when Sue Berelowitz led a 2012 official inquiry that was widely reported in the media as disproving ‘far right myths’ about Muslim grooming gangs, but which was actually a general study of group CSE that included in its remit (according to its interim report) such things as gay teenagers hanging around clubs and being picked up and black schoolgirls forcing one of their classmates to have sex with a boy in a toilet.

If the writers of the Lowe Report wanted to assert the significance of ethnicity in these crimes, then they had at least to expose the sophistries of academics and the deceptive reporting of the media, and at most comprehensively demolish the methodology and conclusions of the Berelowitz inquiry. (A number of writers on Substack, better versed in such things than myself, would no doubt have been more than happy to help them do it.) Instead they acted as though the official disinformation line did not exist, and indeed conjured up their cloud of statistical and definitional sophistries for others to debunk. And once again I can only assume that they did so in order to play to a gallery of credulous online slop consumers who have long ago tuned the media out.

Did I say slop? Read on, dear reader, gif þu dyrre. It gets worse.

Slop and AI Slop

The second part of the Report is mostly analysis and argumentation, and begins with a section entitled The Influence of Islam.

The willingness to discuss the role of Islam is supposed to be the whole thing that differentiates the Lowe inquiry from others. Unfortunately, what it has to say on this subject can hardly be distinguished from the same old tropes we have been hearing from certain parts of the right for the last 25 years. The phrase that came to mind as I read through the argumentation was ‘counterjihad slop’.

W are given to understand that Muslim men run grooming gangs because they think they are superior to non-Muslims; because they think men are superior to women; because they don’t allow women to flaunt themselves in public; because they don’t have age of consent or marital rape or easy divorce (“vy do you have traditional marriage customs, vee don’t do zat in Modernity!”), because something something Barbary Pirates something something ISIS something something dhimmi jizya jihad. There may be a fair bit of truth in some of this, but it is still low-effort slop. Contrast with McLoughlin, who reprinted old flyers from a Muslim youth group encouraging the seduction of Sikh girls (some of the earliest targets of grooming gangs) as a means of converting them to Islam:

Then there is Professor Alison Shaw’s ethnographical study on the Pakistani community of Oxford, first released as A Pakistani Community in Britain (1988) and later revised in Kinship and Continuity: Pakistani Families in Britain (2000). I’ve not read this book myself, but Will Solfiac’s post on it excerpts more than enough of it to show its relevance to the argument of the Report:

One mosque committee member used this image to explain the ideals of purdah:

“If you have something valuable, you keep it safe. If you have a diamond you lock it in a case. You don’t leave it for anyone to take. A woman is like a diamond. She is precious. You should keep her inside the four walls of your house. She should look after the house and children, and you look after her. Inside the house, she is in charge. My place is outside”.

For many people across the generations, the experience of living in Britain has reinforced aspects of the traditional view of the relationship between men and women. This is because images of women in the west provide constant reminders of the contrasting Islamic ideal. A corollary of the idea that a woman should be protected is that a woman who is ‘outside’, among men, unprotected, is ‘free for anyone to take’. Western women in particular appear to break all the rules of purdah. ‘They are regarded as sexually promiscuous, moving freely from one man to another, behaving and dressing in order to provoke men. A woman out alone is in effect ‘asking’ for sexual relations with a man. Rape, young and older men have insisted, is always the woman’s fault, because it is the ‘natural’ result of a woman dressing provocatively and being out alone. In this view, western women are simultaneously exciting and despised for having no sense of shame and being ‘used by more than one man; like prostitutes’. As the man quoted above put it:

“Women are exploited in English society. They are like toys for men to play with. They are cheap. Women are out on the streets, in shops, on the television. They work like slaves for a pittance in factories, in shops and as cleaners. There’s no respect for them.”

His wife then showed me what she thought of English women by pulling her shalwar tight across her buttocks, loosening her hair and swaying her hips, in imitation of how an English woman attracts a man.” (p. 167).

Unlike the vague, sweeping Muzzie-bashing found in the Report, this at least shows how Islamic customs (specifically those of Mirpur-Kashmir, the source of many Pakistani Muslim immigrants to Britain) might have influenced ordinary Muslim men and women to turn a blind eye to grooming gang activity.

More important in my book, however, is the fact that a blind eye was turned to the gangs by a British administrative state otherwise obsessed with sexual crimes and social meddling. Thus I held out at least some sort of hope for the section of the Report entitled Homegrown Enabling Factors, which purports to discuss (among other things) political correctness, post-Macpherson Report anti-(white)racism, and Labour Party dependence on Muslim voting blocs.

The Report starts off (on pp.135-6) doing a decent enough job of shooting these fish in a barrel, without as yet hitting itself in the foot:

The concern to shield Muslims from criticism at all costs went hand in hand with a more general ideological shift organised around the unquestioning treatment of minorities as special victim groups. Rooted in the Left-liberal paradigm of the 1960s, this minoritarian outlook first scored political victories under Harold Wilson’s Labour government. In time, tolerance, multiculturalism, and anti-discrimination became highly prized values in elite circles. The law, too, began to foster an environment in which challenging certain minority communities, including Muslim ones, became politically dangerous and even criminal. This enabled the grooming gangs to operate with impunity for years because authorities at every level, as we have seen, feared being labelled ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ more than they feared failing the girls to whom they owed a duty of care.

The legal framework that underpinned this paralysis began with the Race Relations Act 1965 and its even stronger successor in 1976. These statutes, designed to combat overt discrimination, were interpreted and expanded in ways that made any discussion of ethnicity or culture in crime patterns hazardous. The Macpherson Report (1999) following the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry branded the police “institutionally racist” and introduced a definition of racism so broad that police officers and social workers became terrified of any action that could be construed as targeting ethnic minorities. Across Britain, clear evidence of organised abuse by Pakistani gangs, among other majority-Muslim ethnic groups, was ignored because confronting it risked accusations of racism. The fear was not abstract. Senior officers and council staff explicitly cited concerns about so-called “community relations” and potential race riots as reasons for inaction.

The country’s transformation was greatly accelerated under Tony Blair’s New Labour project, which culminated in the Equality Act 2010. This consolidated and strengthened so-called ‘anti-discrimination’ protections by adding religion as a protected characteristic alongside race. Combined with hate crime legislation under Part III of the Public Order Act 1986 and the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, it created an environment in which criticising aspects of Islamic culture or patterns of offending linked to Muslim communities could be framed as ‘racial hatred’ or ‘Islamophobia.’ Official definitions of ‘Islamophobia’ promoted by some campaign groups further blurred the line between legitimate concern and blind prejudice. The result was a chilling effect across public institutions. Police forces, social services, and local councils repeatedly chose silence or denial over robust investigation because the political and professional costs of appearing to single out Muslims was deemed too high. The Casey National Audit of 2025 confirmed this pattern, noting that authorities shied away from examining ethnicity and culture even when the data pointed overwhelmingly to Pakistani Muslim perpetrators.

Not a bad little overview. Over the next few pages, however, the reader becomes more and more frustrated, as the overview continues going in circles without ever homing in on the details or attempting to extract any real points from them. The next paragraph starts with the promising words “what went wrong is now painfully clear” – only to end up as painfully unclear baffgarble:

The post war liberal consensus that began with Wilson emphasised diversity, inclusion, and non-judgementalism as supreme virtues. Multiculturalism replaced national self-confidence as the guiding principle. Long-standing British norms around free speech, child protection, and impartial application of the law were subordinated to the need to avoid offending minority sensitivities at all costs. Liberal elites in media, politics, and the public sector internalised the idea that acknowledging cultural or religious factors in crime was itself a form of bigotry. This mindset actively shielded the rape gangs by discouraging the very inquiries and interventions that could have saved thousands of children.

Although more specific details do follow, they become few and far between, and the vague, repetitive, circtuitous and waffling style of argumentation becomes more and more pronounced and frustrating. As I read on and on, with mounting irritation, the horrible realization dawned on me – yes, I am slow on the uptake and like to be liberal with the benefit of the doubt – that the writers of this Report had dared to outsource large swathes of its writing to SlopGPT.

AI detection is not an exact science, but as most people know, there are certain structural ‘tells’ and they appear in abundance in the latter part of this Report. First let us look at Exhibit A:

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali told this Inquiry, centre-left parties viewed Muslim voting blocs as a protected base and aggressive prosecution or deportation risked losing those votes. Chronic electoral dependence on such blocs thus paralysed far too many levels of government. Political actors across the board – national, local, and devolved – knew about the organised rape gangs for decades yet put electoral survival, so-called “community relations,” and fear of racism accusations before child protection. Labour Party figures proved especially guilty of making electoral calculations where they should have been looking out for the nation’s children. Combined with demographic shifts in swing seats, this got in the way of concerted inaction. (pp.115-6)

I would say this is only ‘dubious’, and the first two sentences may well have been written by a human. Thereafter, though, we get Rule Of Three twice in quick succession (“national, local, and devolved”, “electoral survival, so-called “community relations,” and fear of racism accusations”) as well as A Before B (“put … before child protection”). Note moreover that everything from the third sentence on is couched in the vague and light style of a brief summary, such as LLMs tend to churn out before giving the meat of their answers in bullet points, although by this point we ought to be well into the meat of the details. Finally we see the bizarre mistake “got in the way of concerted inaction”, the most likely explanation for which is that SlopGPT spat out “concerted action” and was ‘corrected’ at haste by some semi-literate human editor.

Exhibit B is worse:

“Politicians received direct briefings, sat in multi-agency meetings, read internal intelligence and still denied knowledge, blocked inquiries, and silenced critics in order to cleave to Muslim voting blocs. This was not ignorance of the crimes, but calculated, repeated, nationwide abandonment of children.” (p.142)

So here we have Rule Of Three (”received direct briefings, sat in multi-agency meetings, read internal intelligence”), Rule Of Three again (”denied knowledge, blocked inquiries, and silenced critics”), and Not A But B plus Rule of Three yet again (”not ignorance of the crimes, but calculated, repeated, nationwide abandonment of children”), plus some weird semi-alliterative parallelism (’ignorance of crimes / abandonment of children’) that would probably only occur to SlopGPT. Note moreover that the whole sentence essentially says nothing, which points to the use of AI as a content generator and not as a mere stylistic editor.

Lest we be accused of over-interpreting rhetorical flourishes as AI tells, let’s look at a contrasting example, Exhibit C:

Official research increasingly reinforces relational approaches to CSE, recognising that protective networks – including parents, siblings, extended family, schools, peers, and community relationships – are central to reducing vulnerability and disrupting exploitation. [60] Once removed from family and community networks, children as a general matter become more vulnerable to grooming, missing episodes, trafficking, and other forms of harm. A ‘family first’ approach is therefore essential. We recommend the construction of a safeguarding framework in which families are recognised as primary protective factors wherever safe, family support is prioritised, contextual safeguarding approaches are strengthened, and residential care is used proportionately and as a last resort rather than as a default response to exploitation risk. This proceeds from the understanding, bolstered by our Inquiry, that where rape gangs are concerned, parents and carers are more often protective than causative agents. (p.163)

There are three things to note about this paragraph: that it doesn’t have any obvious tells (and for what it’s worth, an AI detector gave me a negative result for it but a positive for the other two), that it makes a substantive and quite sensible point, and that it backs this point up as anyone would with a footnote linking to a study. Unfortunately, the presence of such ‘normal’ paragraphs in the Report only heightens my suspicion that other parts of it were spat out by a slop generator.

My verdict is that the Report is basically human-written, but has been considerably ‘padded out’ with AI content and edited in some haste. Haste is the operative word here, and explains most all of the failings we have discussed so far; evidently the Report has been rushed out before it was even close to being ready, and we shall get to the likely reason why a little later.

Bad Recommendations

Before we do so, we must say a few words on the Recommendations section (pp.159-78), which in some ways is the most disappointing of all. It’s not entirely devoid of sensible suggestions; I think we can agree that foreigners who commit grooming gang offences ought to be deported back to their country of origin, perhaps by means of some sort of very large catapult. But much of it just amounts to bog-standard hard-conservative law ‘n’ order woofing – the gist of which is that the British state must be granted even more money, personnel, laws and power over its wretched subjects in order to solve a problem that it is ultimately responsible for creating (as well as tolerating, abetting, covering up and deflecting onto others).

“Independent Sexual Violence Advisers must be funded nationally.” “Cross-examination that re-traumatises the child must be prohibited.” “The CPS must create a dedicated national unit for group-based child sexual exploitation, with specialist prosecutors trained in trauma- informed practice.” “A single, comprehensive Childhood Sexual Exploitation Act must be enacted at once” and “it must reverse the presumption that a child can ever consent to sexual activity with an adult” (i.e. as a mitigating factor in cases of statutory rape). “One vital reform would be to ensure the wider and more proactive use of Sexual Risk Orders (SROs) and related civil preventative orders”, which “allow authorities to impose restrictions on individuals who demonstrate concerning behaviour characteristic of sexual abusers, even where a criminal conviction has not yet been secured”.

Ooh, you’re ‘ard. Who but some ululating child pimp could possibly object to any of this – unless it be one of those boring libertarian fellows we’ve all long ago learned to despise for being too squeamish to resort to state power?

Well, let’s go there.

Britain already has age of consent and statutory rape laws. Britain already has a culture of neurotic obsession with paedophilia, which has led among other things to fathers being arrested for filming their own children at play. Britain is not such a sexually free and easy place that a young (white) man cannot be prosecuted for initiating a conversation with a young woman in the street and touching her on the arm and waist. Nationalists in Britain have also been repressed under anti-terrorism legislation originally designed to deal with abusive or explosive foreigners. The problem with Britain is not that its permanent government doesn’t have enough laws, money, officials or power to deal with grooming gangs; the problem is that it is largely staffed by ‘anti-racist’ scum who will look for any excuse not to enforce the existing laws on the non-white population in defence of the white population.

So the task of the Report at this point was very simple:

1. to identify ‘anti-racism’ as a racist ideology in its own right;

2. to demand that any laws mandating it be repealed;

3. to demand that those espousing and promoting it be purged from the various institutions of the extended government (especially the police and judiciary);

4. to call for the disestablishment (for want of a better word) of all media, educational and ‘charitable’ institutions that promote anti-racist ideology; and

5. to warn that until this cleansing of the Augean stables is accomplished, the blind-eye turning, denialism and travesties of justice that characterized the British state’s response to grooming gangs will only continue and manifest in new forms (as we saw with e.g. the Nowak case).

Obviously this is no ordinary policy recommendation, but then, this is no ordinary inquiry. Shouldn’t it be right up Restore’s street? Isn’t the party supposed to be about rejecting the idea of “conserving or reforming the status quo”, and ushering in a “democratic revolution”, one that moreover will be “incredibly painful”? So why do Lowe and Co. want to add more tentacles to The Blob instead of turning it inside out?

So far we have taken this Report to task for its lack of truthfulness and intellectual competence. But for the sake of argument, let us put down this perspective for a moment and take up a different one, the one to which so many on the right like to pretend: the perspective of ruthless ‘Machiavellian’ amoralism2, concerned only with strategizing and propagandizing and worming one’s way into power. From this perspective, I would say, Lowe and Co. have badly flubbed this section of their Report, by failing to set out such a policy programme as would allow them to use the grooming gang issue as a weapon to hammer down those parts of the establishment hostile to their revolutionary programme (that is to say, to do with this issue what the ‘anti-racists’ did with the death of Stephen Lawrence after the Macpherson Report3).

But none, to my knowledge, of those who profess indifference to truth have undertaken to criticize this Report on the grounds of bad propaganda and bad strategy; and this, as we’ve said, is because their talk of such things is idle. The purpose of most of the online right is just what it does, and what it does is to produce and consume tabloid slop; it is an entertainment industry masquerading as a political force. That is not to say that it does not, at some level, desire to be what it pretends to be, just as the left at some level desires to be what it pretends to be. But just as it is easier for leftists to project their soul-rotting hatreds onto ‘bigots’ than to try to overcome them, it is easier for rightists to project their sloth and base self-indulgence onto ‘normies’ than to try to overcome them.

Petty Political One-Upmanship

Let us turn at last to the question of how and why the Rape Gang Inquiry Report ended up like this – with, to recap, sloppy numbers, ill-handled testimonies, lazy argumentation, probably AI-generated writing, and recommendations that advocate the strengthening of a hostile permanent government.

The first clue lies in the motives of Rupert Lowe and the nature of Restore Britain, which is less a serious party than a vehicle for a personal crusade to harass and upstage Nigel Farage that began when he ejected Lowe from Reform UK (by the genuinely slimy means of spurious ‘bullying’ allegations). Although the ideological differences between the two are superficial, Farage’s party is much more subject to media pressure and Tory entryism and he seems unable or unwilling to resist either, so Lowe’s typical mode of operation is to capture the ground to his right (though he is not above making the opposite manoeuvre when it suits his vendetta; thus, when Farage came out with strong statements on the Nowak story, Lowe jumped to his left and sided with Kemi Badenoch against him).

Were Lowe and Farage truly competing for power and the personal glory of redeeming the country, I would have nothing to say against the egoism and one-upmanship on display here. But since the right is about entertainment, it all manifests in a much more petty and clownish manner – as a competition to sound tough and deport millions of immigrants on paper, while neither party seems to have any more idea of how to deal with the ‘Blob’ than the Tories did when they sat in office and ranted about immigration. Farage strikes me as a man with a burning ambition for absolute retirement, and Lowe is in the position of being able to say whatever will attract the punters away from his rival with no expectation that he will have to make good on any of it anytime soon. The whole farce is perhaps best analogized to this Mr. Bean skit.

This is the context in which the Rape Gang Inquiry was born. It was Farage who first mooted the idea of a private inquiry, only to drop it, in the course of demanding a national inquiry from the government (now underway); so when Lowe split from him and formed Restore, according to his mode of operation, he had to take up the project himself and do what Farage hadn’t done and it had to be built up as the definitive statement on the scandal. But Lowe had bitten off more than he could chew, because for once his words had committed him to actually do something, and a proper inquiry is a long and costly endeavour (best done with government backing and full legal powers) that cannot possibly be done on the side by a small party trying to grow and contest local elections and all the rest of it. There was never any question that Rupe and his mates were going to serve up anything more than (at best) a rival to Easy Meat, though this does not explain why the final product is quite as sloppy as it is.

The second clue, then, is that the Report was released from Lowe’s X account on 16th June – just two days before the Makerfield by-election on the 18th. Makerfield was a de facto referendum on Andy Burnham’s bid to replace Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader and British Prime Minister, and both Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and Lowe’s Restore Britain were running candidates against him. Burnham ‘just happens’ to be heavily criticized in the Report (on p.143) for having failed to do enough about grooming gangs during his tenure as Mayor of Greater Manchester (although he did apparently order inquiries into child sexual exploitation); indeed he is criticized at greater length than any other Labour politician, including not only Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips (the obnoxious feminist minister who was much criticized for rejecting a government inquiry into Oldham grooming gangs), but also the Labour councillors who presided over the Rotherham abuses.

Evidently Lowe, or more likely his chief of staff, had the bright idea of rushing out this Report way too early so that it could hit social media at just the right time to do maximum damage to Burnham. Very propaganda! Much strategy! And what was the result? In the short term, that Burnham won the election with ease, trouncing both Reform and Restore (which never had a chance of winning); in the long term, more importantly, that a heap of crude slopaganda has been mixed in with victim testimony provided in good faith and dumped into an issue that people have fought for decades to have taken seriously. And, of course, that the online right has beclowned itself yet again, though that’s just showbusiness.

I can only hope that this post serves to undo some small part of the damage.

To anyone who wants a competent introduction to this issue, once again I can recommend Peter McLoughlin’s Easy Meat, which I hope will be updated and re-released again so that it can supersede the Lowe Report. And to anyone seriously expecting Restore Britain to do any more than Farage’s Turquoise Tories to save this country, well, I can only offer the wish that you live in entertaining times.

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One is that this film is so obviously, unabashedly woke. The right happens to have spent the last year or so telling itself that woke is dead, and almost superstitiously referring to it in the past tense, because Trump’s second election win is supposed to have caused a rightward ‘vibe shift’ that has allowed society and culture to move on. This of course was a delusion, because woke is just one of many names for the folkways and caste taboos of the modern ruling class, which has suffered no loss of power or institutional authority in the last ten years of Trump’s ranting and bumbling in and out of office. But the bold truth-tellers of the right don’t like it when you hurt their feelings by pointing out the facts, so everyone agreed to believe in the magic cultural effects of ceremonial elections and now the delusion bubble is being popped.

What makes this worse is that the needle is being wielded by Nolan, whose previous work has long been suspected of lickspittle reactionary themes. Of course we have no way of knowing whether such themes will be absent from this film, other than to watch it (and I for one am not going to bother, unless someone makes a good case for its being more interesting than it looks); but if the ‘last Tory’ has indeed gone woke, then perhaps the magic election spell was not so much useless as counterproductive. That is to say, perhaps woke has not just survived the second coming of Trump but been vindicated by comparison, like a nasty-looking girl who gets the chance to bask in the shadow of an outrageously grotesque one.

Lastly, there may or may not be a subtler feeling of self-admonition quietly nagging at the right. I was curious to see whether I could catch any inkling of this in the commentary of the ‘hardcore’ dissident right, as opposed to the usual anti-woke film critics ranting away on Youtube. So I decided to check out a podcast by Auron MacIntyre (who surely ranks as high as Neema Parvini in the pantheon of dissident right elite theorists) entitled “Why Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ Had to Go Woke”.

Alas, I can’t recommend this to anyone who values their time, except as a work of almost surreal unintended comedy.

Within the first five minutes, MacIntyre’s guest offers the one and only comment on the Odyssey: that Odysseus is a ‘strong Type A male’, ‘even a toxic male’, on a quest to get back to his wife and child and restore his homeland to law 'n' order. The host more or less repeats this take in his own words, and from this point on the conversation digresses into an almost hour-long ramble around every subject but the Odyssey: the Hegelian Dialectic, the Sovereign Individual, the American Constitution, the Free Market, the Epstein Files, the Muslims, the Banking Cabal, the Fractional Reserve System, and of course the heckin' Transnational Globalist Elites (who are probably eating their catamites with a nice Chianti even as I write this post). At the end the host says these words (and I quote): “I know we didn’t stay on the actual topic of Christopher Nolan very long, but I think we had a much more interesting discussion.”

So he spake – and dropped this podcast into the dissident right ecosystem, presumably thinking such things as this is fine and I’m okay with the title and contents of this podcast. And to judge from the comments on the Youtube version, almost none of his audience complained about the lack of attention to the topic (although some had concerns about the ideological purity of the guest).

Now, dear reader, I am well aware that not every commentator on the right is like this. But we cannot hope to diagnose an affliction by looking away from those worst affected by its symptoms; and the fact that some on the right cannot be bothered even to talk about the Odyssey for five minutes, without digressing into their tedious political obsessions for fifty, should tell us that there is some plague in the host of Western Civ’s self-appointed defenders. Ironically, unintentionally, and precisely because of its contempt for its topic, MacIntyre’s podcast succeeds in answering the question posed by its title.

Why, then, did Nolan’s Odyssey have to go woke? There are of course all sorts of reasons – institutional and financial and political – why it might have been swayed in the direction of woke. But to the question of why it had to go woke – inevitably, as a foregone conclusion, even with a conservative director not afraid to be witchsmelled by slimy journos – there can be only one answer, and this is that it was a ‘win by default’. The cultural conquest of Homer by the woke side, now set to be fortified by a $300-million-dollar movie, was not at all contested by the side now crying a barren sea of salt over the desecration of Our Sacred Heritage.

That conquest began almost a decade ago, on the humbler ground of the printed page, having been prepared for years beforehand by a single woman labouring in relative obscurity over thousands of lines of ancient Greek. I refer of course to Emily Wilson and her bestselling 2017 translation of the Odyssey – followed in 2023 by a translation of the Iliad – which has been namechecked by Nolan and seems to have inspired the modernizing bent of his movie. Wilson, as we’ll see, is primarily a feminist, and more interested in tarring Homer’s men than in blackwashing his women – which leads us to imagine that the worst travesties in Nolan’s film are to be found in the script, not the casting. (From the perspective of the original poem, though, it would be harder to find a worse travesty than ‘defy the gods’, which does not come from Wilson.)

By no means has Wilson pursued this literary campaign alone, nor has participation been limited to scholars of ancient Greek. Other feminist takes on the Homeric matter, retellings rather than translations, have been coming out at a steady drip both before and after the publication of Wilson’s translations: these include Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (2005), Madeleine Miller’s Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018), and Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls (2018) and Women of Troy (2021). Evidently what we have here is a full-blown literary movement, of which Wilson’s translations are only the most serious and authoritative component.

That may be a low bar to clear. I am no scholar of ancient Greek; but Jireh Gardo and Richard Whitaker are, and by their accounts, Wilson’s work is marred by elementary blunders and infelicities as well as deliberate and malicious ideological distortions. Her apparent agenda in the Odyssey is to exaggerate the wrongdoings of the hero (in her own words a “liar, pirate, colonizer, deceiver and thief”), to play devil’s advocate for the suitors and traitorous servants who are destroying his property, to portray monsters like Polyphemus the Cyclops as noble savages (a notable tendency in Beowulf revisionism as well, and one that says much more about the moderns than the ancients), and to translate every menial role from houseboy to herald as ‘slave’ so as to evoke the clank of chains and crack of whips in 18th-century cotton plantations whenever any such character comes onstage. As for her Iliad (reviewed negatively here and here), much of it is rendered in such a way as to reduce the wrath of Achilles and the death-struggle of heroes to a fight between overgrown children – making, ironically, a strong case for the proposition that women ought to leave epic poetry to men and confine their own storytelling efforts to the nursery.

You are of course free to hold a higher (or a lower) opinion of these works than I do. Either way, the ‘mode of operation’ is instructive: a scholar conquers the high ground by re-translating (and, inevitably, reinterpreting) a revered ancient work in a dead language, while lesser writers fan out in support with imaginative retellings and reinterpretations that are in turn justified and supported by the central effort. The analogy of conquest makes it all sound very nefarious, but this is simply how a modern-antiquarian cultural movement gets going: it must reclaim the sacred ground of the old, which has authority, and at the same time populate it with the productions of the new, which have vitality.

There are also inner benefits to this process that have nothing to do with influencing the wider culture. One might say that the problem with Wilson’s approach to Homer, as well as that of Atwood, Miller and Barker, is that she hates everything that he stood for and considered to be right. But, as is so often said, hatred is not the opposite of love. Someone who drips with spite and resentment towards an ancient literary work is still better able to appreciate it than someone who regards it with indifference – even if this be reverent indifference.

And this brings us to the other side in this rather one-sided ‘culture war’.

The online right existed inchoately during the 2000s, coalesced into the ‘alt-right’ around 2010, and has called itself the ‘dissident right’ for the past decade or so. What has it been doing over that past decade while the feminists have conquered Homer? Has anyone been toiling (sorry, slaving) like Emily Wilson over thousands of lines of Greek, working to create neo-traditionalist translations of the Iliad and Odyssey? Or breathing new life into Homeric stories by reimagining and retelling them?

I think we all know the answers to these questions.

To speak in collective terms, with all due exceptions for individuals, the fact is that Der Ewige Chud has spent the past decade taking the most powerful engine of intellectual edification and cultural propagation ever devised – that is to say, the internet – and using it to influence, analyse or simply obsess over the closed shop of official politics and activism. In short, as far as we are concerned, he has done nothing. And now he belatedly emerges from his political gooncave and wants to rant and rave because it is Emily Wilson’s something, and not his nothing, that Christopher Nolan has decided to incorporate into his movie.

I exaggerate, of course. I myself would not be bothering with the online right, even to critique it from within, were it not for the efforts of dissident publishers like Passage Press and Imperium Press to draw some of its energy out of the politics-and-culture-war wanksock. Imperium evidently cares enough about traditional poems and stories to have re-released a bunch of them under the series title of ‘Western Canon’, which it introduces as follows:

The Western Canon’s value is self-evident. Its status, however, has been under threat since the middle of the 20th century. Feminists, Marxists, intersectionalists, and others deny the Canon’s existence by refusing to observe its traditional boundaries, throwing the borders open to invite all manner of second- and third-rate material. They intentionally misread the Canon, deconstructing it and looking for incoherence where men have only ever found genius.

Imperium Press’ Western Canon series reclaims the Canon from the forces hostile to it. The series offers not only definitive versions of these works, but also supplementary material placing them at the centre of our aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual life—where they belong.

These books, however, are just reprints of older translations that have passed into the public domain, such as W.C. Bryant’s Iliad and Odyssey and Francis Gummere’s Beowulf. Unlike some, I wouldn’t disparage these choices; but if one side has been moved by a spirit of ‘misreading’ and ‘deconstruction’ to produce original translations and retellings of this canon (however flawed), while the other has been held back by its reverence from attempting the same task, then it is not hard to foresee which side will be doing the ‘reclaiming’. Unless you are going to build your life and society around a fixed text (something that Anglos have only really achieved with the Bible), the effect of freezing it in stasis can only be to make it an object of indifference.

We see the same reliance on old translations in this comparison chart of four translations of the first few lines of the Odyssey (apparently first posted on 4chan’s /lit/ board), which might just stand as the most effort made by a based reactionary chud to forestall Wilson’s conquest of Homer:

Alas, this too failed to shift the vibe, and there are at least some good reasons for this.

What we notice first is the bland modernism of Wilson’s language, and the extent to which she has stripped down the content of the original lines. The other four are in a higher register, with more epic grandeur and literal fidelity, and less excised content. They also condemn the sacrilege of Odysseus’s men more strongly than Odysseus’s own failure to save them, whereas Wilson reverses this; if you’ve looked at the original lines (click on the words to bring up dictionary definitions, or save yourself some bother by getting Grok to do it), you’ll notice that Wilson has cut out Homer’s charge of atasthalia ‘criminal folly’ against the devourers of the sun-god’s cattle.

Look again, though, and you’ll notice other things. For one, Wilson is the only one so much as trying to write in regular metre – something with which most 20th-century Homer translators, including the highly-regarded Richmond Lattimore, preferred not to bother themselves. Apparently vile vers libre is now in the rearguard of poetic reaction. Well, online rightists have certainly coped themselves into stranger alliances.

Another thing you notice is that the Greek word polytropos (lit. ‘many-turned’, both ‘much-travelled’ and ‘variously-shifty’; perhaps ‘multifarious’, ‘recourseful’) is causing some of the translators real problems. Fagles’ ‘man of twists and turns’ is quite good, I think, apart from its lack of formulaic versatility, but I cannot say the same for Lawrence’s ‘various-minded man’ or Fitzgerald’s ‘skilled in all ways of contending’. Wilson’s ‘complicated’ might just stand as the best solution of the four, at least were it not for the suspicion that what she really wanted to write was ‘problematic’.

What of the Iliad? As I’ve mentioned, I’m no scholar of Greek; but I did once work through the original text of the first book of the Iliad, in order to produce an experimental translation in Old English-style verse, and what drove me to this painstaking labour (from an initial intention to do no more than rework a 19th-century translation with reference to a couple of 20th-century ones) was my realization that the fidelity of all translations is traced in sand. The literalist repute of Lattimore, for example, does not survive the first few lines of his Iliad, in which he describes the bodies of men as being given to the delicate feasting of dogs and birds – conjuring this turn of phrase from somewhere quite other than the original text, and for some unknown poetic purpose, since the word delicate hardly helps us to conjure the image of hungry crows and curs ripping bodies apart on a battlefield.1

John Prendergast, an independent and apparently autodidactic translator of Homer, has written a critical comparison of Iliad translations that mostly covers those written from the mid-20th century to the present day. Although some of his points strike me as pedantic, eccentric or just incorrect2 (for example, Lattimore’s word groundling is not a noun any more than is sideling, better known as sidelong), he uncovers enough bungled words, botched similes and silly interpolations to banish the illusion that Homer was being translated just fine until Wilson came along. As a matter of fact, his criticism falls quite lightly on Wilson, who is praised for avoiding certain errors made by translators of the last century.

Nor should we look for a Golden Era in pre-20th century translations. The earliest ones made in the 17th and 18th centuries (Chapman and Pope) are great artistic works of their own time, but are also rhymey, ornate and brazenly unfaithful. Some of the 19th-century ones (Bryant more than Cowper) can perhaps be said to occupy a nice middle ground of metricality, simplicity and relative accuracy, but these still belong to a poetically-decadent era and also predate some important scholarship. The most important modern scholarly contribution to the study of these poems is of course Milman Parry’s oral-formulaic theory, which dates to the 1920s-30s, prior to which translators used to go out of their way to vary Homer’s formulaic repetitions (although Wilson does the same thing and in this respect is very much a ‘regressive’).

To sum up, while older translations may not be warped by leftist ideology, they do not constitute some perfect mirror of Homer and there is still much room to improve upon them. And, as we have seen, there is much room to improve upon Wilson as well. So is there any good reason why some man of the true right should not take a shot at the crown – and, perhaps, start a Homerically-inspired cultural movement in the opposite direction? It would be a tall order, no doubt; but it only takes one of us to do it, a few others to follow his (or her?) lead, and the rest of us to care enough about it that the others do not give up for lack of an audience.

As far as I can see, there are both good and bad reasons why such a thing has not yet been attempted.

First, the bad. Looking at the ‘resistance strategy’ to Wilson over the last decade, encapsulated above all by that comparison chart, I cannot resist the observation that it bears much resemblance to the mode of operation in right-wing politics. The ‘progressive’ position is mocked and criticized; the avant-gardists of a generation ago are rebranded as ‘conservative’ and relied upon to hold the fort against it; and nothing whatsoever is done in the way of positive, constructive action. Much as a man who becomes addicted to porn often ends up wrecking his attraction to flesh-and-blood women, the right seems to have imported its political learned helplessness into a field where dissidents have much more potential agency.

The difference between the two fields is this. Politics is subject to the law of power and violence, and the liberal state has an effective monopoly on violence that it waives (as per Moldbug) in favour of the ‘left-wing’ actors that serve to increase its power. Dissidents talk about ‘fighting the left’, but cannot actually play the game of politics as the liberal state and its partisans do, i.e. by expropriating the property and rights of their foes and redistributing them as benefits and privileges to their friends. What dissidents are allowed to do is to line up (a long way behind organized business interests and foreign state lobbies) in support of the ‘right-wing’ protection racket, which exists to limit the expropriation demands in the interests of the state – and, of course, to cope themselves into thinking that this amounts to doing something.

Where dissidents have had success is in the realm of truth and of the authority that comes from its recognition. This realm is also subject to the law of violence and power, but only partly (which is why, for example, the Christians of late antiquity did not have to take over the Roman state by armed force); and in the modern state, the main ‘hard’ constraint on it is an academy-media monopoly on information that has been practically dismantled by the internet.3 It has almost never been easier for outsiders to access scholarship, promote work, publish books and so on; and so dissident truths and ideas, a category to which arts and high culture also belong, can conquer in a way that rightist political actors cannot. Nonetheless they continue to be restrained by the right’s insistence on treating its truth struggle as a handmaid – nay, a slave – of its chronically-failed power struggle, and on polluting the healthy potential of the former with all the decrepit habits of the latter.

This brings us to another obvious objection. In case you were wondering, I am well aware that Wilson and her comrades have played the game of cultural conquest on easy mode, with every institutional helping hand thrust in their direction. Neo-traditionalist translations and retellings from dissident publishers would have met with a different reception: most likely, they would have been ignored, and every effort would have been made to tarnish their names had they garnered a following anyway. And most likely we would still have got a woke Odyssey movie based on the officially-approved translation and cultural movement.

Probably best not to bother, then?

As the Bhagavad-Gita says, thou hast the right to work but not to the fruits of work – and those fruits that do come from work can be subtler than expected. No-one expects online dissidents to start making movies (do not even breathe the word ‘AI’ at me); but a neo-traditionalist movement capable of producing its own culture would have far less reason to care about the contents of the latest movie. (Conversely, one that remains incapable of doing so should probably learn to take what slop is doled out to it and stop sassing the hand that feeds it, for there is no injustice in the principle that subjection comes with dependency.)

The immediate problem is not the enmity of the media, which should be taken for granted, but the indifference (reverent or otherwise) of our own people. It must be said that most people on the dissident right don’t care very much about Homer, Beowulf or traditional poetry in general, and I am certainly not about to try to nag them into caring more than they do. It’s fine not to care for these works, it’s fine to read them once and be done with it, and it’s fine to care about them to some degree while being focused on other things (including political theory).4 What concerns me is that traditional poetry is one of many worthwhile things that some people on the right could be doing, were it not for the morbid desperation that compels them to try to achieve their goals through conservative politics. Again like men addicted to porn, such people must turn away from the slop cycle so as to be able to feel the attractive pull of their true calling, whatever it might be.

One good reason for leaving them where they are is that no-one wants to see two hordes of ideological bugpeople swarming all over the Homeric matter, vomiting their modern obsessions onto it and reducing it to political content. But when we imagine what sort of distortions might result from this,5 we realize that they could only emanate from someone who has not sincerely forsaken right-wing politics. Ideally, one who had the talents and determination to attempt what I am suggesting would not be of this type; he would instead have passed through the dissident right as a sort of via negativa, remaining trapped on no ideological islet, but losing every one of his convictions in the essential justice and righteousness of the modern liberal state. A dissident of this kind would be better placed to approach ancient works on their own terms than any other modern man or woman of any other political or apolitical bent.

Even failing that, though, I doubt that ‘woke’ distortions and projections would simply be replaced by ‘based’ ones, because the dominant tendency of people on the right is towards the opposite vice: an excessive, self-paralyzing reverence for fixed texts. And here we come to a reason for our cultural sterility that has nothing to do with indifference to traditional poetry or political porn addiction.

In fandoms devoted to literary works, a division has been observed between ‘affirmational’ and ‘transformational’ fans, which respectively skew male and female. The typical affirmational fan of (say) Tolkien’s work learns the lore of Middle-Earth in detail, perhaps speculates and argues about it, but is much too reverent to presume to add anything to it himself. The transformational fan is more interested in using the work as a basis for her own creative efforts, some of which could not be more irreverent (e.g. queer Hobbit porn). The problem with the transformational fan is that she carelessly projects her own preoccupations onto the work, without having brought herself into a state of harmony with it; but the problem with the affirmational fan is that he spends an inordinate amount of time and effort internalizing the work, only to bring forth nothing original from it.

Without shifting the artistic context to a political one, it strikes me that the words ‘affirmational’ and ‘transformational’ can be taken as more or less equivalent to conservative and progressive. It is also perhaps easier to see in the artistic context what the dissident right has long forgotten in the political one, which is that both are wrong. Progressivism is rot, but conservatism is the death that ushers it in, and neither is to be identified with the healthy and normal growth of tradition.6

Although the oral tradition of archaic Greece is long gone, medieval and post-medieval Englishmen (notably Chaucer and Shakespeare) were quite capable of adding new matter to the literary tradition. Nowadays this sort of thing seems to be done only by feminists and other progressives, and it is worth reminding ourselves that some of the feminist retellings of Homer (Atwood’s Penelopiad and Miller’s Song of Achilles) came out years before Wilson’s translations and probably inspired or encouraged their writing. Wilson, then, essentially belongs to a transformational literary movement, and her flawed fidelity to Homer can be understood as a (perhaps rather grudging) concession to the affirmational medium of translation. To critique her work or even to try to surpass it is to miss the point, which is that the movement to which she belongs is the most vital thing left in the post-classical Homeric tradition (just as rot is the most vital thing left in a dead body).

All the same, we have emphasized translation for good reason, because we cannot expect to wash away the barrenness of conservatism overnight. The ‘cure’ for aspiring traditionalists must be gradual, and comes as I envisage it in three stages: first to reclaim the old matter through translation, then to retell it through poetic recomposition, and finally to breathe new life into it by original expansion.7 This, at least, is the basic mode of operation by which I have approached Beowulf and the handful of other surviving heroic poems from Anglo-Saxon England. And although I must say yet again that Homer is well out of my reach, anyone who can claim otherwise is more than welcome to make analogical use of any of the ideas outlined at this blog.

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O goddess, sing    of the son of Peleus:
Of the wrath of Achilles,    and the countless pains
It heaped on the Achaeans;    and of heroes' shades
It hurled, untimely,    into Hades' depths,
And gave their bodies –    through the God's design –
To the fluttering birds,    and to the feasting dogs;
For that a violent word-war    had forced asunder
Divine Achilles    from the king of men.

Which of the gods    engaged them in strife?
Leto's son and Zeus's.    He was stoked to rage,
Incensed at the king;     a sickness raised he –
A plague upon the host –    and piled up corpses;
For the son of Atreus    had dishonoured his priest,
Venerable Chryses,    when he came to the fleet
With riches to ransom    his rapted daughter –
And the laurel garland    that graced his hand
Upon the gold sceptre    of farshóoting Apollo.
He entreated all,    to reobtain his girl,
In the host of Achaeans;    but chiefly two:
The sons of Atreus,    on high commanding.

"Ye two Atrides,    and ye throng of Greeks,
"Well-gréaved Achaeans;    may the gods of Olympus
"Grant ye the plundering    of Priam's city
"And a safe return.    But take my gifts
"And restore me my darling,    for the sake of honour
"To the son of Zeus,    farshóoting Apollo."

The rest of the Achaeans    cried assent then
To reverence the priest,    and the ransom take;
But displeased was Atrides, and repulsed him harshly,
And sent him away    with a stark decree:

"Get thee hence, old man,    from these hollow barques,
"And nor loiter in this place    not later return,
"Lest the god's garland –    if again I should find thee!
"And his gold-decked staff    should not save thy life.
"The maid is mine now;    I'll dismiss her not
"From my home at Argos;    till age should take her,
"In bed she'll partner me,    and ply the loom,
"And everywhere she fares    shall be far from her country.
"Move me no more now.    While thou mayst, begone!"

The old man trembled,    and in haste obeyed,
And in silence mourned    by the tumultuous sea.
He went in solitude,    and ceaseless prayed
To the Fulgent, whose birth    was of fair-locked Leto:

"Hear me, O god    of the argent bow!
"Who bestrideth Chrysa,    and Cilla divine,
"And reigneth over Tenedos    as rightful lord!
"O Mousebane Apollo!    If it pleased thy heart
"When I built thy temple up,    and burned the thigh-fat
"Of bulls and goats to thee,    then bring my wish about:
"Strike the Danaeans    for thy servant's tears!"

So Chryses prayed;    and Apollo heard him,
And strode from Olympus    with his shining bow
And quiver o'er his shoulders,    that clashed as he marched,
And rattled with arrows;    enraged in heart
And bent on vengeance.    To the fleet he came
As dark as the night;    and he knelt apart,
And loosed off an arrow –   with a lash and clang
Of the doom-knelling string    upon the silver bow.
He struck the mules first,    and swift-limbed dogs,
Then full vengeful at men    sent his venomed darts –
And the dead were mounded    on cremation-pyres.
Nine nights the army    from his arrows suffered;
'Til Achilles, on the tenth day,    called a meeting
Of the whole war-host.    White-armed Hera
Had sent that thought to him    to seed his mind –
For she most dearly pitied    those dying before her.

So they gathered in council,    together assembling,
And swift-foot Achilles    stood to spéak amóng them:

"It seems, Atrides,    if we scape with life
"From the war and pestilence    that wastes our host,
"We must pell-mell homeward,    repelled and routed,
"In defeat, from this fight!    But let's first consult
"Some prophet, or priest,    or prober of dreams –
"For dreams are from Zeus –    for to show what cause
"Has so incensed the archer-god:    what act or fault?
"Let us offer hecatombs;    let altars smoke;
"So that for vows we have broken    he may blame us not,
"And thus soothed by the smouldering    of spotless lambs
"And blemishless goats,    his bane may turn from us."

He spake, and sat;    and the son of Thestor,
Calchas the augur –    who all things knew
Of what was, and what is,    and what will be after –
Who was best of bird-seers,    blessed by Apollo
As a soothsaying oracle –    whose arts had guided
The ships of Achaea    to the shores of Troy –
This sage stood up now,    and spake goodwillingly:

"God-loved Achilles!    I would gladly tell thee
"What has caused the choler    of the king Apollo
"Who shoots from on high.    But I will say it only
"If thou swear'st me a pact –    that with speech and hand,
"With word and with deed,    thou wilt do me aid –
"And with thy might defend me.    'Less I miss my guess,
"The Argives' ruler,    who reigns supreme –
"He who sways this host –    will be incensed to hear it.
"And woe to the underling    who angers a king!
"Today he might bite back    the bile in his chest,
"But his vengeance will fester,    be fulfilled in time –
"So tell me for truth:    wilt thou protect my life?"

Fleet-foot Achilles    fitly answered:
"Take courage, Calchas,    declare what prophecy
"Thou learnedst from the god –    belov'd of his father,
"Far-shot Apollo –    whom in prayers thou seek'st,
"And discover'st knowledge,    for Danaeans' sake,
"Of divine foresight.    In this force of troops
"None shall boldly dare –    while I breathe the air
"And look on the light –    to lay upon thee
"His heavy hand    at the hollow ships –    
"Not e'en if thou namest    Ágamémnon,
"Who boasts himself above us    as the best of Greeks."

And so blameless the seer,    emboldened, spake:
"'Tis nor for vow nor hecatomb    he harries us,
"And with pains oppresses us.    His priest was wronged
"When Agamémnon dishonoured him –    his maiden's ransom
"He scorned to take,    and did not set her free;
"And thus affronted,    the afar-shooter
"Afflicts us with arrows;    and no end will come
"To the horrid murrain;    he'll withhold no shames,
"'Til unpurchased, unransomed,    with no price exacted –
"The bright-eyed girl    goes back to her father,
"And a blessed hecatomb    bleeds in Chrysa.
"We might thus be pardoned,    and appease the god."

So he spake, and sat;    and the son of Atreus
Arose, heroic    wide-rúling Agamemnon –
Baleful black wrath    overboiled his heart,
And his eyes were like embers,    hotly blazing.

Ill-stáring at Calchas,    he bespake him thus:
"Oracle of evils!    Not e'er has come
"Any good for me    from thy grievous tongue;
"Ill-tidings are thy joy;    and tidings glad
"From thy words and works    have never ónce come forth.
"'Midst Danaeans divining,    thou announc'st to all
"That the far-shooting one    afflicts us so
"For the sake of his priest;    for that the splendid ransom
"For Chryseis the virgin    I refused to trade;
"For I much prefer    the maid to have
"And hold in my house;    for in every way
"She more charms me than my wed wife,    Clýtemnéstra;
"In no wise is she worse:    in her woman's form,
"In her mind, in her works –    a matchless girl!
"Yet I'll loose her regardless –    for I'm loath to watch
"My people keep perishing    in pyre-smoulders –
"Ye must see, at once, though,    that reward is found,
"For to make amends to me.    Unmeet 'twould be
"If it were I alone    in the Argive troop
"Who should want an honour-prize;    as all ye witness,
"The prize that was mine own    now elsewhere wends."


Swift-foot Achilles    responded thus:
"Son of Atreus,    overstanding all,
"And as greedy for gain    as thou art great in rank:
"How ought us greathearts    to grant thee a prize?
"None are lying about here!    The loot from cities
"That we captured and sacked    has been claimed and doled,
"Distributed generally;    unjust 'twould be
"To regather it again    from all the Grecian host.
"But for the moment send    the maid to her god,
"And thou shalt take repayment –    three or fourfold –
"When the walls have fallen    round the well-fenced Troy,
"And Zeus has granted us    to sack and to gut her."

But answered the lordly one,    Agamemnon:
"O divine Achilles,    who art valiant, truly,
"Do not steal to subtlety!    Deceitful wit
"Shall not persuade or escape me;    thou shalt slip not past me!
"Thou wishest, haply,    to be well-repaid,
"While I sit down emptily    and sore with lack?
"Thou demand'st I give her;    our greatheart host
"Must then compensate me    with equivalent prize,
"Their king to gratify.    I'll grasp it myself
"Should they scorn to grant it!    I shall set my hands
"Upon the prize allotted thee,    and lead her away;
"Or the prize of Odysseus,    or the prize of Ajax,
"And whomever I visit    shall be filled with gall.
"But this matter may wait    until a meeter time.
"So now come, let us haul    to the heaven-bright brine
"A sable ship,    staffed with rowers,
"Stuffed with a hecatomb;    and set on board
"Fair-chéeked Chryseis –    and let charge be taken
"By some man of counsel    who shall make the trip:
"Idomeneus or Ajax;    or deific Odysseus,
"Or thee, Pelides –    our terriblest man –
"By making sacrifice    to seek appeasement
"Of the long-armed god,    and to lift his scourge."

Yet he responded scowl-browed,    swift-foot Achilles:
"O my, so covetous,    cloaked in shamelessness
"With loot on the brain!    Who would liefly serve thee
"In this host of Achaeans?    Thy hest obey?
"At thy command wage war?    Or wend on a mission?
"I came not for vengeance    on these foreign spearmen!
"No Trojan has touched me;    none thither drove
"My horses or beeves;    none has harmed or plundered
"Any fruit of field    in my fertile Phthia,
"Nurse of mighty men.    Remote she lies,
"Protected by territories    between us standing:
"The deep-valed mountains    and redounding sea.
"O grossly shameless one,    we gathered behind thee,
"Dog-eyed ingrate,    to do thee honour –
"Thyself and thy brother –    to settle wrongs
"That ye suffered from those Trojans,    that thou turn'st not to heed.
"And at that thou threat'st me    that thou'lt take my prize
"That I earned by mine efforts,    and the Argives gave me!
"I have never taken    from the throng-filled cities
"Sacked on our ventures,    any share thine equal:
"Though my hands ever brunt    the hardest fighting,
"When we fall to dividing,    by far the greater
"Of the prizes is thine;    and with paltry winnings –
"Yet dear-beloved –    to my dark-tarred ships,
"Wearied by war-works,    my way I take.
"But my course I'll turn now,    with my curve-prowed boats,
"To my home Phthia;    and I hardly think
"That thou shalt gather such treasures    as might glut thine avarice
"When I, the dishonoured,    aid thee no more."

And the host-king answered,    Agamemnon:
"Well then fly, and fleetly,    if thou feel'st in heart
"Such ardent urging    to be out and gone.
"Do not stay for my sake;    I'll beseech thee not;
"I have others around me    who will honour me more,
"As will the highest Counsellor,    the all-wise Zeus.
"I regard thee loathest    among God-kept kings:
"For in strife thou joyest    and in shedding blood –
"In combat and carnage.    Yet perchance thy might
"Is the gift of some god,    and thus no ground to boast on.
"So hence thee homeward,    with thy house-companions,
"To lord the Myrmidons.    No loss I count thee,
"And I reck thy wrath    not a wretched jot.
"But I threat thee thus:    just as taken hence
"By Apollo the Fulgent    is my prize Chryseis,
"And I send her on sea    with my sworn companions,
"Fair-cheeked Briseis    will surely be mine.
"I shall move on thy camp    and demand thy prize.
"Thou shalt learn, thus lessoned,    thy lower place;
"And that shall cow the next man –    who shall know far better
"Than face-to-face with me    to vaunt his peerhood!"

He so bespake him;    and the shaggy breast
Of the son of Peleus    was seized by pain;
Divided, debating:    if to force a path
With his blade unsheathed,    through the standers-round,
For to take the life    of the lord of men;
Or if to stop his gall up    and restrain his heart.

As in his mind he doubted,    and drew, unscabbarding,
His trenchant sword,    Athena came,
From heaven descending;    snow-armed Hera
Had sent her swiftly,    for the striving pair
She dually regarded    as dear to her spirit.
So the Spear-Shaker    stood behind him –
And appeared to none of them,    apart from him –
And grasped his gold locks.    Jarred, he turned then,
And knew, instantly,    those eyes that flashed
With a terrible light.    He thus bespake her
With feather-fletched words:    "O why hast thou come,
"Thou child of the Aegis-Bearer,    all-wise Zeus?
"Hast thou come to witness    the wanton insolence
"Atrides foists on me?    I tell thee soothly:
"That forceful bombast    might just burst the life from him."

Owl-eyed Athena    returned these words:
"From heaven I've been sent    for to stay thine anger –
"So wilt thou obey me?    White-armed Hera
"Dually regards ye    as dear to her spirit.
"So halt thy hand now,    and heft no sword;
"With thy tongue retort to him –    let that suffice.
"I foretell to thee truly    that the time will come
"When thou shalt take for this outrage    a threefold payment
"In splendid bounty-gifts!    Stay, obey us!"

Swift-foot Achilles    responded thus:
"O Goddess I will hear thee,    though galled in heart,
"For 'tis always best    to obey thy words:
"Who hears the gods    is heard by them too."

Just so he spake;    and on the silvered hilt
Laid his heavy hand,    and homeward thrust
His sword to its sheath;    he did not scorn obedience
To the word of Athena.    She went Olympusward
To mix with her kindred,    the immortal gods,
In the high halls of Zeus,    the Aegis-Bearer.

But with rage unceasing    'gainst the son of Atreus,
Pelides spoke out    with scathing words:
"Thou stout sack of wine,    with the shameless eyes
"And aspect of a dog,    and the heart of a deer!
"When the host takes arms,    I've not ever seen thee
"Arm for battle;    or an ambush dare
"With the doughtest Greeks;    the din of war
"Is like the call of death to thee,    and cows thy heart.
"Much rather wouldst thou range    through the rear of the host
"To steal from whomever    dares dispúte thy words.
"Thou art a people-eater,    who oppresses nobodies
"Tamed to abuses –    or else they would make
"This loathsome outrage    thy last of all.
"But I'll speak against thee;    and I'll swear an oath
"By this very sceptre –    that will sprout no buds,
"Nor bear more leaves,    nor boughs bring forth –
"Since from its source 'twas severed,    on the slopes of mountains;
"Lopped by the bronze blade    of leaves and bark;
"And is carried by justicers,    Achaeans' sons,
"Those who guard the ordinances    got from Zeus –
"By this sign I swear now    a resounding oath:
"That Achilles will be missed    by Achaeans' sons;
"And the time shall come    when thou shalt crave his aid;
"When thou hapless grievest;    cannot help thy men;
"When man-slaying Hector    mows down droves of them;
"Thou'lt rend thy heart then,    and rue the day
"That thou didst no honour    to the doughtest in arms!"

Then hard to the earth    he hurled his scepter,
Studded with gold nails,    and sat back down;
And yet Atrides seethed    upon the side opposing;
So arose another:    Nestor of Pylos,
Sweet-tongued orator;    sheer eloquence
Dripped from him dulcetly    like delicate honey;
In his long lifetime    there had lived and perished
Two generations    that were reared and born with him
In godly Pylos;    now he governed the third.
Up he stood in their midst,    and spake goodwilling:

"O what shame and disaster    has struck Achaea,
"And how Priam and sons    would be pleased to hear it!
"All the other Trojans    would at heart rejoice
"Were they to hear the two of ye    in heated quarrel,
"Who in battle and counsel    are the best of Greeks!
"But yield to persuasion:    ye are younger, both of ye,
"Than I, who in old days    oft consorted
"With much nobler men –    and yet was ne'er disdained by them.

"I've seen none like them,    nor will see the like again
"Of King Pirithous,    who ruled the Lapiths;
"Or that people's herdsman,    the hero Dryas;
"Caeneus, Exadius,    noble warriors;
"Polyphemus the Lapith,    who was like an immortal;
"Theseus son of Aegeus,    who was equal to gods.
"They were the mightiest bred    among us mortal earthborns:
"The mightiest indeed,    and with the mightiest fought –
"With the mountain Centaurs,    and crushed them utterly!

"With such I consorted,    coming straight from Pylos,
"When they called me forth    from my far-off land;
"And I fought my part –    although to fight with them
"Would overmatch the might    of any man alive.
"Yet they observed my counsels,    to my speech yielding –
"So yield ye also,    since to yield is best.
"Agamemnon –    though thou mighty art –
"Do not seize the girl    that the Greeks awarded him;
"And thee, Pelides –    do not think to set
"Thy face against his –    for no higher glory
"Has been granted by Zeus    to a sceptred king.
"Although thy strength be great –    though thou be goddess-born –
"Yet he stands the lordlier    in lands and men.
"Son of Atreus!    Cease thine anger,
"And leave it to me,    by polite entreaties,
"To calm the choler    of Achilles here,
"Who is the bulwark of our side    in this bitter war."

The kingly one answered,    Agamemnon:
"Indeed, elder,    on all these things
"Thou hast fitly spoken;    but this fellow here
"Will not sate his desire    'til he stands o'er all:
"Over all lording,    over all commanding,
"And all deeds dictating;    but I doubt that one
"Will abide his lordship    or obey his words.
"The immortal gods    have made him a spearman,
"But they gave him no license    for disgraceful insults –"

He cut in and answered,    deific Achilles:
"I'd be called a coward,    and a cheap nonentity,
"If everywhere, in everything,    unresistingly
"I bow to thy bidding.    Let thy beck and call
"Be laid on others –    I'll no longer yield.
"But now hark, and hold this    in thy heart and mind:
"I'll not strive for the girl –    I'll not set my hands
"On thee, or any other    who intends to come
"And remove once more    what to me ye gave –
"But of what sundries are mine    beside my swift black boats,
"I'll not suffer one    to be seized unwilling:
"Should thou come and try me,    let this crowd observe
"Thy black blood billow    round the blade of my spear!"

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So having battled back and forth    with bitter words,
They stood, and dissolved    the assembly-host
By the Achaean ships.    The son of Peleus
Went, with his warriors,    to his well-planed boats –
And with the son of Menoetius –    to his sheltered camp.

Meanwhile the son of Atreus    to the sea-waves dragged
A thrusting ship;    took twenty rowers;
Put on board, for the god,    a blessed hecatomb;
And led to her chair    fair-chéeked Chryseis,
Consigned her to the charge    of resourceful Odysseus.

And as away they sailed,    upon the watery roads,
Agamemnon commanded    the men of the host
To purge themselves    from the plague's defilements.
They washed the filth off;    to the waters cast it;
And pledged to Apollo    perfect hecatombs –
Both bulls and goats –    beside the briny furrows,
Barren and harvestless.    To heaven rose
The smoke and the savour    in spiral-coils.

Thus the army bustled;    and yet Agamemnon
Ne'er relented the threats    he had laid on Achilles;
So he spoke to his heralds,    who esquired him always –
Talthybius, Eurybates –    ready attendants:
"Now go to the camp    of Achilles Pelides,
"And take by the hand    and hither lead
"Fair-cheeked Briseis;    if he quits her not,
"Then I shall go to take her    with a troop of men –
"And that shall chill him colder    than his quitting the girl."

So he spake, and sent them    with that stark decree;
And they full trepidly traipsed    by the untillable brine;
'Til when they came to the ships    and the camp of Myrmidons,
By shelter and black ship    they saw him there:
Achilles sitting;    and the sight of them
Did not at all please him.    They promptly stopped –
Frozen stock-still    in fright and awe –
And nor accosted nor questioned    the king before them.

Yet he understood,    and he bespake them thus:
"Hail and welcome,    ye heralds of Zeus,
"And messengers of men.    Move ye closer;
"No fault do I find with ye;    fully culpable
"I hold the one    who has hither sent ye
"For the sake of Briseis,    to seize her from me.
"God-sprung Patroclus!    Go in haste now
"To lead the girl out;    and let them take her,
"And lead her away;    and let them henceforth
"Bear their witness –    before blessed gods,
"Before mortal men;    and more besides,
"Before that heartless king –    if e'er again
"My help be needed,    the host to save
"From a wretched ruin!    He rages and fumes,
"Seethes and smoulders,    in destructive mind,
"With nor hind nor foresight –    and heeds not a whit
"How the Greeks, by their fleet,    may fight unscathed."

He thusly spake;    Patroclus obeyed
His beloved friend;    and led the girl,
Fair-cheeked Briseis,    from the camp's shelter.

She was given, taken –    and the two went back,
Returned to their king,    by the Achaean ships;
And as away they led her,    she, reluctant, went with them,
A woman unwilling.    Then went Achilles
Away from his comrades,    and wept in sorrow
On the shore of the hoar sea,    staring outward
On the ocean's endlessness.    And as he did so,
He cast his hands forth,    and called in prayer
Upon his dear mother,    with many a word:
"Mother who bore me!    In my minimal time
"I might have looked for honour    to Olympian Zeus,
"Who thunders on high;    but not a titch he grants me,
"And I'm thus dishonoured    by Agamemnon,
"Who my prize possesses,    having seized her away."

Thus he spake, and wept,    and it went to the lady
Who bides under brine,    in abyssal depths
With her aged father.    From the hoary sea
She ascended swiftly    like a shroud of mist –
And she sat before him    as he shed his tears;
And with her hand she stroked him,    and she spake and named him:

"Why weeps my child?    What has sorrowed thee?
"Speak, do not hide it;    share it between us."

He sighed, and responded,    swift-foot Achilles:
"Why should I tell thee    what thou wost and seest?
"At the city of Eëtion,    sacred Thebe,
"We struck and we sacked,    and with spoil returned;
"It was distributed fairly;    and the sons of Achaeans
"Chose for Atrides    fair-cheeked Chryseis.
"Then came Chryses, the priest    of Apollo the far-shot,
"To the speedy boats    of the bronze-clad Greeks
"With riches to ransom    his rapted daughter,
"And the laurel garland    that graced his hand
"Upon the gold sceptre    of farshooting Apollo.
"He entreated all    to reobtain his girl,
"In the host of Achaeans;    but chiefly two:
"The sons of Atreus,    on high commanding.
"The rest of the Achaeans    cried assent then
"To reverence the priest,    and the ransom take;
"But displeased was Atrides,    and repulsed him harshly,
"And sent him away    with a stark decree.

"Thereafter, in anger,    the old man prayed –
"And Apollo harkened,    for he held him dear,
"And took at us Argives    a terrible shot.
"The dead fell in droves;    the darts of the god
"Went whizzing all ways    throughout the width of our camp.
"Then a seer explained to us    the Shooter's will:
"It was I who urged,    ahead of the rest,
"The god's appeasement;    but, gripped by anger,
"The son of Atreus,    swiftly rising,
"Spake a threat at me –    and soon fulfilled it.
"For the bright-eyed Achaeans    to Chryse send
"The girl on a swift ship,    with gifts for the Lord;
"But just now the heralds    from my huts have led
"Briseus's daughter,    whom the sons of Achaeans,
"The Grecian host,    to my hand had given.

"But now succour thy son,    if thou hast sway to do so!
"Ascend to Olympus,    with Zeus to plead,
"If by speech or deed    thou ever servedst or gladdenedst him.
"I frequent heard thee,    in my father's hall,
"Exultant, telling    of the time thou helpedst him:
"Lone 'midst Olympians,    thou liftedst ruin
"From the cloud-murking Thunderer,    Cronus's scion.
"When many immortals    had a mind to bind him –
"Hera, Poseidon,    and Spear-Shake Athena –
"Thou unloosedst his bonds,    and to th' Olympian heights
"The Hundred-Hander    to his help thou calledst –
"Whom gods call Briareus,     but all mortals
"Know as Aegaeon –    for that giant's strength
"Exceeds his sire,    [Poseidon Aegaeon.]
"When he sat by Cronides,    in exultant glory,
"He cowed the blessed ones;    they rebelled no more.

"Go clasp his knees,    and recount all that,
"So that haply he helps    the host of Troy –
"So to ships and sea-shore    they may shove the Greeks back,
"With terrible slaughters;    they may thank their king,
"Wide-ruling Agamemnon –    who shall reck the folly
"Of doing no honour    to the doughtest in arms!"

Thetis answered –    there were tears in her eyes –
"O woe, my son –    why did I bear thee?
"So bitter-born,    and so bound to sorrow!
"I wish thou couldst sit    without weep or pain
"By thy ships, since thy life-lot    is short indeed!
"Thou art fleet-fated,    and now far exceedest
"Others in sadness –    and so, therefore,
"I bore thee in the hall    to an evil fate!
"But to thundering Zeus    I will take thy suit –
"To snowy Olympus    I myself will go,
"And try to persuade him.     Till that time should come,
"By the ships swift-travelling,    sit continually,
"Rage at th' Achaeans,    and quit their war.
"For Zeus has departed    to the circling Ocean,
"With the faultless Ethiopians    a feast to hold,
"Yesterday going –    and the gods all followed.
"Days twelve will pass    ere they return to heaven.
"To his bronze-founded house    I shall hasten then,
"And clasp his knees    with cozening prayers,
"Entreat him humbly,    and hope he will listen."



So she spoke, and departed    from that place, and left him,
With a heart full of gall    for the well-girdled woman
They had taken unwilling.    By that time, Odysseus
Had sailed to Chrysa    with the sacred oxen.

To the deep-hollowed harbour    they drew full nigh
Until they fared within;    then they furled their sails,
And in the swart ship stowed them.    Then the standing mast
Was to the mast-crutch lowered    to lock it aft –
Loosing the forestays    that aloft had fixed it, 
Quickly and nimbly.    Then they caught the oars up,
And rowed her forth    until she reached her moorings.
They cast the anchor-stones;    secured the ropes
At the stern of the ship;    then stepped they out
Upon the shore of the sea,    amidst the surf of waves,
And led the hecatomb    for longshot Apollo.

And Chryseis stepped    out of the sea-crosser –
And was guided to th' altar,    and the arms of her father,
By resourceful Odysseus,    who spoke these words:

"I am come, O Chryses,    from the king of men –
"From high Agamemnon –    to home thy child,
"And to the Fulgent sacrifice    these sacred oxen,
"For the sake of the Greeks;    to assuage the Lord
"Who has heaped us Argives    with hard-groaned pains."

Thus he spake, and sent her    to her sire's hands –
And he received, rejoicingly,    his sweet-loved child.
Then they swiftly arrayed    the sacred oxen
In ordered wise    around the well-built altar.
Then they laved their hands,    laid hold of the barley,
And loud prayed the priest,    his palms uplifting:

"Hear me, O god    of the argent bow,
"Who bestrideth Chrysa,    and Cilla divine,
"And reigneth o'er Tenedos    in regal might!
"Thou hast honoured me once:    to my words didst harken,
"And hard didst thou harrow    the host of Achaeans!
"Fulfill my wish now;    ward from Danaeans
"That wrack and ruin,    and rescue their host!"

So he spake in prayer –    and Apollo listened –
And they prayed, and then sprinkled    the seeds of barley
'Twixt the horns of the beeves;    bent back their heads,
And slit their throats;    and skinned the carcasses.
They cut the thighs away,    and cowled them in fat,
And enfolded them doubly;    and flesh laid on,
Red-raw morsels    from the rest of the body.
The elder burned them    on billets of wood,
And made flowing libations    of the flambent wine,
As with five-pronged forks    stood the flanking youths.
When the thighs were cindered,    and they'd tasted the entrails,
They sliced the portions up,    on spits transfixed them,
And roasted them thoroughly;    and took the meat off.

When the work was finished,    and the fest prepared,
They feasted to the full –    with none found to be wanting.
Once they'd driven off their lust    for the drinking and eating,
Boys brought mixing-bowls    that brimmed with wine;
And they poured libations,    and then passed the cups round.

The Achaean youths,    throughout that day,
Sang splendid paeans    to appease the god,
The Far-Worker;    as their voices rose,
He heard their hymning,    and his heart rejoiced.

When the sun went down,    and darkness came,
By their ships' stern-ropes    to sleep they lay;
And when rose-fingered Eos –    the early-born one –
Shining, showed herself,    to sea they took,
Towards the wide host    of the war-Achaeans –
And the Far-doer graced them    with a favouring wind.

When they raised up the mast,    and unrolled the sail,
White and wide-spread,    the wind outbillowed it –
Filled full its middle;    by the foreprow parted,
The purple sea-waves    pealed full loudly
As the ship o'er the swell went,    speeding homeward.

When they came to the Achaeans'    encampèd host,
They dragged on the mainland    the dark-tarred ship,
High on the shore-sands –    and held her fast
With the lengths of wood    that they laid beneath her.
Then they scattered each way    to their ships and camps.



Still in wrath sat the other    by his rapid ships:
Divine Peleus' son,    fleet-foot Achilles.
Nor came he to council,    where chiefs win glory,
Nor went he to war;    but wasted his heart out
In sitting idle –    yearning wistfully
For combat and battle-cry.    There came at last
The twelfth day's dawn;    the eternal gods
Returned to Olympus,    led by the Thunderer,
All together.    Unforgetful was Thetis
Of her son's request;    from the sea-waves rising
In the mists of the morning,    she mounted the sky
And the tip of Olympus;    and there she found
Far-seeing Zeus,    son of Cronus –
Who was sat apart    from the sundry gods
Of many-ridged Olympus,    on the loftiest peak.

Down she sat beside him,    and seized his knees
With the left of her arms;    lifted her right hand
To cup his chin;    in supplication, spake
To Zeus son of Kronos,    the king of gods:
"O Father Zeus,    if I have favour done thee
"By my words or actions,    in the host of immortals,
"Grant my wish now;    give my son now –
"Who is swiftest-fated –    succour of honour;
"For the host-king dishonours him,    Agamemnon,
"Who has seized his prize    for himself to hold.
"But at least, thou honour him,    all-wise Olympian –
"Until the hour    when the humbled Greeks
"Shall heap him with honours,    help the Trojans –
"Fill them full of force    upon the field of battle!"

Just so she spake;    but Zeus the cloud-drover
Sat in silence,    and responded not.
So having taken his knees,    Thetis clasped them;
Clung to him closely;    requested again:
"Give me sure promise –    an assenting nod –
"Or refuse me fully,    since thou fearest nothing;
"I shall know full well then    to what degree
"I am the least in honour    midst the host of gods."

And so the cloud-gatherer,    aggrieved in mood,
Now answered thus:    "What thou ask'st of me
"Is a baneful doing;    I shall brunt the odium
"Of Hera, who is ever    stirring up disputes
"With provokeful reproaches –    calls me partial, always,
"With aid to the Ilians,    'midst the host of gods.
"Hasten homeward,    lest Hera spy thee;
"Leave thy case in my care,    'til I should carry this out;
"And I shall nod my head,    that thou mayst have my surety:
"'For this, from me,    is the mightiest pledge,
"And whate'er I nod to    is never found
"To be false, revoked,    or unfulfilled in time."

Thus spake Cronides,    and nodded assent
With his blue-black brows;    the ambrosial locks
Upon his deathless head    swept down in ripples,
And Olympus shook    beneath its sovran lord.



So the two now parted,    having taken counsel;
She plunged from Olympus,    to plumb the sea-depths;
But Zeus went homewards    to the hall of gods,
Where the immortals sat.    To meet their sire
They arose at once;    not one could bear
To stay and await him;    they stood together,
As he sat on his throne.    But his sister-wife
Had seen and was wise    to his sharing counsels
With silver-footed Thetis,    the sea-elder's daughter.

So without delay,    she thus bespake him –
Zeus son of Cronus –    with snithing words:
"O all-wily one!    Which other god
"Has shared thy counsels?    Such is beloved of thee:
"To plan and to ponder,    apart from me,
"And never venture frankly    to divulge thy mind to me."

He answered, the father    of humans and gods:
"Do not hope, Hera,    to wholly know
"My words and purposes;    that will not be;
 "'Twould be hard for thee,    although thou art my consort.
"What is fit to thy knowledge    thou art first to know
"Among mortal men    and the immortal gods.
"Of what I plan by myself,    sitting apart from ye,
"Pry not and probe not    with pestering questions!"

And his queen requoth to him,    cow-eyed Hera:
"Dread son of Cronus,    how comes this speech?
"In the past, truly,    I've not pressed thee much
"With prying and quarrying;    as it pleases thee,
"At ease, quiescent,    thou work'st out thy plans.
"But I fear, dreadfully,    thou fall'st to the sway
"Of silver-footed Thetis,    the sea-elder's daughter.
"In the mists of the morning,    she made her way here,
"And sat beside thee,    and seized thy knees;
"And methinks thou didst nod,    and thy troth didst seal,
"To honour Achilles,    and help the Trojans
"To slaughter scores    beside the ships of Greece."

Zeus the cloud-drover    spake in answer:
"O dear, O dear!    Does no doing of mine
"Escape thy suspicion?    Yet this serves thee ill:
"For it avails thee nought    but to further drive thee
"From my heart away;    and that shall harrow thee worse.
"If what thou say'st be sooth,    then as such I willed it;
"So now sit in silence,    and my speech obey –
"Lest I lay these hands on thee –    unwithstandable –
"And none on Olympus    in the least might help thee!"

Just so he spake;    and, shocked to fright,
Cow-eyed Hera    curbed her high heart
And sat down in silence.    Sorely troubled
Was the host celestial    in the house of Zeus.

So Hephaestus spoke,    famous craftsman;
Did favour to his mother,    fair-armed Hera.
"What a horrid business!    And how hard to bear,
"If ye two should quarrel    on account of mortals,
"And bring a brawl about!    The banquet of gods
"Would fall to the fouler,    and be void of pleasure!
"Let me warn my mother –    though full wise she is –
"To gratify our father,    lest again he scold her,
"And stir disturbance up    to spoil our feast.
"Should the Olympian lightning-wielder    list to round on us
"And strike us from our seats,    none could stand athwart him;
"But with soft words soothe him –    who is strongest of all –
"And the Olympian will graciously    be gentle with us."

Just so he spake –    and sprang to his feet,
Took the double goblet,    which he dealt to the hands
Of his dear mother,    and addressed her thus:
"Forbear, mother,    and abide, though vexed;
"Lest mine eyes should see thee    being struck – and I,
"As dear as thou art to me,    might aid thee not,
"For to vie with the Olympian    would be far too painful.
"Once I tried it,    wishing to help thee –
"And was caught by the foot;    and he cast me down
"Past the sublime threshold –    and long I hurtled,
"All day, through air;    with the downing sun
"I landed in Lemnos,    and my life was ebbing;
"But I soon had succour    from the Sintian folk."

Just so he spake;    and a smile appeared
Upon the face of the goddess,    fair-armed Hera;
And smiling, from her son    she received the goblet.
Then he rounded, rightwise,    the room of gods,
And drew from the mixing-bowl    the dulcet nectar.
As they looked on Hephaestus,    lame and awkward,
Huffing and bustling    through the hall to serve them,
The blessed ones were stirred    to unstinting laughter.

'Til the sun went under,    for all that day,
To the full they feasted,    with nought found to be wanting –
Not the sheen lyre    in the sway of Apollo,
Nor the singing in exchange    of the sweet-voiced Muses.

When low sank the light    of the lucent sun,
Each left for his house,    for to lay him down –
For the famed Hephaestus    had framed such homes for them
With learned artfulness,    the list-limbed god.
So Zeus the lightning-wielder    sought the rest-bed
He'd sought oft before    when sweet sleep came;
He went up and lay there,    with his lady next to him –
Gold-throned Hera    by the great Olympian.

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We concluded the penultimate part with Zeus’s threat to lay hands on his wife unless she stop interrogating him about his agreement with Thetis. At this, Hera sits down cowed-eyed, and an awkward silence descends on the house of the gods. The first to stand up and speak is none other than Hephaestus, the lame god of the smithy, who mollifies his mother before giving the other gods some comic relief by limping around the hall serving out the divine nectar.

In H.J. Rose’s Handbook of Greek Mythology, Hephaestus is placed among the ‘lesser and foreign deities’, and the following is said of him (p.p.165-6):

Hephaistos has been pretty conclusively shown to be an Oriental. The distribution of his worship is intelligible only if we assume that he was, to begin with, a fire-god adored by the natives of the region of the Lykian Olympos, which was and is remarkable for the presence of a considerable quantity of natural gas. From this centre, his cult appears to have spread among the Karians, not only on the mainland, but to adjacent islands, notably Lemnos, whose mountain, Moschylos, geologists recognize as obviously volcanic, and in which some traces of volcanic activity seem to have lingered long enough for a memory at least of them to survive in classical tradition. Here also, it would seem, those Greeks who had settled on or near the coast of Asia Minor learned to know of this god… By this time he was no longer, if he had ever been, simply a deity who made fire come from the ground, and was become a divine smith, whose forges were under the earth at sundry places and made their presence known by fire and smoke escaping therefrom. The population of Attica, which was largely industrial, worshipped Hephaistos with considerable zeal, and here and there in other parts of Greece he was honoured…

Hephaestus will make reference to this island of Lemnos, as well as the somewhat mysterious Sintian people who lived there, in the course of his speech to Hera. According to him, this is where he happened to land after being thrown off Olympus by Zeus, having tried to intervene in one of the god-king’s many quarrels with his wife. What is interesting is that in another account, also found in the Iliad (specifically Book XVIII), it is Hera who throws Hephaestus off Mount Olympus after giving birth to him and finding him deformed.

At the level of story, there’s no necessary contradiction here: when Hephaestus was born to Hera (which, according to Hesiod, took place ‘without union with Zeus’), she threw him off Mount Olympus because he was deformed, and on a separate occasion Zeus did the same thing because he intervened in a domestic quarrel. But the duplication of theme leads us to wonder whether they do not originate from one myth rationalized and narrativized in two different ways.

Much more can be found on Hephaestus, his fall, and his landing here.

Just so he spake;    and, shocked to fright,
Cow-eyed Hera    curbed her high heart
And sat down in silence.    Sorely troubled
Was the host celestial    in the house of Zeus.

So Hephaestus spoke –    famous craftsman –
To do favour to his mother,    fair-armed Hera.
"What a horrid business!    And how hard to bear,
"If ye two should quarrel    on account of mortals,
"And bring a brawl about!    The banquet of gods
"Would fall to the fouler,    and be void of pleasure!
"Let me warn my mother –    though full wise she is –
"To gratify our father,    lest again he scold her,
"And stir disturbance up    to spoil our feast.
"Should the Olympian lightning-wielder    list to round on us
"And strike us from our seats,    none could stand athwart him;
"But with soft words soothe him –    who is strongest of all –
"And the Olympian will graciously    be gentle with us."

Just so he spake –    and sprang to his feet,
Took the double goblet,    which he dealt to the hands
Of his dear mother,    and addressed her thus:
"Forbear, mother,    and abide, though vexed;
"Lest mine eyes should see you    being struck – and I,
"As dear as you are to me,    might aid you not,
"For to vie with the Olympian    would be far too painful.
"Once I tried it,    wishing to help you –
"And was caught by the foot;    and he cast me down
"Past the sublime threshold –    and long I hurtled,
"All day, through air!    With the downing sun
"I landed in Lemnos,    and my life was ebbing;
"But I soon had succour    from the Sintian folk."

Just so he spake;    and a smile appeared
Upon the face of the goddess,    fair-armed Hera;
And smiling, from her son    she received the goblet.
Then he rounded, rightwise,    the room of gods,
And drew from the mixing-bowl    the dulcet nectar.
As they looked on Hephaestus,    lame and awkward,
Huffing and bustling    through the hall to serve them,
The blessed ones were stirred    to unstinting laughter.

'Til the sun went under,    for all that day,
To the full they feasted,    with nought found to be wanting –
Not the sheen lyre    in the sway of Apollo,
Nor the singing in exchange    of the sweet-voiced Muses.

When low sank the light    of the luminant sun,
Each left for his own house,    to lay him down –
For the famed Hephaestus    had framed such homes for them
With learned artfulness,    the list-limbed god.
So Zeus the lightning-wielder    sought the rest-bed
He'd oft sought before    when sweet sleep came;
He went up and lay there,    with his lady next to him –
Gold-throned Hera    by the great Olympian.

Thus ends the first book, along with this experiment in translation, at least for the foreseeable future. I would not want to continue the project further without first acquiring a much better understanding of the language, so that I can work more artfully and lean less on crutches. This is a tall order, however, and for various reasons it is unlikely that I will be able to attempt it anytime soon; in the meantime, should anyone else be willing and able to take up the task of retranslating Homer, he or she is welcome to make use of the ideas outlined here.

It must be said that the ‘alliterative’ meter may not be the best choice for a serious, full-length translation. As I noted in the first part, since there exists no obvious English analogue to the Greek hexameter line, translators of the Iliad and Odyssey have had to resort to various metrical (and unmetrical) forms that are quite unlike to the verse of Homer. Thus Chapman had his rhymed fourteeners, which imitate the original hexameters only vaguely; Pope with his pentameter couplets threw away all pretence to imitation; 20th-century translators wrote longer lines with more fidelity to Homeric formulas, but had to resort to free verse for this; and now Emily Wilson has reverted to the 19th-century preference for unrhymed iambic pentameter with formulas rewritten for variation. Do we really need another translation in a meter that forces us even farther from the original poem?

The true neo-traditionalist way, I think, would involve a retvrn to Old English forms but not to the normal metre of Beowulf. In Anglo-Saxon poems there is a second, longer type of metrical line that appears only occasionally, and is called ‘hypermetric’ by modern scholars. Such lines contain six stresses and are governed by very onerous ornamentational rules (worked out in detail by Old English scholar Constance Hieatt; see here and here if you’re interested). The following sample of two such lines is taken from the Seafarer (full translation here):

Dol biþ se þe him his Dryhten ne ondrædeþ / cymeð him se deað unþinged

Eadig bið se þe eaþmod leofaþ / cymeð him seo ar of heofonum

These lines can be rendered in modern English as follows, with Hieatt’s rules preserved (stresses in italics, chiming stresses in bold):

He is dull who dreads not his Lord;    there comes to him death without warning;
He is happy who humbly lives;    there comes to him heavenly grace.

Once we strip these lines of their ornamentational rules, however, we end up with a blank six-stressed line that should be long and flexible enough to render Greek hexameter verses one-to-one. To the above pattern with two half-lines of three stresses each we can add other, equivalent patterns, such as a line composed of three half-lines (third-lines?) of two stresses each. We can illustrate both of these patterns by using them to retranslate the first two lines of the Iliad:

O goddess, sing of the wrath / of Achilles, the son of Peleus –
Catastrophic – / that heaped on Achaeans / pains uncounted...

This comes quite close to the original Greek lines:

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

Meenin aeide thea / Peeleeiadeoo Akhileeos

[Anger sing, goddess / of Peleus’s son Achilles]

οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,

oulomeneen / hee myri’ Akhaiois / agle’ etheeke

[accursed / that many to Achaeans / pains brought]

This, then, could be the key to translating this ancient poetry into English and linking it with the oldest remnants of our own oral tradition. What might be said against it is that it would threaten to become too exact, to degenerate into a sterile exercise in identifying formulas and replicating them the same way everywhere they are used, without the element of creative variation forced upon the translator by the meter used here.

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Notes

The double goblet

The LSJ dictionary is unclear on the matter of whether ἀμφικύπελλος (amphikupellos) should be taken as meaning ‘double-handled’ or ‘double-bowled’ (i.e. having a bowl at the top and the bottom).

The sublime threshold

The word translated as ‘sublime’ is θεσπέσιος (thespesios), which depending on context can take such meanings as ‘divine’, ‘wondrous’, ‘oracular', ‘superhuman’. Possibly we can understand the ‘transcendent threshold’, the boundary between the realm of the gods and that of mortals.

As they looked on Hephaestus, lame and awkward

‘Lame and awkward’ is interpolated metri causa and serves to remind the modern reader why Hephaestus’s cupbearing was a source of such amusement to the gods.

The list-limbed god

The epithet ἀμφῐγῠήεις (amphigueeeis) is obscure in Ancient Greek, and so I have made its English translation just as obscure. According to Wiktionary, it could mean ‘lame on both sides’ (referring to Hephaestus’s legs) or ‘strong on both sides’ (referring to his arms), though the meaning is usually understood to be the former because Hephaestus has other epithets referring to his lameness. Similarly, although list is an old word meaning skill, art or cunning, its primary association is with lopsidedness (as of a listing ship). Of course it could well be that I am overthinking the word, in which case you are free to read it as ‘lame-limbed god’.

The relationship between Zeus and Hera is often, notoriously, like this, with many conflicts sparked from Hera’s jealousy towards her husband’s extramarital loves – one of whom, as we have touched upon, was Thetis. In this case, however, Hera has her own reasons for disliking the arrangement made by Zeus, and this simply that she wants to see the Greeks beat the Trojans and raze their city to ashes. And although she is harshly put in her place for now, she will get her way in the end, since even Zeus (despite his sympathy for the Trojan king) cannot or will not go against the decree of fate that Troy is to be destroyed.

Like many other background details of the Iliad, the reason for Hera’s hatred of Troy was explained in the Cypria, the first poem in the literary Epic Cycle that distilled the Greek oral tradition of the Trojan War. Unfortunately, this poem is now lost, along with every other part of the Epic Cycle except the Iliad and the Odyssey (by all accounts the best and longest parts of it, and probably the first to be written down). But the story was still known to later antiquity, and the gist of it is not in doubt.

It begins with the marriage of Thetis and Peleus, from whose union will later come Achilles. All the gods and goddesses are invited to the wedding, except for Eris the goddess of strife. Thus bent on souring the occasion, Eris throws a golden apple (in some accounts, inscribed with the words ‘to the fairest’) among the three goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, successfully starting a quarrel between them as to which one of them is fit to claim it. Zeus tells the goddesses to seek out Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, and have him award the apple to whichever one of the three he judges to be the most beautiful.

Once it becomes clear that the goddesses are more or less equally beautiful, this Judgement of Paris descends into a contest of bribery. A detailed account of the event can be found in a work called The Rape of Helen by the 6th-century (A.D.) poet Collothus of Lycopolis. The following excerpt is from the 1928 translation of A.W. Mair, available to read in full at Theoi Classical Texts Library:

...Paris bent a gentle eye and quietly essayed to judge the beauty of each. He looked at the light of their grey eyes, he looked on the neck arrayed with gold, he marked the bravery of each; the shape of the heel behind, yea and the soles of their feet. But, before he gave judgement, Athena took him, smiling, by the hand and spake to [Paris] thus: “Come hither, son of Priam! leave the spouse of Zeus and heed not Aphrodite, queen of the bridal bower, but praise thou Athena who aids the prowess of men. They say that thou art a king and keepest the city of Troy. Come hither, and I will make thee the saviour of their city to men hard pressed... Hearken to me and I will teach thee war and prowess.”

So cried Athena of many counsels, and white-armed Hera thus took up the tale: “If thou wilt elect me and bestow on me the fruit of the fairer, I will make thee lord of all mine Asia. Scorn thou the works of battle. What has a king to do with war? A prince gives command both to the valiant and to the unwarlike. Not always are the squires of Athena foremost...”

Such lordship did Hera, who hath the foremost throne, offer to bestow. But [Aphrodite] lifted up her deep-bosomed robe and bared her breast to the air and had no shame. And lifting with her hands the honeyed girdle of the Loves she bared all her bosom and heeded not her breasts. And smilingly she thus spake to the herdsman: “Accept me and forget wars: take my beauty and leave the sceptre and the land of Asia. I know not the works of battle. What has Aphrodite to do with shields? By beauty much more do women excel. In place of manly prowess I will give thee a lovely bride, and, instead of kingship, enter thou the bed of Helen...”

Not yet had she ceased speaking and he gave her the splendid apple, beauty’s offering, the great treasure of [Aphrodite], a plant of war, of war an evil seed. And she, holding the apple in her hand, uttered her voice and spake in mockery of Hera and manly Athena: “Yield to me, accustomed as ye be to war, yield me the victory. Beauty have I loved and beauty follows me...[”] Thus spake [Aphrodite] and mocked Athena. So she got the prize of beauty that should work the ruin of a city, repelling Hera and indignant Athena.

It’s not entirely clear from this account whether Aphrodite finally won Paris over by her own immodest self-display, or by invoking the name of the most beautiful mortal woman in the world. Either way, she has promised him marriage to Helen, and is obliged to deliver – although she has neglected to mention that he shall have to abduct (‘rape’) her first, because she is already married to King Menelaus of Sparta. Perhaps she deceived Paris, or perhaps she simply paid no heed to this detail – for what care has the goddess of love for the formalities of marriage?

Thus Paris abducts Helen, and dooms his father’s city to a losing war against her outraged husband – who has not only secured an agreement from all other Greek kings to uphold and defend his marriage, but can now also count on the divine aid of both Hera and Athena. And this is why Hera, as she (presumably) spies upon the meeting of Thetis and Zeus, is seething over something more than the way in which the sea-goddess clasps her husband’s knees.

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So the two now parted,    having taken counsel;
She plunged from Olympus,    to plumb the sea-depths;
But Zeus went homewards    to the hall of gods,
Where the immortals sat.    To meet their sire
They arose at once;    not one could bear
To stay and await him;    they stood together,
As he sat on his throne.    But his sister-wife
Had seen and was wise    to his sharing counsels
With silver-footed Thetis,    the sea-elder's daughter.

So without delay,    she thus bespake him –
Zeus son of Cronus –    with snithing words:
"O all-wily one!    Which other god
"Has been sharing counsels with you?    Such is beloved of you:
"To plan and to ponder,    apart from me,
"And never venture frankly    to divulge your mind to me."

He answered, the father    of humans and immortals:
"Do not hope, Hera,    to wholly know
"My words and purposes;    that will not be;
 "It would be hard for you,    although you are my consort.
"What is fit to your knowledge    you are first to know
"Among mortal men    and the immortal gods.
"Of what I plan by myself,    sitting apart from ye,
"Pry not and probe not    with pestering questions!"

And his queen requoth to him,    cow-eyed Hera:
"Dread son of Cronus,    how comes this speech?
"In the past, truly,    I've not pressed you much
"With prying and quarrying;    as it pleases you,
"At ease, quiescent,    you work out your plans.
"But I fear, dreadfully,    you fall to the sway
"Of silver-footed Thetis,    the sea-elder's daughter.
"In the mists of the morning,    she made her way here,
"And sat beside you,    and seized your knees;
"And methinks you nodded,    and your troth did seal,
"To honour Achilles,    and help the Trojans
"To slaughter scores    beside the ships of Greece!"

Zeus the cloud-drover    spake in answer:
"O dear, O dear!    Does no doing of mine
"Escape your suspicion?    Yet this serves you ill:
"For it avails you nought    but to further drive you
"From my heart away;    and that shall harrow you worse.
"If what you say be sooth,    then as such I willed it;
"So now sit in silence,    and my speech obey –
"Lest I lay these hands on you –    unwithstandable –
"And none on Olympus    in the least might help you!"

After this open threat, at which Hera is at last cowed into silence, an awkward tension descends on the hall of gods – until the lame smith Hephaestus stands up to provide some much-needed comic relief.

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Notes

To the hall of gods where the immortals sat

Interpolated for clarity; the δῶμᾰ (dooma) of Zeus is not described, but is presumably a large celestial hall or palace analogous to that of an earthly king.

But his sister-wife…

The text says simply ‘Hera’, but it seems apposite to remind modern readers of the relationship between the king and queen of the gods.

With snithing words

Hera’s words are described as κέρτομος (kertomos), ‘mocking’ or ‘stinging’, which according to some etymologists (see here) is related to words for cutting and shearing. The English word snithing, which means ‘cutting’, seems a better translation option than cutting itself because of its association with snide.

O dear, O dear

Zeus says δαιμονίη (daimoniee), feminine vocative of δαιμόνιος (daimonios), which can be used as a respectful or affectionate term of address but also has connotations of possession by a daemon (see here) and hence is often translated as ‘strange one’.

And that shall harrow you worse

We met the formula ῥίγιον ἔσται (rhigion estai) in Part V, spoken by Agamemnon of Achilles, and rendered it more literally as ‘[that] will chill [him] the colder’. The present metre does not permit us to render Homer’s formulas identically in each instance of their usage, at least not without straining the sense; for that we would need a different metre, worked out here, based on the six-stressed ‘hypermetric’ lines of Anglo-Saxon verse with the structural ornamentation removed.

Now that the allotted time has passed, and Zeus is back on Olympus, it’s time for the sea-goddess to keep her promise to her son.

Yet in wrath sat the other    by his rapid ships:
Divine Peleus' son,    fleet-foot Achilles.
Nor came he to council,    where chiefs win glory,
Nor went he to war;    but wasted his heart out
In sitting idle –    yearning wistfully
For combat and battle-cry.    There came at last
The twelfth day's dawn;    the eternal gods
Returned to Olympus,    led by the Thunderer,
All together.    Not forgetful was Thetis
Of her son's request;    from the sea-waves rising
In the mists of the morning,    she mounted the sky
And the tip of Olympus;    and there she found
Far-seeing Zeus,    son of Cronus –
Who was sat apart    from the sundry gods
Of many-ridged Olympus,    on the loftiest peak.

Down she sat beside him,    and seized his knees
With the left of her arms;    lifted her right hand
To cup his chin;    in supplication, spake
To Zeus son of Kronos,    the king of gods:
"O Father Zeus,    if I have favour done thee
"By my words or actions,    in the host of immortals,
"Grant my wish now;    give my son now –
"Who is swiftest-fated –    succour of honour;
"For the host-king dishonours him,    Agamemnon,
"Who has seized his prize    for himself to hold.
"But at least, you honour him,    all-wise Olympian –
"Up to the hour    when the humbled Greeks
"Shall heap him with honours,    help the Trojans –
"Fill them full of force    upon the field of battle!"

Just so she spake;    but Zeus the cloud-drover
Sat long in silence,    and responded not.
So having taken his knees,    Thetis clasped them;
Clung to him closely;    and requested again:
"Give me sure promise –    an assenting nod –
"Or refuse me fully,    since you fear nothing;
"I shall know full well then    to what degree
"I am the least in honour    midst the host of gods."

And so the cloud-gatherer,    aggrieved in mood,
Now answered thus:    "What you ask of me
"Is a baneful doing;    I shall brunt the odium
"Of Hera, who is ever    stirring up disputes
"With provokeful reproaches –    calls me partial, always,
"With aid to the Ilians,    'midst the host of gods.
"Hasten homeward now,    lest Hera see you;
"Leave your case in my care,    'til I should carry this out;
"And I shall nod my head,    that you may have my surety:
"'For this, from me,    is the mightiest pledge,
"And whatever I nod to    is never found
"To be false, revoked,    or unfulfilled in time."

Thus spake Cronides,    and nodded assent
With his blue-black brows;    the ambrosial locks
Upon his deathless head    swept down in ripples,
And Olympus shook    beneath its sovran lord.

Thetis has thus succeeded in persuading Zeus to grant Achilles’ wish, and set in motion the tragic events of the rest of the Iliad. What remains for us in this first book is to see what Hera has to say about it at the council of the gods.

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Notes

In the mists of the morning…

The word ἠέριος (ee’erios) means ‘in the early morning’, but according to LSJ has the second meaning ‘misty’, and it seems likely that the ambiguity is intentional here given that Thetis has already been once described as rising from the sea like mist. A survey of different translations tells me that the allusion to mist is ignored by George Chapman, William Cowper, William Bryant, Richard Lattimore and Robert Fagles, and worked in by Alexander Pope, Robert Fitzgerald and…Emily Wilson.

Who was sat apart from the sundry gods of many-ridged Olympus, on the loftiest peak

The wording in the original is more like ‘was sat apart from the others on the highest peak of many-ridged Olympus’. This epithet may perhaps analogize many peaks or ridges to many gods, or may simply be an accurate description of the mountain.

And seized his knees…

To clasp someone’s knees was the traditional gesture of supplication.

With his blue-black brows

The colour is κῠᾰ́νεος (kuaneos), which is etymologically ‘cyan’, but in Ancient Greek referred to a deep dark blue closer to azurite or lapis lazuli. A more usual translation would be ‘dark’, ‘blackish’ or ‘sable’; but deep-black hair can have a subtly bluish tone, and in any case I think it best not to edit out the peculiar colour perceptions of Homer.

But since it is the god who is being propitiated, much more than the priest, this requires also the sacrifice of a hecatomb – in theory, though apparently not always in practice, an offering of a hundred oxen. By no means will these animals be burned entirely on the altar so that the god alone can enjoy them (that would be a holocaust, or burnt offering, usually made at night to underworld powers); rather, the inedible bones and gristle will be burnt on the altar along with some of the meat and fat, the aroma of which was supposed to be pleasing to the gods. The rest of the meat, including the choicest portions, will be consumed by the gathered humans in a great commensal feast made in honour of the god.

This tradition of sacrifice was said by the Greeks to have been started by the Titan Prometheus, when he outrageously cheated Zeus out of the choice meat on behalf of the human race. H.J Rose tells the tale in his Handbook of Greek Mythology (p.55):

It being agreed that men should sacrifice to the gods and share the victim with them, the question arose which part should be for men and which part for the gods. Prometheus was called upon to arbitrate. He killed an ox, cut it up, and separated the flesh and entrails from the bones. The latter he wrapped in fat and made, with the hide, into a bundle; the rest he enclosed in the stomach. Zeus, on being given his choice, at once snatched the inviting-looking parcel of fat, and was furious to find that he had got little but bones. Hence it is that men sacrifice little or none of the best meat to the Olympians, but eat it themselves at the sacrificial banquet.1

Zeus took revenge for this swindle, but his wrath mostly fell on Prometheus himself, and the gods thereafter accepted these rules of sacrifice.

There is little need for us to preface the text with an explanation of the rituals and customs of sacrifice and feasting, since Homer describes both in step-by-step detail. I have expanded the text a little (see the Notes for details) so as to bring to light some points that would have been common knowledge to the original audience. Those who would like to know more details can see here and here.

As should go without saying for long-term readers, the sacrifice and feast constitute formulaic themes inherited by Homer from the oral tradition, and are repeated with very close wording in other passages of the Iliad and Odyssey.2 Another set of themes well- represented in this section has to do with sea-travel, mooring, and setting sail; I have also expanded some of these passages for the sake of clarity.

...By that time, Odysseus
Had sailed to Chrysa    with the sacred oxen.

To the deep-hollowed harbour    they drew full nigh
Until they fared within;    then they furled their sails,
And in the swart ship stowed them.    Then the standing mast
They lowered to the mast-crutch    to lock it aft,
Loosing the forestays    that aloft had fixed it, 
Quickly and nimbly.    Then they caught the oars up,
And rowed her forth    until she reached her moorings.
They cast the anchor-stones;    secured the ropes
At the stern of the ship;    then stepped they out
Upon the shore of the sea,    amidst the surf of waves,
Leading the hecatomb    for longshot Apollo.

And Chryseis stepped    out of the sea-crosser –
And was guided to the altar,    and the arms of her father,
By resourceful Odysseus,    who spoke these words:

"I am come, O Chryses,    from the king of men –
"From high Agamemnon –    to home your child,
"And to the Fulgent sacrifice    these sacred oxen,
"For the sake of the Greeks;    to assuage the Lord
"Who has heaped us Argives    with hard-groaned pains."

Thus he spake, and sent her    to her sire's hands –
And he received, rejoicingly,    his sweet-loved child.
Then they swiftly arrayed    the sacred oxen
In ordered wise    around the well-built altar.
Then they laved their hands,    laid hold of the barley,
And loud prayed the priest,    his palms uplifting:

"Hear me now, O god    of the argent bow,
"Who bestrideth Chrysa,    and Cilla divine,
"And reigneth o'er Tenedos    in regal might!
"You have honoured me once:    to my words you harkened,
"And hard did you harrow    the host of Achaeans!
"Fulfill my wish now;    ward from Danaeans
"That wrack and ruin,    and rescue their host!"

So he spake in prayer –    and Apollo listened –
And they prayed, and then sprinkled    the seeds of barley
'Twixt the horns of the beeves;    bent back their heads,
And slit their throats;    and skinned the carcasses.
They cut away the thighbones,    and cowled them in fat,
And enfolded them doubly;    and flesh laid on,
Red-raw morsels    from the rest of the body.
The elder burned them    on billets of wood,
And made flowing libations    of the flambent wine,
As with five-pronged forks    stood the flanking youths.
When the thighs were cindered,    and they'd tasted the entrails,
They sliced up the portions,    and on spits transfixed them,
And roasted them thoroughly;    and took the meat off.

When the work was finished,    and the fest prepared,
They feasted to the full –    with none found to be wanting.
Once they'd driven off their lust    for the drinking and eating,
The boys brought mixing-bowls    that brimmed with wine;
And they poured libations,    and then passed the cups round.
The Achaean youths,    throughout all that day,
Sang splendid paeans    to appease the god,
The Far-Worker;    as their voices rose,
He heard their hymning,    and his heart rejoiced.

When the sun went down,    and darkness came,
By their ships' stern-ropes    to sleep they lay;
And when rose-fingered Eos –    the early-born one –
Shining, showed herself,    to sea they took,
Towards the wide host    of the war-Achaeans –
And the Far-doer graced them    with a favouring wind.

When they raised up the mast,    and unrolled the sail,
White and wide-spread,    the wind outbillowed it –
Filled full its middle –    by the foreprow parted,
The purple sea-waves    pealed full loudly
As the ship o'er the swell went,    speeding homeward.

When they came to the Achaeans'    encamped host,
They dragged on the mainland    the dark-tarred ship,
High on the shore-sands –    and held her fast
With the lengths of wood    that they laid beneath her.
Then they scattered each way    to their ships and camps.

At this point the narration briefly returns to Achilles, still sitting and seething, before turning to Thetis and her divine petition – the matter of the next part.

Tip Jar

Notes

Then the standing mast they lowered to the mast-crutch to lock it aft, loosing the forestays that aloft had fixed it…

‘To lock it aft’ and ‘that aloft had fixed it’ are not in the original text; I have expanded the passage in order to give a better idea of what is being done here. When it is time to set sail, the mast is raised up by halyards attached to the bow of the vessel (i.e. forestays), and when the sails are furled the mast is lowered down to a ‘mast-crutch’ (a standing wooden post with a prong for the mast to rest in) located at the stern.

‘Twixt the horns of the beeves

This detail is not in the original, but it is known that the salted barley grains were sprinkled on the head of the animal along with lustral water, causing it to nod its head and thus express its ‘consent’ to be sacrificed.

Red-raw morsels from the rest of the body

‘From the rest of the body’ is added; the small pieces of meat placed upon the fat-wrapped thighbones might have come from any part of the body, but would most likely have come from other parts of the hindquarters, and it was usual to burn the tail so that it curled in a way considered to be auspicious (see here).

The flambent wine

I have coined the word flambent, a portmanteau of flaming and lambent, in order to express the associations of the Greek word αἶθοψ (aithops) with flame and sparkling light. Like the more famous description of the sea as ‘wine-looking’ (οἶνοψ oinops, perhaps rather ‘vinous’ or ‘liquorous’ than its assumed meaning ‘wine-dark’), it seems to belong to a quite different and yet vaguely familiar conception of the sensory world, one perhaps rooted in a real difference of perception and not just one of language.3

Rose-fingered Eos

In most English translations ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς (rhododaktylos Eoos) is rendered as ‘rosy-fingered Dawn’; but in accordance with my convention, I keep the Greek name of the deity while wending her epithet into English. Eos in Greek mythology was not a simple personification of the dawn, but rather a very promiscuous goddess with a number of mortal lovers – including the wretched Tithonus, who received from Zeus (at Eos’s naive petition) the curse of immortality without eternal youth.

And held her fast with the lengths of wood…

Once the ship is hauled onto land, ‘long props’ (ἕρματα μακρὰ hermata makra) are laid beneath the hull, presumably to hold it in place. I have read articles denying that sailors of the Trojan war era would ever have beached their ships; for an article that takes Homer’s account seriously, and supplements it with extensive details, see here.

This latter begins as follows:

Once upon a time there was a King in the North of the world who had an only daughter, and in his house there was a young lad who was not like the others. One day some huntsmen had come upon a great bear in the mountains. They tracked him to his lair and killed him, and in his den they found a man-child. They marvelled much, for it was a fine child, about three years old, and in good health, but it could speak no words. It seemed to the huntsmen that it must have been fostered by the bears, for it growled like a cub.

They took the child, and as they could not discover whence he came or to whom he belonged, they brought him to the King. The King ordered him to be taken into his house, and reared, and taught the ways of men. He got little good of the foundling, for the child grew to a surly, lumpish boy, and was slow to learn the speech of the land. He would not work, nor learn the use of tools or weapons. He had great liking for honey, and often sought for it in the woods, or plundered the hives of the farmers; and as he had no name of his own, people called him Bee-wolf, and that was his name ever after. He was held in small account, and in the hall he was left in a corner and had no place upon the benches. He sat often on the floor and said little to any man.

But month by month and year by year Beewolf grew, and as he grew he became stronger, until first the boys and lads and at length even the men began to fear him. After seven years he had the strength of seven men in his hands. Still he grew, until his beard began to show, and then the grip of his arms was like the hug of a bear. He used no tool or weapon, for blades snapped in his hands, and he would bend any bow till it broke; but if he was angered he would crush a man in his embrace. Happily he was sluggish in mood and slow to wrath; but folk left him alone.

One day, this Beewolf hears of a unnamed king in a faraway country, whose hall is invaded every night by an ogre called Grinder. He sets off on a journey to the hall, and falls in with two companions who are on the same quest. Once he has reached the hall and offered the king his help, he has a brief contest of words with a jealous retainer named Unfriend. After a bear-hug, Unfriend becomes outwardly polite to Beewolf, but continues to scheme against him in private.

After his two companions fall asleep waiting in the hall for Grinder, and end up being killed, Beewolf takes his turn to stay up. He wrestles with the ogre and rips his arm off, but cannot prevent him from getting away. Accompanied by Unfriend, he makes an expedition to the monster’s lair – a cave located in a mere behind a waterfall – and dives off a steep cliff into the water on the assurance that Unfriend will haul him back up on a rope. He encounters Grinder’s mother, who is stronger and more cunning than her son, and beheads her with a giant sword that he finds among her belongings. After killing the wounded Grinder, he turns back, laden with treasures – only to find that Unfriend has abandoned him and loosened the knots of the rope by which he was to climb back up. He climbs up anyway, returns to the hall, gives Unfriend the thrashing he deserves, and at last returns to his own homeland to become a great king.

By no means have we divulged every detail here, and those who have read Beowulf will find much more to smile at. For those who haven’t – suffice it to say that Sellic Spell is the story of Beowulf, but not as we know it.

The ‘real’ Beowulf has a name that has often been identified as bee-wolf, a possible kenning for ‘bear’ (though there are other, more likely possibilities). He has bear-like strength, was considered lazy and useless in youth, and shows a preference for unarmed combat. But he is no foundling raised by a bear; he is the son of Ecgtheow, the grandchild of King Hrethel of Geatland, and nephew to the famously large and strong King Hygelac. The death of this Hygelac takes place during a raid into Frisia that was also recorded in the history of Gregory of Tours, making it the best-attested historical event in the whole poem.

The monsters of the poem, such as Grendel (a name that may or may not have to do with ‘grinding’), are of course not so historical. But Grendel does not menace any old hall belonging to any old king ruling over any old country; he menaces the hall of the Danish king Hrothgar of the Scylding dynasty, stated in the Norse analogues to have ruled from a seat at Lejre on Zealand (a location backed up by archaeological evidence). Although Hrothgar has a jealous retainer called Unferth, whose name vaguely resembles unfrið ‘unpeace’, he does not betray Beowulf and ends up on good terms with him after their initial verbal clash (and his name, again, was probably a real one with a different origin). These details and complexities are absent from Sellic Spell; the story is set in the world of fairytale with its nameless kings, timeless countries, simplistic heroes and villains, and predictable sequence of events.

Is Sellic Spell, then, no more than a silly spiel, a Beowulf for children? The answer is no. Like everything else in the book, it is a scholarly work.

What Tolkien was trying to do here was to reconstruct the ‘original’ Beowulf – not the archetype of the poem, not even the oral-poetic legend that preceded its writing, but the still older folktale from which both the tale and the text were supposed to have emerged. This Tolkien believed to have been a lost variant of the ‘Bear’s Son Tale’, attested across and outside Europe in hundreds of variants. The common elements of the story are as follows:

1. The hero is sired, suckled or otherwise raised by a wild animal, often a bear.

2. He has a difficult youth, in which he performs feats of great strength, but also botches what work is given him and is shunned by others for his acts of violence.

3. He falls in with two companions, obtains an unique weapon, and undertakes to defend a dwelling against some sort of monster (often a gnome or dwarf), which he defeats after his two companions prove unequal to the task. The enemy flees, often after having had one of its body parts severed in the fight.

4. The hero tracks his defeated foe to an underground lair, often encountering a second and more dangerous adversary, for which he sometimes requires a special strengthening drink. The enemy is guarding some (usually three) captive maidens, whom the hero liberates. Relying on his companions to haul him back up to the surface, he is instead betrayed by them and left in the underworld.

5. He escapes to the surface, often with miraculous help, and revenges himself on his treacherous companions before marrying the best of the maidens. Often this involves a period of subterfuge in which he waits for an opportunity to expose the traitors, who have put it about that they accomplished the feat of rescue.

Not all variants contain every part of this story, and in Tolkien’s reconstructed variant the whole business with the maidens and the marriage is left out, just as the poem Beowulf leaves out all details of the hero’s marital status and has him grow old and die without issue.1

What we do not find in Tolkien’s Beowulf is a detailed scholarly argument for the origin of the poem in the folktale. This was not needed, because the case had already been made in detail by the German scholar Friedrich Panzer in his 1910 work Studien zur germanischen Sagengeschichte I: Beowulf. This book is divided into two parts: an exhaustive documentation of two hundred variants of the Bear’s Son Tale, and a critical comparison with Beowulf and various Norse analogues. No-one to my knowledge has undertaken to translate it into English, so I had to resort to Grok-translating an online text that doubtless contains some errors (DM me if you want the conversation, which I am happy to give out on request).

My intention here is not to criticize Panzer’s detailed arguments for the connection of the folktale with the poem; hopefully, what we have said so far has sufficed to make the case.2 The thesis has not gone without criticism, but most of those who disagree accept the notion of folktale origins, and simply wish to trace the poem to a different folktale. Thus Martin Puhvel, in Beowulf and Celtic Tradition, argues that a more compelling connection exists between the Grendel story and the Irish ‘Hand and Child’ tale-pattern (in which a monstrous arm invades a dwelling and is torn off); but Panzer himself noted this connection in his book (in Chapter 6 of Part II, pp.386-89), and at most can be faulted for touching on it too briefly.

I would rather question Panzer at a more fundamental level, on the assumption that pervades his theory: that the folktale is original and primary, and that the epic poem (or heroic saga) is only a secondary elaboration. Might it not be quite the other way around? And would this not account just as well for the similarities between the two?

There should be no doubt as to which of the two has the better claim to antiquity according to the written record, since the writing of epics with ‘folktale’ characteristics (some of which are very old, such as Gilgamesh and the Odyssey) almost everywhere precedes that of folktales. Panzer extracted most of his two hundred variants of the Bear’s Son Tale from collections dating to the 19th century; and yet it is these folktales, or rather hypothesized medieval variants of them, to which he traces the origin of the 8th-century Beowulf as well as various 14th-century Icelandic sagas such as Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, Orms þáttr Stórólfssonar and Hrólfs saga kraka.

Of course, the wide geographical spread of folktale types proves that they existed long before the first written collections were made. But the same can be said for the themes and story-patterns of heroic poetry. For example, the basic ‘return’ storyline of Homer’s Odyssey (in which a hero returns to a wife who turns out to be either treacherous or faithful) was found by early 20th-century collectors to recur time and again in South Slavic traditional poems concerning the deeds of Bosnian heroes in the Ottoman era. In How To Kill a Dragon, Calvert Watkins traces certain verbal formulas of heroic poetry across the various Eurasian daughter-languages of Proto-Indo-European, indicating that the art of traditional poetry was already well developed long before the writing of any of these languages.

Might folktale, then, be nothing more than the distant echo of this poetry – a degenerate form of the art practiced by common people who can no longer wield the poetic language or recall the names and homelands of the heroes? Might Sellic Spell, after all, represent a simplified Beowulf rather than a prototypical one?

Before we develop these arguments further, let us see what Panzer has to tell us about his own reasoning. Throughout most of the book, he takes the priority of the folktale over the poem as a given; but at the end of the first part (Chapter 9, Alter und Heimat des Märchens, pp.226-45), he not only shows some awareness of an alternative point of view but also furnishes a certain amount of evidence for it. I shall take the liberty of adding some links, emphasizing some passages, and making some omissions so as to keep the excerpt from trying the patience of the reader.

If we see Germanic sagas from the early Middle Ages converging with our fairy tale in a way that excludes chance, but this fairy tale, even if only in the 19th century, is nevertheless recorded in Bulgaria or on a Greek island, in Siberia or in the highlands of the Pamir, one will hardly want to derive these fairy-tale variants from the Germanic saga recorded centuries earlier. Rather one will without further ado incline to the opinion that a common source must underlie them here, namely our fairy-tale material, which, older than that saga, has spread from a point unknown for the time being to different regions, tenaciously maintaining its connection also in oral tradition, but attaining literary form and written record here early, there only many centuries later, according to the cultural conditions.

Now some older records also figure in our list. It does not mean much that our fairy tale, as the last section showed, was printed in Sweden in the 18th century as a chapbook; but it is important that it attained literary form much earlier already in the Orient. … Somadeva’s reworkings prove that our fairy tale was known in India not only in the 11th century but, since he himself rests only on the more comprehensive work of Gunadhya, in the 1st or 2nd century A.D…

In these records, since persons and places are named, the fairy-tale form is actually already abandoned and transformed into the form of saga; to place them together with the pure fairy tales is, as said, pure convention, which on the one hand is explained from the accidental history of fairy-tale research, on the other from the fact that these records have indeed changed almost only the external form of the fairy tale but have mostly preserved its spirit as well as the material very well. The literary traditions of other peoples could just as well be adduced here. It has already been indicated above that in the chronicle of Gargantua, in the sagas of Thor and Heracles, elements of the Strong Hans fairy tale [closely related to the ‘Bear’s Son’] are found clearly enough…here only the demonstration may seem desirable that the Bear’s Son type, at least with its middle and final part, was known in Greek Asia Minor in the 1st century B.C.

Our fairy tale is found, though not quite complete, namely in the 35th narrative of Conon… [there follows an account of a story in which a shepherd is let down to a cave, finds a heap of gold, then is betrayed by his companion before being rescued by Apollo and punishing the traitor, conforming to the later parts of the Bear’s Son Tale]

But Indo-Iranian tradition allows us to trace our fairy tale still essentially further back than this Asia Minor record. I begin with a passage from Firdausi’s Shahnameh [Book of Kings], which transmits the complete Bear’s Son tale in detailed epic narrative in the story of King Feridun… [there follows the story of a hero named Feridun who is suckled by a cow, has a club of steel made for him, is betrayed by his brothers, enters an enemy castle, and liberates two women before waiting for an evil king known as ‘the dragon’ to return and defeating him]

It hardly needs detailed exposition that in this story of Feridun, as the Shahnameh tells it, we have before us the Bear’s Son tale in perfect elaboration... [there follows a detailed exposition of the various large and subtle connections of the story with the folktale]

Now however it is well known that the narratives of the Shahnameh about the first mythical kings of Iran are by no means inventions of Firdausi. They rest rather on old tradition, long previously also fixed in writing, which is attested clearly enough not only with individual elements but in its whole structure already in the Avesta… [there follow two excerpts from the Avesta, the ancient Zoroastrian religious corpus, which show a much older Iranian provenance for the motif of liberating two women from a demon] …Here we learn therefore… that the Avesta already knew of the liberation of two women from the power of the demon; the names [of the women in Avestan] correspond to Firdausi’s [in Persian]…

[There follows a more detailed dissection of the Iranian tradition, which need not detain us, before Panzer turns to consider the Vedic tradition of ancient India]

If Indra needs the weapon he has brought against the demon, it is still only a mighty draught of Soma that gives him the strength for his heroic deed: we are reminded of the strengthening drink of the fairy-tale hero… Three lakes full of Soma is Indra said to have drunk before the battle, just as in general, and indeed from the day of his birth onward, he appears as an enormous drinker and eater who devours one or even hundreds of oxen at a time. In this he reminds us as much of the Bear’s Son and Strong Hans as when, right after birth, he speaks, is of gigantic size, and possesses a strength to which no one can compare. Indeed, it even seems that the Veda knew the motif of the hero’s despised youth…, since [Rig Veda] IV, 18.5 says: “Like a blemish she has hidden him, the mother, though he was full of heroic strength; then he rose up, putting on his garment himself”…

Indra is younger than the gods; once… he is even called outright “the younger brother” of the gods. But he has to complain that these older brothers of his, or, as it is often said, the Maruts, Indra’s constant companions (marutvat “accompanied by the Maruts” is a standing epithet of his), fearfully abandoned him in the battle against the demon, just as the brothers or companions abandon our fairy-tale hero. Of Trita, however, stories emerge that report active betrayal by the evil brothers, the details of which, as we already saw with the betrayal of Feridun’s brothers in the Shahnameh, strikingly match the fairy tale here as well.

In RV. I, 105.17 there is an allusion that Trita was rescued from a vat (pit?) by divine help: “Trita, hidden in the vat, calls the gods to help; Brhaspati heard him and created breadth for him out of narrowness”…

More precise information about the story in question is provided by a narrative that Sayana quotes from the Satyayanins in RV. I.105… The three brothers Ekata, Dvita, and Trita (i.e., the “First,” “Second,” “Third”) once found a well while wandering thirst-tormented through a waterless forest. T[rita] climbed down, drank, and handed some up to his brothers. But they threw him back down into the well, stole all his possessions, covered the well with a wagon wheel, and went away. “Then Trita, who had fallen into the well, could not climb out again and wished in his heart, ‘If only the gods would pull me out,’ whereupon he became the seer of this hymn praising them.” The betrayal by the brothers here matches the Bear’s Son fairy tale in detail, where even the covering of the well after the betrayal is not missing…

After all this, it can hardly be doubted—and as far as I see, is not doubted by the specialists—that these legends of Indra-Trita go back to the time of Indo-Iranian tribal unity and were brought by the Indians from the old homeland into their new settlements. The epic core in the Vedas has been greatly reshaped by mythological-philosophical elaboration, such as Indian religious poetry also applied to this material, but by no means destroyed. Indeed, in many respects the chronologically older Vedic tradition has undoubtedly remained truer to the original than that of the Avesta…

I refrain from investigating whether extra-Aryan components…are recognizable in the traditions examined. For our purposes it suffices that we have been able to trace the Bear’s Son fairy tale, I may well say, not only in its elements but in its entire structure back to the times of Indo-Iranian community life. For it is indeed my conviction that the fairy tale is not a submerged myth; rather, the reverse is true: in the myths touched upon, poetic-religious interpretations and further elaborations of the older fairy tale are to be recognized.

For anyone who consumes scholarly works with the digestive acid of scepticism, instead of merely swallowing their evidence and conclusions as solid dogma, the concluding statement of Panzer translated above can only read as an outrageous non-sequitur. By the same comparative method by which he connected the Bear’s Son Tale to Beowulf, he has just traced that tale through Persian hero-legend to the most ancient religious writings of Iran and India. Without labouring a point that would have been obvious to his audience, he has noted that a tradition found in India, Iran and Europe can only be assumed to go back to the Aryans (a word that still denoted, at the time of writing, the entire Bronze Age people known today as the Indo-Europeans), who did not migrate across Eurasia as commoners swapping old wives’ tales but as conquerors bearing heroic poetry and religious tradition. Yet having said all this, he summarily dismisses the idea that the tale might have originated as myth and only later ended up as folklore, and concludes the exact opposite without argument. And there ends the chapter, and the discussion, as Panzer moves on to the second part of his book to discuss the parallels of Beowulf with the Bear’s Son Tale.

To take some famous words from Tolkien quite out of context, there is something irritatingly odd about all this. And one wonders, indeed, what has gone wrong with our modern judgement!

One clue can be found in Panzer’s introduction to the second part of the book– in which, without resuming the discussion of the origins of the Bear’s Son Tale, he spends some time attacking the theories of Karl Müllenhoff on the interpretation of Beowulf. Unlike Panzer, Müllenhoff is not taken seriously in Beowulf scholarship anymore, and is generally remembered for three things: dealing harshly with other scholars in writing, trying to pull the text of the poem apart into various shorter ‘lays’ (Lieder) and interpolations, and identifying the heroes and monsters of the story with allegorical nature-myths. It is on the last of these points that Panzer takes him and his academic following to task:

To the majority of scholars down to this day it appears as a settled matter that behind this narrative an old myth lies hidden, to which Müllenhoff in the year 1849…has given the interpretation that has since remained authoritative. Beowulf is a representative of Freyr, a divine being that stands by men in the battle against the elements. For Grendel is the god or demon of the wild dark sea at the time of the spring equinox, which overflows and devastates the land and swallows men; the god protects men from him by subduing Grendel. But Grendel’s mother is a personification of the sea-depth; when she appears once more slaying, and Beowulf, diving after her, kills her on the sea-bottom, this means: the god takes from the sea, when it floods once more, the power that moved it, in order to calm it definitively. To this part of the myth the dragon-fight offers the autumnal counterpart. “In autumn the storms rise again and the sea floods the land again: the dragon rises and lies down on the possession of men. Once more the divine hero proves helpful to men and once more knows how to push back the demonic, giant powers, to reconquer for men the treasures that the soil harbors; but his realm is now provisionally at an end, for winter stands before the door: the aged Beowulf finds death himself in the battle and is buried with all his treasures.”

To this interpretation of Müllenhoff ten Brink… adheres completely and Symons… follows it with slight modifications: Grendel is a personification of the storm-flood, which is subdued by the hero of peaceful cultivation. In Beowulf’s dragon-fight the nature-myth underlying the culture-myth still breaks through: the culture-hero is further developed from an older light-being; only that Beowulf is a hypostasis of Freyr is rejected. Similarly for Kögel…Grendel is a personification of the terrors of the undiked marsh. “The myth of the slaying of Grendel symbolizes the diking of the marshland finally successful after long labors and its utilization through meadow-growth and grain-cultivation.”

E. Mogk… declares it is true that Beowulf belongs “to poetry, to heroic saga, not to the demon- or god-myth”; but his battle with Grendel appears to him too as a kind of allegory: “a mighty natural event, the penetration of the sea, which in prehistoric times tore off whole pieces of the land, poured itself over the countries and thus created islands and destroyed human settlements, may have lived on in the people and given the impulse to this magnificent folk-poetry.”

[There follow more examples of much the same stuff from other scholars of Panzer’s time]

As far, therefore, as the individual scholars diverge in their interpretation, they are, as one sees, united that an old myth underlies the Beowulf saga. … And yet one should think that already the very different results to which all these attempts at mythological interpretation have come should have awakened lively doubts about the justification of such a conception at all, which a critical consideration of the individual attempts must considerably strengthen. That Müllenhoff’s nature-mythological interpretation actually possesses no support in the natural processes themselves in cardinal points has already been set forth by Heinzel...

Above all, however, this interpretation does justice in no way to the real tradition. It was indeed a child of its time; I must confess that I possess no feeling for it from the outset. It is incomprehensible to me how anyone can find it plausible that a figure like Grendel’s mother really represents “the personification of the sea-depth,” that this figure of so bloodless, thought-like an abstraction owes its highly concrete, living existence; it is incomprehensible to me how one can believe in a myth that would have conceived the sea as a son of the sea-depth, how one can rest content with an interpretation that is yet completely incapable of really explaining any positive detail of the saga. The favorite conception is in truth also by no means won from the narrative, but springs rather from a speculation that must then be most violently read into the narrative. And how questionable yet remains even for him who would admit its starting-point, in detail this interpretation that constantly jumps back and forth between a culture- and nature-myth, that at some points (esp. in the dragon-fight) becomes self-contradictory to the point of pure impossibility! I will not enter into a criticism of the details; the best criticism will always remain that positive one that sets a usable new in the place of the contested old. But a usable new explanation of the Beowulf saga has been found: it can probably be doubtful to no one who has read the first part of this book that in this saga nothing other than the Bear’s Son fairy tale lies before us. … Saga and fairy tale do not merely have some motifs in common; rather the saga of Beowulf’s battle with Grendel is according to my conception nothing other than the fairy tale of the Bear’s Son transformed into heroic saga by the art of the scop.

This, then, would seem to explain (at least better than anything else in this book) Panzer’s strange aversion to the idea of a ‘submerged myth’. Apparently, he associated all such ideas with the arbitrary nature-allegories concocted by Müllenhoff, against which he was obliged to push back hard in order to change the scholarly consensus of his time. That other scholars held much the same set of associations3 would explain why Panzer’s folktale-origins theory was so widely and confidently adopted after the collapse of Müllenhoff’s authority.

But Panzer was forgetting something: that Müllenhoff’s theory in no way resembled the alternative hypothesis of mythical origins at which he hints in his discussion of the Shahnameh, Avesta and Rig-Veda. Müllenhoff and friends did not trace the story of Beowulf to millennia-old mythology handed down from the poetry and religion of the Aryans; they traced them rather to local, popular, Germanic myths about the sea, the storm, the marsh, the harvest, and popular fertility-deities like Beowa and Freyr. In Müllenhoff’s idea of the nature-myth, no less than in Panzer’s idea of the folktale, oral-traditional culture is not just handed down by the common people but essentially generated by them as well.

This notion is something of an unexamined assumption for many students of Germanic tradition. It is baked into the modern English concept of folklore (a word that looks like an Anglo-Saxon inheritance, but was actually made up by an antiquarian in the mid-19th century4), and its influence on the Germans who did so much to collect and study that lore has been even stronger. It has its roots in the Herderian romantic-nationalist idea that epic poetry comes from the people, that is to say the nation5, which either generates it by some mysterious communal process or uses an individual genius as its mouthpiece (in much the same way as a mob might elect a leader to represent it). The Grimm brothers, who laid the foundations of Germanic philology and folkloristics in the 19th century, took this idea very seriously; and although it has been taken less and less seriously thereafter, in the time of Panzer we can yet find Francis Gummere in The Beginnings of Poetry (1901) arguing that the poetic art first arose spontaneously from the rhythms of communal labour. Although some have taken aim at the idea6, for the most part it just seems to hang around in the conceptual background while scholars focus on other things, much as does the ‘primordial soup’ of Darwinism in which life is supposed to have been generated.

The comparison with Darwinism is apt, since the idea that epic and saga were elaborated from folktale shares a fundamental assumption with this biological theory: that whatever is high, complex and rarefied must have followed and evolved out of what is low, simplistic and common, as opposed to having preceded it and degenerated into it.7 Yet this is a form of Darwinism that lacks its most obvious rationale, since in the field of culture the existence of the ‘intelligent designer’ is not a matter of controversy for anyone. And when it comes to the products of human creativity (what Tolkien called ‘subcreation’), the process of development is not always from simple to complex: consider, for example, the descent of alphabets and other syllabaries from Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters.

But what would be the alternative hypothesis?

The one briefly floated earlier on – that heroic oral poetry comes first and later degenerates into saga and folktale – is not seriously defended here, although it can certainly be argued from the written record in the case of Beowulf and the Bear’s Son. Since we are dealing with orally-derived traditions, the written record cannot be trusted unreservedly; and in any case, as Panzer has shown us, the earliest relevant texts point rather towards the religious than the heroic. Moreover, we must concede to Panzer that some elements of the story-pattern he identifies (such as the betrayal of the hero) appear suppressed in Beowulf and better expressed in the folktales8 – though a different impression might be garnered from a full survey of other oral and written variants of the Beowulf-poem, now of course long vanished into air and fire.

What seems more likely to me – and I daresay I am not the only one – is that traditional poetry originated in what we would today call cult or religion, among people whom we might term priests, shamans, vates, or some other such (probably inadequate) equivalent. Above all it is the nature of the poetic art – with its memorial and rhetorical uses, its supernatural story-patterns, and its association with hymn, prophecy and magic – that betrays its origins in such a knowledge-bearing class. And the method of reading esoteric teachings out of the symbols and narratives of poetry (as in Porphyry’s essay on the Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey) is an ancient one, suggesting that the signs are there, regardless of whether the poets remembered their meanings or the interpreters read them aright.

One would suspect that the fantastical adventures found in epic poems were not originally attributed to famous heroes, but rather belonged to the incarnate gods or vatic sages of the original cultic poetry, describing their spiritual experiences and probably also serving as ritual guides to their repetition. The story-pattern found in Beowulf and the Bear’s Son Tale – with its animal-marriage, its night encounter with a demon, its ‘sacrifice’ of two companions, its underground expedition and liberation of royal maidens, etc. – looks to be rooted in some sort of initiatic ritual, although we must leave aside the question of what exactly this might be.

The absence of this form of poetry from the written record can be explained by more than its presumed antiquity. Traditional poetry is an art of collective memory, which would have had huge importance in an oral culture, and we would expect an initial antipathy towards writing to have persisted for some time among those who practiced it. Writing not only threatens the authority of preliterate knowledge-bearers, but also arguably threatens knowledge itself, by allowing the ignorant to imitate it parrot-style without the need for training, talent, or deep understanding. Thus it was that the Vedic Brahmins and Zoroastrian priests long preferred to memorize than to write down the Rig Veda and Avesta, and that the lore of the Druids was lost to history (unless anything of it survives in Welsh poetry) because of their resistance to writing.

It stands to reason, then, that the first written poetry would be the work of a later and somewhat degraded class of knowers, who had more or less come under the sway of rulers and warriors (who of course would have had much more to gain by the promotion of writing).9 This change in status would presumably have come about some time before the dawn of literacy, possibly as a result of the armed migrations, and would not have involved the total degradation of poets into entertainers and genealogists devoid of their old spiritual authority. Early on, they would have been valued for their ability to invoke divinities on behalf of their patrons (as in the Rig Veda); and the old idea that poets immortalize heroes in song would make more sense if this entailed attributing the traditional deeds of sages to them.

In sum, what we have here is a rough ‘degenerative hypothesis’, consisting of three stages (with intermediate sub-stages):

1. ‘Cultic’ poetry (degenerates to memorized hymn)

2. Heroic poetry (degenerates to prose saga)

3. Folk story

The last of these, we must say, is nothing more than the residue of the two higher types of poetry as preserved among the common people – or rather, as it was preserved among them prior to the modern tide of schooling, hyperliteracy, television etc., which has levelled even this last redoubt of archaic oral culture and left only a mass of dead texts in its wake.

I can foresee some objections to this hypothesis, at least on the details; but I like to think that it makes more sense than Cultural Darwinism. The question is whether our regarding the Bear’s Son Tale as submerged myth rather than elaborated folklore makes any difference to the interpretation of Beowulf, since it would probably have been all the same to the person who wrote it.

I would say that it makes some difference. I have read papers in which academics cheerfully punt on such questions as how Beowulf armlocked Grendel, or why he found it harder to defeat his mother despite her being weaker than her son, simply because these details are assumed to be embellishments of some folktale analogue with a simpler story. Regarding the original form of the story to have been, in all likelihood, more complex and subtle than the extant versions motivates us to pay more attention to some of these details. There has also been a great deal of Freudian, Jungian and other such interpretation of the themes of Beowulf, none of which can ever be called right or wrong, as long as those themes are assumed to have bubbled up from some collective well of ideas onto which any modern construct can be projected. By contrast, once we assume that there is (or at least was) some conscious and specific meaning behind them, we are better motivated to try to understand it on its own terms – assuming, of course, that this has not been rendered impossible by the accumulation of later meanings upon an original one that may well have been somewhat ambiguous.

More important, however, is the difference made to our reasons for studying traditional poetry in the first place.

As we have said, mass literacy and mass media – now to be followed by machine-generated slop – have washed oral folklore out of the people, and there is no indication that anything much is likely to bubble up from them again in the foreseeable future. As long as the ‘folk’ is considered prior to the ‘lore’, there is not much to do by way of revivalism other than to larp like it’s 1899 (or to nag the folk into being more traditional, or to try to persuade the media class to be less overtly anti-traditional). But if the ‘lore’ was always primary, and illustrative of spiritual reality, then it can never be destroyed; and if the art is its receptacle, then we need it more than ever; not, ironically, to resist the threat of oblivion that used to hang over preliterate societies, but to hold what is essential in the heart and mind against the modern tide of letters, images and slop.

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But in this world, nothing significant happens without the will of the gods, so Achilles cannot truly accomplish his purpose without calling on their aid. Fortunately for him – and unfortunately for the other Greeks – he is the half-divine son of Thetis, a sea-goddess who lives with her many sisters at the bottom of the ocean. As we shall see, Thetis also has the ear of Zeus, due to her having called a hundred-handed giant to his aid when his wife and other gods attempted to bind him.

The story of Thetis’s marriage to Peleus, Achilles’ father, is not told in the Iliad or Odyssey. Like the Judgement of Paris, the Rape of Helen, and several other important events in the background of the story, it belongs to the lost Cypria – the first poem in the longer Epic Cycle that narrated the entire history of the Trojan War, and of which only the two works of Homer survive. These lost poems are much shorter than the Iliad and Odyssey (the Cypria is the longest), their quality was criticized in antiquity, and summaries of their contents suggest that they were written after the Homeric works in order to fill in the gaps. The stories themselves, however, belong to an oral tradition that predated all of this literature.

D.M. Smith’s Cypria – a modern reconstruction of the ‘prequel’ based on eclectic fragments of its traditional story preserved in later works – tells the tale of Thetis’s marriage as it appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca. Although Zeus loves Thetis, he will not sleep with her due to a prophecy that the son she bears will surpass his father (the same fear that led him to liquidate his first wife Metis), and instead decides to marry her off to the mortal king Peleus. Thetis does not want to marry below her station, and has to be caught by Peleus first, whereupon she changes into all manner of forms – a bird, a tree, a tigress – before reluctantly submitting after he continues to hold her fast. After they are wed and Achilles is born, Thetis secretly immolates him in the fire every night so as to burn away his mortality; but Peleus discovers her at this work and cries out, whereupon she abandons both him and Achilles and returns to her home in the sea.

Both of these themes are deeply traditional: Thetis’s capture and shapeshifting closely resembles the account of Proteus given in the Odyssey, and her attempting to burn away the mortality of a child before being interrupted by its uncomprehending human parent is paralleled in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.1

Note that the following verses begin from the second half of a line; as you may recall from the last installment, the first half-line was A woman unwilling (that is, Briseis, who was reluctantly led away from Achilles by Agamemnon’s heralds).

Then went Achilles
Away from his companions,    and wept in sorrow
On the shore of the hoar sea,    staring outward
On the ocean's endlessness.    And as he did so,
He cast his hands forth,    and called in prayer
Upon his dear mother,    with many a word:
"Mother who bore me!    In my minimal time
"I might have looked for some honour    from Olympian Zeus,
"Who thunders on high;    but not a titch he grants me,
"And thus I am dishonoured now    by Agamemnon,
"Who possesses my prize,    having seized her away."

Thus he spake, and wept,    and it went to the lady
Who bides undersea,    in abyssal depths
With her aged father.    From the hoary sea
She ascended swiftly    like a shroud of mist –
And she sat before him    as he shed his tears;
And with her hand she stroked him,    and she spake and named him:

"Why weeps my child?    What has sorrowed you?
"Speak, do not hide it;    share it between us."

Deep-sighing, he spake to her,    swift-foot Achilles:
"Why should I tell you    what you wit and see?
"At the city of Eëtion,    sacred Thebe,
"We struck and we sacked,    and with spoil returned;
"It was distributed fairly;    and the sons of Achaeans
"Chose for Atrides    fair-cheeked Chryseis.
"Then came Chryses, the priest    of Apollo the far-shot,
"To the speedy boats    of the bronze-clad Greeks
"With rich gifts to ransom    his rapted daughter,
"And the laurel garland,    that graced his hand
"Upon the golden sceptre    of farshooting Apollo.
"And he supplicated all    for his enslaved girl,
"In the host of Achaeans;    but chiefly two:
"The sons of Atreus,    highest-commanding.
"The rest of the Achaeans    cried assent then
"To reverence the priest,    and the ransom take;
"But Atrides was displeased,    and repulsed him harshly,
"And sent him on his way    with a stark decree.

"Afterwards, in anger,    the old man prayed –
"And Apollo harkened,    for he held him dear,
"And took at the Argives    a terrible shot.
"The dead fell in droves;    the darts of the god
"Went whizzing all ways    throughout the width of our camp.
"Then a seer explained to us    the Shooter's will:
"It was I who urged,    ahead of the rest,
"The god's appeasement;    but, gripped by anger,
"The son of Atreus,    swiftly rising,
"Spake a threat at me –    and soon fulfilled it.
"For the bright-eyed Achaeans    to Chryse send
"The girl on a swift ship,    with gifts for the Lord;
"But just now the heralds    from my huts have led
"Briseus's daughter,    whom the sons of Achaeans,
"The Grecian host,    to my hand had given.

"But now succour your son,    if you have sway to do so!
"Ascend to Olympus,    with Zeus to plead,
"If by speech or deed    you ever served or gladdened him.
"I frequently heard you,    in my father's hall,
"Exultantly telling    of the time when you,
"Alone among Olympians,    lifted ruin
"From the cloud-murking Thunderer,    Cronus's scion.
"When many immortals    had a mind to bind him –
"Hera, Poseidon,    Spear-Shake Athena –
"You unloosed his bonds,    and to the Olympian heights
"The Hundred-Hander    to his help you called –
"Whom gods call Briareus,     but all mortals
"Know as Aegaeon –    for that giant's strength
"Exceeds his own sire,    [Poseidon Aegaeon.]
"When he sat by Cronides,    in exultant glory,
"He cowed the blessed ones;    they rebelled no more.

"Go clasp him by the knees,    and recount all that,
"So that haply he may help out    the host of Troy –
"And to ship-stern and sea-shore    shove the Greeks back,
"With terrible slaughters;    they may thank their king,
"Wide-ruling Agamemnon –    who shall reck the folly
"Of doing no honour    to the doughtest in arms!"

Thetis answered –    there were tears in her eyes –
"O woe, my son –    why did I bear you?
"So bitter-born are you,    bound to sorrow!
"How I wish you could sit    without weep or pain
"By your ships – since your life-lot    is short indeed!
"You are fleet-fated,    and now far exceed
"All others in sadness –    and so, therefore,
"I bore you in the hall    to an evil fate!
"But to thunder-loving Zeus    I will take your suit –
"To snowy Olympus    I myself will go,
"And try to persuade him.     Till that time should come,
"By the ships swift-travelling,    sit continually,
"And rage at the Achaeans,    and quit their war.
"For Zeus has departed    to the circling Ocean,
"With the faultless Ethiopians    a feast to hold,
"Yesterday going –    and the gods all followed.
"Days twelve will pass    ere they return to heaven.
"To his bronze-founded house    I shall hasten then,
"And clasp him by the knees    with cozening prayers,
"In humble entreaty,    and hope he will listen."

So she spoke, and departed    from that place, and left him,
With a heart full of gall    for the well-girdled woman
They had taken unwilling...

While Achilles seethes and waits for Thetis to make her petition, Odysseus is busy returning the daughter of Chryses to her father – as we shall see in the next part.

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Notes

In my minimal time…

Alternatively, ‘although mortally doomed’, that is to say of brief lifespan; the original word is μινυνθάδιος (minunthadios).

And she spake and named him

This traditional formula (ἔπος τ᾽ ἔφατ᾽ ἔκ τ᾽ ὀνόμαζε) is not to be taken literally, since Thetis does not actually call Achilles by name. What it seems to mean is rather than she addresses him in an intimate way. But sometimes it is better to preserve the surface meaning of a formula than to distort it by elucidation.

With rich gifts to ransom…with a stark decree

These lines are near-identical to the ones in which Homer directly narrates this scene, and so I have taken care not to change what I wrote in the first part.

Spake a threat at me, and soon fulfilled it

Interestingly, the word for threat in Ancient Greek (ἀπειλή) has more or less the same range of meanings as Old English beot – that is to say, it can mean a threat, a boast or a boastful promise. Accordingly, I have cast this phrase as a formula that can be used in several contexts: spake a [threat/boast/pledge] / [and soon/in sooth/but scarce] fulfilled it.

Whom gods call Briareus, but all mortals know as Aegaeon – for that giant’s strength exceeds his own sire, Poseidon Aegaeon

Here I have not only expanded on the text, but also interpolated the assertion that Poseidon was the father of Briareus and was also called Aegaeon. My reason for this flagrant doctoring is that Achilles’s words – which in the original are simply “whom gods call Briareus, but men Aegaeon, for his strength exceeds that of his father” –would make very little sense without it.

Although Hesiod attributes the parentage of the ‘Hundred-Handers’ (Hekatoncheires) including Briareus to the primordial couple Uranus and Gaea, his divine genealogy differs from that of Homer on several points.2 Although Homer does not name the father of Briareus, according to Wikipedia there is an alternative tradition connecting him with Poseidon, who was also sometimes called Aegaeon; and it is obvious that Briareus could not have cowed Poseidon into obedience to Zeus were he not a good deal stronger than the sea-god. Thus, Achilles’s meaning – and this is the most speculative part – would seem to be that Briareus merits the name Aegaeon in the eyes of men, given that he is more powerful than the other divine claimant to it.

Go clasp him by the knees…

This was the traditional gesture of supplication. Where Thetis refers to it again at the end of her speech, I have expanded on the text a bit so as to make its significance clear.

You are fleet-fated…

In the original language the word ὠκύμορος (ookumoros) ‘swift-dying’ or ‘fleet-fated’ does not much resemble the famous epithet of Achilles, ποδώκης (podookees) ‘swift-footed’ or ‘fleet-footed’3, but the pun is hard to resist in English.

For Zeus has departed to the circling Ocean, with the faultless Ethiopians a feast to hold…

The word ‘circling’ is not in the original, which simply says that Zeus has gone to Ocean; but in order to make sense of this statement, we must recall to mind the archaic conception of the earth as a flat area encircled by the ocean.4 With regards to the Aetheopians (literally ‘burntfaces’), Homer understood them to be a race divided in two and located at the ends of the earth: some in the east at the sun’s rising and some in the west at its setting. When gods in the Iliad or Odyssey go to visit them, they depart from their usual roles and can neither help nor hinder the rest of humanity.

Incidentally, one of the lost Epic Cycle poems is called the Aethiopis, and deals with the events following the conclusion of the Iliad (when, SPOILER WARNING, Achilles kills Hector and drags him behind his chariot). In this tale, two allies of the Trojan king Priam come to help him against the Greeks, and are eventually both killed by Achilles: the Amazon queen Penthesileia and the Ethiopian king Memnon. Soon after slaying Memnon, Achilles pursues the Trojans to the gates of Troy, where he is fatally shot by Hector’s unvaliant brother Paris.

In the end I opted for the following example, which comes a hundred lines or so after Beowulf’s victorious battle with the monster Grendel. One of the hero’s men was devoured by Grendel in the course of that battle, and the poet comments that more would have been slain “had not wise God and a man’s courage not warded off that outcome from them” (nefne him witig God wyrd forstode, and ðæs mannes mod). The truth, he goes on to say, is that God has always ruled the race of men, just as he still does now (Metod eallum weold gumena cynnes, swa he nu git deð).

He then launches into a little homily (lines 1059-62):

Forðan bið andgit    æghwær selest,
ferhðes foreþanc.    Fela sceal gebidan
leofes ond laþes,    se þe longe her
on ðyssum windagum    worolde bruceð.

These lines were rendered as follows by Francis Gummere in his 1910 translation:

Therefore is insight    always best,
And forethought of mind.    How much awaits him
Of lief and of loath,    who long time here
Through days of warfare    this world endures!

The many more translations that have been produced in the last century do not deviate much from this – at least not on the word windagas (windagum as indirect object), which is rendered by Gummere as ‘days of warfare’. The most popular translation for this word seems to be ‘days of strife’ (plumped for by Roy Liuzza, Howard Chickering, and Tom Shippey); others prefer ‘days of trouble’ (J.R.R. Tolkien), ‘days of warring’ (Edwin Morgan), or ‘anxious days’ (Michael Alexander); and those who decline to translate the text exactly (e.g. Seamus Heaney, Maria Dahvana Headley) nevertheless retain the pessimistic sentiment.

Thus it would seem that there is unanimous agreement among translators on the identification of windagas with the more common gewinndagas (plural of gewinndæg), meaning ‘days of trouble’ (from gewinn or winn, ‘strife’, ‘war’, ‘toil’).

And yet there is an alternative possibility, which is that windagas is actually a form of wyndagas (plural of wyndæg), meaning ‘days of joy’ (from wynn, ‘joy’, ‘delight’, ‘pleasure’).

Truth be told, if we had to plump for one or the other, I would follow established convention and identify windagas with gewinndagas. ‘Days of strife’ fits the context better than ‘days of joy’, and the vowel sounds of winn and wynn are not the same (although they are very close to each other, since y in Old English was equivalent to modern German ü, and used interchangeably with i in some other word spellings).

However – once we start reading the text for ambiguity, we do not have to plump for one or the other. We can just accept that the dominant meaning winndagas ‘days of strife’ carries an intentional echo of the subordinate wyndagas ‘days of joy’. And it is this double meaning that fits the context best of all, since those who live in windagas must endure what is both ‘lief and loath’ (leofes and laþes); and surely there is nothing ‘lief’, or lovable, about strife and trouble and toil.

But there’s a second puzzle lurking in this word. Assuming that windagas refers to a specific time period, can this be understood as the time of the poem’s writing (probably the early or middle 8th century, during the time of the Mercian hegemony in England), or the time in which its narrative is set (the early 6th century, during the Migration Period on the Continent)? The wording suggests the former, but it is the latter that truly answers to the description. Not only was this much more of a ‘time of strife’, it also seems to have been remembered nostalgically as a ‘time of joy’, perhaps analogous to the Age of Piracy in the imaginations of late 19th-century Englishmen.

The only way to be sure of this, however, is to take a closer look at the context.

As we have said, this passage is immediately preceded by the poet’s statement that God has always ruled humanity ‘just as he still does now’, and that He aided Beowulf against Grendel. This means, of course, that the God worshipped by English Christians of the 8th century was not absent from the lives of their unconverted 6th-century Scandinavian ancestors. Note also that the passage is immediately followed by the beginning of the Finnsburg episode (translated, not without errors, here) – a bloody tale of treachery, oathbreaking and vengeance, much more morally-questionable than the poem’s main narrative, which just happens to star the English founding father Hengest. Indeed it is this matter above all that would have presented the Christian audience of Beowulf with ‘much of what is lief and loath’, requiring them to exercise ‘insight’ or ‘understanding’ (andgit).

In the interests of keeping this post short and sweet, I’m going to jump to my conclusion here. I do not think that this passage is some randomly-interspersed Christian homily, in which our poet wags his finger at his half-converted audience and douses them with a bit of doom and gloom before returning to his tales of heathen heroism. Rather, if there is any finger-wagging in it, this is pointed at a certain type of Christian – the sort who had come to think that his most virtuous ancestors were forsaken by God, damned to hell and unworthy of remembrance, because they had not been born into the Jewish nation prior to the coming of Christ.1 I would not go as far as to say that our poet is engaged in pagan apologia, since he makes no apology for polytheism; but his whole poem constitutes one long apology for the virtues of noble pagans, so it hardly stretches credulity to see this agenda as being openly expressed in some of his homiletic digressions.

The nature of our poet’s Christianity is a question that we must leave aside for the time being, again for the sake of brevity. Instead, let us confine ourselves to interpreting windagas in light of what we have just said, as an expression of the ambiguous attitude of early Christian England to the heathen heroic age that preceded it. Of course the real question is how best to render the word in modern English without departing too far from the text; I would opt for sanguine days, which has the same mixed connotations of bloodiness and joy (weighted towards the latter in modern usage, but not in archaic usage).

All of this leads us also to reconsider the phrase ferhþes foreþanc, translated by Gummere as ‘forethought of mind’.

Neither of these words are unambiguous: ferhþ can mean ‘mind’, ‘spirit’, or ‘life’, and foreþanc can be ‘forethought’, ‘consideration’, or ‘providence’. Accordingly, we find more variation in the translations: Chickering has ‘the spirit’s forethought’, Liuzza ‘spiritual foresight’, Tolkien ‘the heart that taketh thought’, Heaney ‘a prudent mind’, and Shippey (paraphrasing) ‘take thought for the future’.

Were it not for the context, and the precedent of windagas that clues us into the presence of ambiguous language in these lines, we too might be satisfied with something like this. But let us instead take a closer look. The meaning of the compound word foreþanc, as we have said, is ‘forethought’; but the two components are fully transparent, as is not often the case in modern English words, and they are fore ‘in front of’, ‘before’ and þanc ‘thought’, ‘grace’, ‘thanks’, ‘gratitude’. Were þanc to be interpreted as ‘thanks’ or ‘gratitude’ instead of ‘thought’, and fore as pointing backwards in time instead of forwards, then ferhþ as possessive noun (ferhþes) could be understood not as ‘of mind’ or ‘of spirit’ (as in Gummere’s ‘forethought of mind’) but as ‘for life’ (as in, thanks or gratitude for one’s life). The whole phrase might thus be alternatively read along the lines of afore-thanks for [one’s] life – and the recipients of such gratitude would presumably be one’s progenitors, one’s forefathers, whom as we have said our poet is attempting to defend and redeem.2

Of course there is no question of reproducing such a knotty turn of phrase in translation. But we might at least sacrifice some literalism and render ferhþes foreþanc as farther forethought, which vaguely evokes the word forefather. And we might reinforce this by translating andgit as understanding, which has the helpful connotation of ‘tolerance’ or ‘sympathy’ in modern English.

Now we are in a position to attempt a full retranslation of the passage:

Understanding    is thus always best,
And farther forethought.    He must face a lot
Of what is lief and loath,    whoever long abides here
To share of the world    in these sanguine days.

In case it is not obvious from the cited translations, I should warn the reader that this method of reading Beowulf is not that of most scholars. At present the most authoritative edition of the Old English text is Klaeber’s Beowulf Fourth Edition, edited by R.D. Fulk, Robert Bjork and John Niles, and the most authoritative translation is that of Tom Shippey. Neither contain ambiguous explanations3 or translations, and the preface to the latter actively warns the student against reading too much into the text. Perhaps I am running the risk of making too many leaps and stretches (and of setting a bad example to others, who might be inclined to leap and stretch much further); but I am willing to run that risk, in order to avoid the danger of a flatfooted interpretation that allows far too much to pass overhead.

Tip Jar

In the first part, the god Apollo sent a plague on the Greek host encamped outside Troy, for the reason that King Agamemnon dishonoured one of his priests by refusing to release his daughter from war-concubinage.

In the second, the seer Calchas identified the cause of the plague, and warned that it would not abate until the girl was sent back to her father – much to the annoyance of Agamemnon, who very much desired to keep her.

In the third, Agamemnon demanded that Achilles compensate him for this loss by giving up his own war-concubine – sparking a bitter argument that culminated in the decision of Achilles, the greatest of all Greek warriors, to sit out the war and allow the rest of the host to be beaten by the Trojans.

In the fourth, the elderly Nestor tried and failed to resolve the dispute, and Achilles had the last word – saying that he would allow Agamemnon to take the girl from him, but would shortly kill him should he dare lay hands on any of his other belongings. Here’s how we rendered that:

“But now hark, and hold this in your heart and mind:

“I’ll not strive for the girl – I’ll not set my hands

“On thee,1 or any other who intends to come

“And remove once more what to me you gave –

“But of what sundries are mine beside my swift black boats,

“I’ll not suffer one to be seized unwilling:

“Should you come and try me, let this crowd observe

“Your black blood billow round the blade of my spear!”

The main event of this fifth part will be the requisition of Achilles’ war-bride, so it befits us to say a few preliminary words about her. According to Wikipedia, her name was Hippodameia (meaning ‘horse-tamer’), but Homer conventionally refers to her as Briseis (‘daughter of Briseus’). By way of physical description we can gather very little, other than that she was beautiful; for what it’s worth, this is how she was imagined in a much later Roman wall painting:

In the last two installments, Briseis has been much contested by Achilles and Agamemnon, yet no reference has been made by either of them to any of the personal qualities that make her desirable. She is first and foremost a ‘prize’ (γέρας), a reward and symbol of honour, which Achilles has lost by having been forced to give her up. Quite frankly the two of them may as well be quarrelling over a sack of gold or some other treasure; and it is Achilles who seems the most indifferent to anything but his own honour, since Agamemnon at least praises his own war-bride, Chryseis.

The first clue that there is something more to this picture appears at the end of the following scene, in which Agamemnon’s heralds come to take Briseis from Achilles. For ease of comprehension, note that ‘son of Peleus’ refers to Achilles, and ‘son of Atreus’ to Agamemnon. The ‘son of Menoetius’ is Patroclus, Achilles’ closest companion, whose death in battle towards the end of the poem will draw him back into the fighting and eventually to his own death.

So having battled back and forth    with bitter words,
They stood, and dissolved    the assembly-host
By the Achaean ships.    The son of Peleus
Went, with his warriors,    to his well-planed boats –
And with the son of Menoetius –    to his sheltered camp.

Meanwhile the son of Atreus    to the sea-waves dragged
A thrusting ship;    took twenty rowers;
Put on board, for the god,    a blessed hecatomb;
And led to her chair    fair-chéeked Chryseis,
Consigned her to the charge    of resourceful Odysseus.

And as away they sailed,    upon the watery roads,
Agamemnon commanded    the men of the host
To purify themselves    from the plague's defilements.
They washed away the filth;    to the waters cast it;
And offered to Apollo    perfect hecatombs –
Both bulls and goats –    beside the briny furrows,
Barren and harvestless.    To heaven rose
The smoke and the savour    in spiral-coils.

Thus the army bustled;    and yet Agamemnon
Relinquished not the threats    he had laid on Achilles;
So he spoke to his heralds,    who esquired him always –
Talthybius, Eurybates –    ready attendants:
"Go ye to the camp    of Achilles Pelides,
"And take by the hand    and hither lead
"Fair-cheeked Briseis;    if he quits her not,
"Then I shall go to take her    with a troop of men –
"And that shall chill him colder    than his quitting the girl."

So he spake, and sent them    with that stark decree;
And trepidly they traipsed    by the untillable brine;
'Til when they came to the ships    and camp of Myrmidons,
By shelter and black ship    they saw him there:
Achilles sitting;    and the sight of them
Did not please him at all.    They promptly stopped –
Freezing stock-still    in fright and awe,
And nor accosting nor questioning    the king before them.

Yet inside he understood,    and bespake them thus:
"Hail and welcome,    heralds of Zeus,
"Messengers of men.    Ye may move yet closer;
"No fault do I find with ye;    fully culpable
"I hold the one    who has hither sent ye
"For the sake of Briseis,    to seize her from me.
"God-sprung Patroclus!    Go in haste now
"To lead the girl out;    and let them take her,
"And lead her away;    and let them henceforth
"Bear their witness –    before blessed gods,
"Before mortal men;    and more besides,
"Before that heartless king –    if e'er again
"My help should be needed,    the host to save
"From a wretched ruin.    He rages and fumes,
"Seethes and smoulders,    in destructive mind,
"With nor hind nor foresight –    and heeds not a whit
"How the Greeks, by their fleet,    may fight unscathed."

He thusly spake;    and Patroclus obeyed
His beloved friend;    and led the girl,
Fair-cheeked Briseis,    from the camp's shelter.
He gave her to be taken;    and the two went back,
Returned to their king,    by the Achaean ships,
Leading her away –    who, reluctant, went with them,
A woman unwilling.    Then went Achilles
Away from his companions,    and wept in solitude...

As this 18th-century painting of the scene (one of many) shows, Briseis herself is none too pleased at having been parted from Achilles – the man who sacked her city, slew her wedded husband, and also killed her three brothers before the events of the Iliad. Only after she is returned to Achilles following the death of Patroclus (much, much later in the poem) do we see her again, and only here does she speak her mind and explain herself. Lamenting over the body of the dead Patroclus, she says that he had always been kind to her, and had promised to persuade his friend Achilles to raise her from war-prisoner to legitimate wife.

That this persuasion was successful can be gathered from Achilles’s rebuff to a previous deputation from Agamemnon, in which he declares that his original intention was to marry Briseis; he even compares the injustice of his being separated from her to the rape of Helen that started the Trojan War. But this marriage, of course, is not to be. By the time Briseis is returned to Achilles, he is once again dominated wholly by his anger (which has simply been transferred from Agamemnon to Hector, the Trojan slayer of Patroclus) and is well on the way to his own death at the gates of Troy. At this point he even remarks that he would rather have seen Briseis die in the sack of her city than have lived to become the cause of the quarrel and all the Greek disasters that it brought about.

It might be said of Achilles (and, of course, is often said) that he was first and foremost in love with his own martial honour, of which his captive ‘sex-slave’2 Briseis was merely a symbol. It might also be said of Briseis (and, of course, is not so often said) that she all too quickly forgot the deaths of her husband and brothers, and devoted herself to their killer in the hope of regaining the queenly status that she had lost. These are carping, ‘Thersitean’ opinions, not to be identified with the thoughts of Homer. But there does seem to be some intentional contrast between Achilles and Odysseus, hero of the Odyssey, who gave up the ultimate honour of immortality in order to return to his wife; and thus perhaps by extension, between Briseis and Penelope, who went to every length to resist remarriage despite having every reason to believe that her husband was dead. The contrasting fate of these two love relationships is just one aspect of the contrast between the wider fate of Achilles and that of Odysseus.

But we are getting a long way ahead of ourselves here. In the next part, we shall meet Achilles’ divine mother Thetis, and see how she purposes to help him.

Notes

To his sheltered camp

The word used for the structures in which the Greek warriors live is κλισία (klisia), which is often translated ‘tent’ but is apparently more like ‘encampment’, implying a wooden building. At the original time of writing I read an archived blogpost by an amateur translator that made this case quite persuasively, but have unfortunately mislaid the link to it.

Perfect hecatombs

That is to say, the hundred animals (mixed bulls and goats) that made up the hecatomb were all without defect or blemish.

To heaven rose the smoke and the savour…

The κνίση (knise), i.e. the savour or nidor, given off by the roasting meat was supposed to be pleasing to the gods – an idea hardly confined to Greek tradition.

That shall chill him colder than his quitting the girl

Embellished; all that the original text says is that ῥίγιον ἔσται (rhigion estai) “it shall be more chilling [for Achilles]”, with the word ῥῖγος (rhigos) ‘chilliness’ connoting horror or terror as well as physical cold, the common ground between them being the physical reaction of shuddering.

He rages and fumes, seethes and smoulders…

These four English verbs are spun out from a single Greek one, θύω, which can mean either ‘storm, rage, seethe’ or ‘sacrifice, immolate, slaughter’. These are apparently distinct words with the same sound, and the right one in this context is obviously the ‘rage’ or ‘seethe’ one; but there is reason to suppose that the secondary connotation of ‘sacrifice’ is intended by Homer, since Achilles seems to be implying that Agamemnon has sacrificed the whole Achaean host to his wrath. In the immediate context, he first accuses him of having a ‘destructive mind’; then he says that he cannot consider anything ‘forward or backward’ (meaning that he heeds neither past nor future, but also implying blindedness; and note here that the second θύω may be derived from a root meaning ‘smoke’, which in any case would be the main product of a sacrifice); finally, he refers to the safety of the host in its fighting by its ships, arguably foreshadowing the much later scene in which the Trojans will push the Greeks back to their camp and almost succeed in burning their fleet at its moorings.

Here, once again (see the notes to the last post), I am tempted to suspect that Homer chose his words more carefully – and thus, perhaps, had more leisure to pick and choose them – than Milman Parry and his followers made out when they identified his work as an example of oral composition. Since I lack the requisite language skills to say for sure whether the word is deliberately ambiguous, or whether such ambiguity must absolutely rule out oral composition, this must remain a mere suspicion until someone with more expertise confirms or denies it.

His opening chapter on the villainous Dante can be read in full at Unqualified Reservations – courtesy of Curtis Yarvin, who described it as “one of the greatest political essays ever written”. Frankly, I don’t agree at all (and not just because Dante is the Maestro of Anamnesia, whose poetic work we have yet to begin exploring). Let’s set the tone by quoting the introductory paragraphs:

Dante Alighieri, besides the most wonderful poem ever written, finished only one other major work. This was a treatise on politics, which he called De Monarchia, a title that may be translated as “On the Empire.” De Monarchia is divided into three Books, each of these sub-divided into numerous chapters. The general subject stated by Dante is “the knowledge of the temporal monarchy… which is called empire,” by which is meant “a unique princedom extending over all persons in time.” The topics for the three Books are explained as follows: “In the first place we may inquire and examine whether it the unique empire is needful for the well-being of the world; in the second, whether the Roman people rightfully assumed to itself the function of monarchy; and in the third, whether the authority of the monarchy depends immediately upon God, or upon some other minister or vicar of God.” The “empire” Dante has concretely in mind is the Holy Roman Empire of medieval times, which he mistakenly believed to be the continuation of the ancient Roman Empire.

In answer to his three main inquiries, he maintains: first, that mankind should be governed by a single “empire” or state; second, that this sovereignty is properly exercised by the Holy Roman Emperor (conceived as the continuator of the ancient Roman Emperor); and third, that the temporal, the political authority exercised by the Emperor is independent of the authority of the Pope and the Church (as Dante puts it, “depends immediately on God.”)

We should not need Burnham’s help to gather from this first that De Monarchia is a ‘Ghibelline’ or pro-imperial treatise (as opposed to a ‘Guelph’ or pro-papal one), written to defend the temporal independence of the Holy Roman Emperor from the spiritual authority of the Church and Pope; and that second, it is couched in the scholastic argumentation that was typical of the late medieval era, but is now derided as an exercise in counting angels on pinheads. Burnham summarizes this argumentation as a nonsense of “pointless metaphysical and logical distinctions, distorted analogies, garbled historical references, appeals to miracles and arbitrarily selected authorities”, and dismisses the treatise itself as “totally worthless”. But this, he tells us, is only the “formal meaning” of De Monarchia, a sort of squid-ink cloud disguising its more villainous “real meaning”.

According to Burnham, the real meaning is as follows. Dante was a member of a moderate Guelph faction in Florence, which lost a power struggle against a more extreme Guelph faction after the latter succeeded in obtaining help from both the pope and the King of France. Having been exiled from the city by this coalition, Dante and his friends became fully-fledged Ghibellines, and encouraged the Emperor to invade Italy and restore them to power much as the Pope and French had intervened on behalf of their enemies. Burnham excerpts Dante’s florid public letters to Emperor Henry VII in an obvious spirit of mockery:

“O Italy! henceforth rejoice; though now to be pitied by the very Saracens, yet soon to be envied throughout the world! because thy bridegroom, the most clement Henry, Divus and Augustus and Caesar, is hastening to the bridal. Dry thy tears and remove the marks of grief, O thou fairest one; for nigh at hand is he who shall release thee from the prison of the impious, and, smiting the malicious, shall destroy them with the edge of the sword, and shall give out his vineyard to other husbandmen such as shall render the fruit of justice at time of harvest…

“But you [Florentines], who transgress divine and human law, whom a dire rapaciousness hath found ready to be drawn into every crime,—doth not the dread of the second death pursue you? For ye first and alone, shunning the yoke of liberty, have murmured against the glory of the Roman prince, the king of the world and the minister of God, and on the plea of prescriptive right have refused the duty of the submission which ye owed, and have rather risen up in the insanity of rebellion!…”

The Emperor duly invaded Italy, but failed to conquer Florence, and brought the hopes of his supporters to a premature end by dying on campaign. Dante never returned to home city and spent the rest of his life wandering in exile. And at some point, either during or after the Imperial campaign, he wrote De Monarchia – a Ghibelline treatise that uses scholastic argumentation to defend the rights of the Holy Roman Emperor against those of the Church and Pope.1

What I gather from this – and what I dare say most people at the time would have gathered from it – is that a man of the late Middle Ages who opposed papal supremacy in writing also opposed it in political life. That is to say, I am not much more surprised by it than I would be surprised by the ‘revelation’ that the Pope at the time of De Monarchia’s publication was a Catholic, and that he owned some woods in which bears occasionally did their natural business. But for Burnham, the history behind De Monarchia constitutes a gross indictment of Dante’s hypocrisy – as shocking and damning as would be the discovery of a signed confession to the effect that he didn’t much fancy Beatrice after all.

As he puts it:

Eternal salvation, the highest development of man’s potentialities, everlasting peace, unity, and harmony, the delicate balance of abstract relations between Church and State, all these ghosts and myths evaporate, along with the whole elaborate structure of theology, metaphysics, allegory, miracle, and fable. The entire formal meaning, which has told us nothing and proved nothing, assumes its genuine role of merely expressing and disguising the real meaning. This real meaning is simply an impassioned propagandistic defense of the point of view of the turncoat Bianchi exiles from Florence, specifically; and more generally of the broader Ghibelline point of view to which these Bianchi capitulated. De Monarchia is, we might say, a Ghibelline Party Platform…

The ostensible goals of the formal argument are noble, high-minded, what people often call “idealistic.” This serves to create a favorable emotional response in the reader, to disarm him, to lead him to believe in the “good will” of the author. The unwary reader carries this attitude over to the practical aims of the real argument. But what of these latter aims, what do they concretely amount to? When we dig behind the formal facade, they emerge as vengeful and reactionary.

They are the aims of an embittered and incompetent set of traitors. Dante and his friends had failed miserably in their political careers. They had been defeated in an attempt to take over the government of their country. Quite properly, in accordance with the customs of the time, and for the interests of internal security, they had been exiled. They then joined with the disintegrated forces of earlier exiles, whose only wish was to revenge themselves on Florence, and to destroy her power. The enlarged group also failed. They then crawled slavishly to the feet of the Republic’s oldest and most thorough enemy—the Emperor—begging him to do what they were too weak and too stupid to have done. The aims of the Empire in northern Italy were very far indeed from eternal salvation, universal peace, and the highest development of man’s potentialities. The Empire clutched greedily after the amazing wealth and resources of these remarkable cities, and dreamed of reducing their proud, fierce independence to the tyrannical rule of its Gauleiters.

We’ll quote no further than that silly word – but I advise you to read the rest of Burnham’s very silly rant about the wicked reactionary Emperor and nobles versus the progressive Pope and Florentine burghers. Note that he produces no argument as to why the party of universal empire was any worse than the party of theocracy; or as to why Dante’s appeal to the German Emperor was any more ‘traitorous’ than his enemies’ appeal to the French king; or why his movement from Guelphism to Ghibellinism after losing a power struggle in Florence was any more unprincipled than Burnham’s conversion from Trotskyism to conservatism after losing a power struggle in the Socialist Workers’ Party.

This does not mean that Burnham does not have a valid point when he complains about Dante’s practice of couching political disputes in florid scholastic philosophism.2 Yet this, as we have said, was the conceptual language of Dante’s time, in which he was constrained to think and argue (much as Burnham, writing in 1943, cannot resist thinking and arguing through concepts like ‘reactionary’, ‘progressive’ and ‘Gauleiter’). For all his pretensions to the contrary, Burnham comes across as too shallowly focused on the style of a text to properly assess its substance.

The consequences of this focus become apparent when Burnham turns to the hero of his story, Machiavelli (starting from page 31 of the full book). Suddenly he drops his guard, ceases to search for hidden motives, and swallows every word as plain truth or at least as objective science. This, as we shall see, is not because Machiavelli is necessarily more honest, objective or lacking in hidden motives than is Dante; it is because he speaks Burnham’s language, and indeed, not only speaks it but might even to be said to have invented it.

Machiavelli’s chief immediate practical goal is the national unification of Italy. There are other practical aims in his writings, some of them more general, and I shall discuss them later on. To make Italy a nation, a unified state, is, however, central and constant.

Compared to Dante’s glittering ideals, this goal is doubtless humble, almost sordid. In any case, it is specific and meaningful. We all know what a national state, in the modern sense, means. Machiavelli, writing in the first quarter of the 16th century, and his contemporaries, with the example of France and England and Spain fresh before them, knew what the goal meant. Moreover, the goal was neither wild nor fantastic; it was accomplished elsewhere in Europe during those times, and there was no reason to think it too improbable of accomplishment in Italy.

In the case of Dante we had to distinguish carefully between the formal, presumed goals, and the hidden real goals. In Machiavelli, as in all scientific writing, there is no such distinction. Formal and real are one, open and explicit. The last chapter of The Prince is plainly entitled, “An Exhortation to Deliver Italy from the Barbarians” [that is, foreigners]. In it Machiavelli calls for a champion to rally Italy for the task of unification:

“Having weighed, therefore, all that is said before, and considered seriously with myself whether in this juncture of affairs in Italy, the times were disposed for the advancement of a new Prince, and whether there was competent matter that could give occasion to a virtuous and wise person to introduce such a form as would bring reputation to him, and benefit to all his subjects; it seems to me that at this present so many things concur to the exaltation of a new Prince, that I do not know any time that has been more proper than this. ’Tis manifest how prone and ready she is to follow the Banner that any man will take up; nor is it at present to be discerned where she can repose her hopes with more probability, than in your illustrious Family [of the Medici], which by its own courage and interest, and the favour of God and the Church, of which it is now chief [Leo X of the Medici family was Pope when Machiavelli was writing this passage], may be induced to make itself Head in her redemption; which will be no hard matter to be effected, if you lay before you the lives and actions of the persons above named; who though they were rare, and wonderful, were yet but men, and not accommodated with so fair circumstances as you. Their enterprise was not more just, nor easy, nor God Almighty more their friend than yours. You have Justice on your side; for that War is just which is necessary, and ’tis piety to fight, where no hope is left in anything else. The people are universally disposed, and where the disposition is so great, the opposition can be but small, especially you taking your rules from those persons which I have proposed to you for a Model…” (The Prince, Chap. 26).

Admittedly this is a lot less florid than Dante’s letters to Henry VII, but one might reasonably say that the similarities outweigh the differences. Both look forward to the extinguishing of independent Italian states, including Florence, in some sort of overarching monarchy (which would mean that both are ‘traitorous’ according to Burnham’s definition). Both are addressed, with appropriate flattery, to great men who would end up falling far short of expectations. Both hark back to Roman glories (the end of Machiavelli’s Exhortation quotes a line from Petrarch, “for th’ old Romane valour is not dead, nor in th’ Italians brests extinguished”) that neither the Germans nor the Italians were able to replicate. At most we might say that Dante’s universal monarchy is less practical than Machiavelli’s unified Italy; but his idea of such a monarchy was the Roman empire of Augustus, a historical reality, whereas Italian unification was a future dream to be achieved only in the nineteenth century.

This, of course, is part of what attracts Burnham: he says (on p.33 of his book) that Machiavelli’s ideal, unlike Dante’s, is “unquestionably progressive”. Since we’re not into metaphysical fables about the highest development of man’s potentialities, let’s skip over that3 and see what else he’s got. The answer (from pp.36-7) would seem to be a blatantly anachronistic interpretation of Machiavelli’s motives, in which he is presented as a calculating visionary who used the Medicis as a means to the end of a modern Italian nation-state.

Machiavelli concluded that Italy could be unified only through a Prince, who would take the initiative in consolidating the country into a nation. Those who think sentimentally rather than scientifically about politics are sure to misunderstand this conclusion. Machiavelli did not reach it because he preferred a monarchy or absolutist government—we shall see later what his own preferences were. He reached it because he found that it was dictated by the evidence.

Moreover, in this conclusion Machiavelli was undoubtedly correct. All of the European nations were consolidated through a Prince — or, rather, a succession of Princes — and it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. So it was in France, so in England, so in Spain. The feudal lords did not want nation-states, which in the end were sure to bring the destruction of their power and privileges. The masses were too inarticulate, too ignorant, too weak, to function as a leading political force. The Church knew that its international overlordship was gravely threatened if the national system were successful.

The one great social group that required the national system was the new and spreading class of the burghers, the business men, the merchants, the early capitalists. This class, however, was too young, too untried, too unused to rule, to take on the job by itself. But the monarchy also — the King and those immediately associated with the King — was ready for the nation, through which the full political sovereignty of the monarch could be centralized and brought to bear against the centrifugal pull of feudalism. Therefore a de facto alliance was made, and around the monarchy the nation was pulled together…

If the path of the nation led through the monarchy in these other countries [such as France and England], Machiavelli indicated why this was even more necessarily so in Italy, where the political divisionalism was even more extreme. Only a Prince could rally around him the force and enthusiasm needed to smash and re-fuse the disparate units. In such a way only could Italy become a nation.

Beyond his basic desire as expressed in the Prince to see Italy united and ‘liberated from the barbarians’ (in a temporary anti-foreign crusade? in a permanent arrangement? as a centralized monarchy? as a decentralized empire?), I know of no good reason to suppose that Machiavelli thought in the modern terms of the nation-state or even that he wanted a kingdom like France or Spain. Moreover, unlike in the case of Dante, Burnham fails to cite any biographical details that might help to explain why this supposed objective scientist came to support princely rule in spite of his own preferences. Fortunately, those details are by no means difficult to find.

As early as the age of Dante, the Republic of Florence was ruled by a broad class of mercantile guild members, which repressed the hereditary aristocracy and resisted the rule of princes before eventually falling prey to oligarchy and monarchy. This ruling class called itself the popolo (a word that primarily signified the middle class of citizens, as opposed to the noble magnates above it and the poorer citizens and non-citizens below it); and while its regime was too stratified to be comparable to the demokratia of ancient Athens, it might be called ‘relatively democratic’ in contrast to the aristocratic republicanism of Venice.4 Like other Florentines of his time, Machiavelli was a dyed-in-the-wool advocate of this ‘Democracy’, and made no secret of it in his Letter to Zenobius (quoted in Burnham, p.68):

Why should I be condemned of heresy or indiscretion for preferring a Commonwealth before a Monarchy? Was I not born, bred, and employed in a City, which being at the time I write, under that form of Government, did owe all wealth and greatness, and all prosperity to it? If I had not very designedly avoided all dogmaticalness in my observations (being not willing to imitate young Scholars5 in their Declamations) I might easily have concluded from the premises I lay down, that a Democracy founded upon good orders is the best and most excellent Government, and this without the least fear of confutation...

This was a matter not only of vague patriotic sentiment but also of political allegiance. In 1494 the Florentines expelled the Medici family, who had established a kind of shadow rule over the formal institutions of the city, and established a relatively ‘democratized’ republic. Machiavelli held office in this republic, notably organizing a citizen militia to defend it, only to see it quickly defeated by the Spanish army that returned the city to Medici rule. Having been arrested and tortured on suspicion of conspiracy against the restored regime, he was released and allowed to retire into obscurity, yearning all the time to return to political life – an ambition that now depended on his winning the friendship of Lorenzo de’ Medici.6

This, according to Machiavelli himself in the Letter to Lorenzo that prefaces the Prince, is the reason why this book was written:

Men who are anxious to win the favour of a Prince nearly always follow the custom of presenting themselves to him with the possessions they value most, or with things they know especially please him; so we often see princes given horses, weapons, cloth of gold, precious stones, and similar ornaments worthy of their high position. Now, I am anxious to offer myself to Your Magnificence with some token of my devotion to you, and I have not found among my belongings anything as dear to me or that I value as much as my understanding of the deeds of great men, won by me from a long acquaintance with contemporary affairs and a continuous study of the ancient world; these matters I have very diligently analysed and pondered for a long time, and now, having summarized them in a little book, I am sending them to Your Magnificence…

So, Your Magnificence, take this little gift in the spirit in which I send it; and if you read and consider it diligently, you will discover in it my urgent wish that you reach the eminence that fortune and your other qualities promise you. And if, from your lofty peak, Your Magnificence will sometimes glance down to these low-lying regions, you will realize the extent to which, undeservedly, I have had to endure the great and unremitting malice of fortune.

I reproduce this as tit-for-tat against Burnham (who of course does not quote it), to better illustrate his double standards and prejudice against Dante; for my own part, I have no intention of sneering at Machiavelli because he sought service with a great man and knew how to ask him nicely. The problem with our reading anything in the Prince as objective science is not that Machiavelli threw away his republican principles in order to write it, thus demonstrating that none of what he wrote is to be trusted. The problem is that he did not.

That he retained those principles under Medici rule can be gathered from his longer works, the Florentine Histories and Discourses on Livy. I have not yet read the Histories, but it is clear from Burnham’s long quotations that they contain many speeches praising republican freedom. As for the Discourses, they stand to the Prince as the whole picture stands to the detail, and show that Machiavelli is not a man denuded of ideals but rather an ethical consequentialist. By this I mean that there is a great deal of ‘Machiavellian’ crime and cunning in this book, but that all of it serves only as the means to an end that is never itself reduced to a means, namely the indefinite preservation of republican liberty. For example, the proper role of the ruthless and amoral prince in the Discourses is to create a strong state that can later become a free republic, or to correct a republic once it has fallen into corruption; it is not to replace a functioning republic with a tyranny, which is something Machiavelli condemns in the strongest possible terms.7

Since Burnham’s judgement of the Discourses concurs with my own, I will let him sum up the rest of the book (on p.70 of his own):

In chapter after chapter, Machiavelli insists that if liberty is to be preserved: no person and no magistrate may be permitted to be above the law; there must be legal means for any citizen to being accusations against any other citizen or any official; terms of office must be short, and must never, no matter what the inconvenience, be lengthened; punishment must be firm and impartial; the ambitions of citizens must never be allowed to build up private power, but must be directed into public channels.

This is of course the time-honoured wisdom of all republicanism, which can be defined as a power-sharing arrangement that comes to an end when one man takes too much for himself. What it is not, however, is dispassionate science dictated by objective evidence. A common criticism of scholastics like Dante and Thomas Aquinas is that they could never follow their philosophical speculations into conflicts with Catholic doctrine. But it is no less true to say that Machiavelli in the Discourses cannot follow his practical inquiries into positions that conflict with his own summum bonum of republican liberty – one that was, remember, everywhere losing ground to more efficient monarchies in his own time.

Having said that, since Machiavelli in the Prince was writing against his republican ideals, might this work be said to have achieved a higher degree of objectivity? Well, let’s take a look at it and find out.

First, it is plain to see that this book preserves no small degree of the republican sentiment more openly advanced in the other two. The prince is advised to distrust the nobles, build his power base on the people, eschew fortresses and mercenaries, and rely for defence on a citizen-army. Although Machiavelli makes a good case for the use of citizen-armies instead of mercenaries (in Chapter XII), his position cannot have been wholly dictated by objective fact, since the fact was that the defeat of his own citizen-army was the whole reason why he had to beg office from Lorenzo. And his statement (in Chapter IX) that “the people are more honest in their intentions than the nobles are, because the latter want to oppress the people, whereas they want only not to be oppressed” seems weirdly naive and optimistic for someone otherwise so cynical about human nature with regards to power – although, in reality, it is quite consistent with the Discourses.8 One would imagine that the lords of Florence held a view of the people who had exiled them closer to that of Plato in his Republic, who analogizes the mass of citizens in a democracy to the lowest part of the soul and the lowest part of the soul to an insatiable monster.

Second, where this book seems to egg the prince to treacherous and amoral actions, one wonders who is actually being addressed. The suspicion that Machiavelli’s mirror for tyrants is in fact some sort of republican satire against absolute monarchy has been voiced by a few thinkers down the ages, and cannot have been unknown to the well-educated Burnham. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract (Book III, Chapter 6) says of Machiavelli that “under the pretence of instructing kings, he has taught important lessons to the people.”

Presumably Rousseau was thinking above all of chapters XV-XVIII of the Prince, in which Machiavelli argues that a prince must violate traditional virtue ethics in order to keep his position. He begins this discussion under a protestation of honesty: “But since my intention is to say something that will prove of practical use to the inquirer, I have thought it proper to represent things as they are in a real truth, rather than as they are imagined.” The advice that follows becomes progressively more amoral and outrageous (note that Chapter XVII contains the notorious statement that “it is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both”), until it ends up in the paradox of an open call to deceit:

A prince, then, must be very careful not to say a word which does not seem inspired by the five qualities I mentioned earlier [compassion, faithfulness to one’s word, kindness, guilelessness, and devotion]. To those seeing and hearing him, he should appear a man of compassion, a man of good faith, a man of integrity, a kind and a religious man. … Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are. And these few dare not gainsay the many who are backed by the majesty of the state. … A certain contemporary ruler, whom it is better not to name [i.e. Ferdinand of Aragon], never preaches anything except peace and good faith; and he is an enemy of both one and the other, and if he had ever honoured either of them he would have lost either his standing or his state many times over.

Admittedly, this passage may not have seemed so paradoxical during Machiavelli’s lifetime, when the Prince circulated only in written manuscript form among a small elite readership. Perhaps the advice might even have brought some transitory advantage to Lorenzo (had he only bothered to read the book – to judge from the lack of any positive or negative acknowledgement made to its author, he never did). But once the Prince was published openly and printed widely after Machiavelli’s death, it could only cast permanent suspicion on the honour of the Medicis and all other great men of the time – and all the more so on those who fiercely repudiated the advice. As Christopher Marlowe has his ‘Machiavel’ say in the prologue to The Jew of Malta:

To some perhaps my name is odious;

But such as love me, guard me from their tongues,

And let them know that I am Machiavel,

And weigh not men, and therefore not men’s words.

Admir’d I am of those that hate me most:

Though some speak openly against my books,

Yet will they read me, and thereby attain

To Peter’s chair; and, when they cast me off,

Are poison’d by my climbing followers.

Now, I would not presume to dispute with either Machiavelli or Marlowe on the question what Renaissance princes and popes were actually like. But the logic of these verses – “if you profess to love Machiavelli then you must have taken his advice on dishonesty, and if you profess to hate him then you must have taken it and applied it as well” – can only place the moral authority of absolute monarchs between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Putting this passage and others like it into the Prince – along with the others protesting his unvarnished honesty, the innocence of the people and so on – would seem a wondrously cunning way for the first Machiavellian to curry favour with an individual prince in the short term, while furthering the republican cause against the whole princely species in the long term.

Perhaps his intent was yet more subtle. Perhaps he sought to promote (or further encourage) those tendencies in princes that were bound to annihilate their moral authority, precisely so that he could set up his defeated republican ideal in its place. Perhaps he recommended the clever stupidity of amoral realism to his enemies, because he himself was too wise to practice anything other than spiritual warfare.9 Perhaps he ought to be seen as a hero of the republican cause, an assassin of the princely spirit who sacrificed not his life but his immortal reputation.

Attractive as this explanation might be in retrospect, there is a less exciting alternative – that Machiavelli was basically sincere (as both his Letter and Exhortation suggest) and that the amoral quality of his rhetoric in the Prince was born out of creative restraint. Machiavelli had inherited the collective wisdom of republican Florence, which no doubt had much to say on the wiles and deceptions of ambitious men; and although either his classical studies or his observation of foreign kingdoms had taught him the usefulness of such men, he was used to thinking of them solely as means to the end of establishing and preserving republics. Yet now he was faced with the task of advising a monarch. So he had to argue in his accustomed way as to means, while leaving out any reference to ends, and the result was a book that seems completely denuded of ethical content.

‘Seems’ is the operative word, though. Not unlike Dante10, Machiavelli speaks a particular rhetorical and conceptual language, in which some things (republicanism, popular liberty) are held sacred and others (monarchy, personal honour, religion) are not. Perhaps he was truly able to approach the latter things with more honesty and a more penetrating inquiry than was available to those who believed in them. But his honesty is selective, his inquiry is arguably hostile, and those who confuse his rhetoric for objective science are sorely deceived.

Thus Burnham, who lists the ‘scientific’ virtues of Machiavelli (on pp.41-3 of his book) as follows: 1) that he speaks in realistic terms, 2) that he represents politics as a struggle for power (as opposed to a quest for peace, harmony, welfare, the good life, etc.), 3) that he assembles facts and draws conclusions from them, and 4) that he correlates these judgements into general laws. The following sceptical counterpoints suggest themselves:

1. That of course Machiavelli was able to write in a ‘desacralized’ way about things in which he did not really believe;

2. That of course, being an adherent of a popular republicanism that was losing its struggle with private ambition, he represented politics as a struggle for power and privilege by self-interested and unprincipled actors;11

3. That in light of the preceding two points, any facts cited by Machiavelli in support of his views are bound to be selectively chosen and interpreted (here Burnham says that ‘the facts’ vindicated Machiavelli on the merits of the citizen army over the mercenary one, when as we have seen this was very far from being a conclusion dictated by the evidence);

4. And that consequently, any general laws derived from these facts are bound to be only partially true and turned to ideological ends (a point well illustrated by Burnham, who cites as an example Machiavelli’s principle that the terms of military officials should be kept short despite the inconvenience and risk of defeat, because this practice is “wise from the point of view of the preservation of the liberty of the Republic”).

As to the practical ends of the Machiavellian science, Burnham sums them up as follows (p.77):

In any case, whatever may be the desires of most men, it is most certainly against the interests of the powerful that the truth should be known about political behaviour. If the political truths stated or approximated by Machiavelli were widely known by men, the success of tyranny and all the other forms of oppressive political rule would become much less likely. A deeper freedom would be possible in society than Machiavelli himself believed attainable. If men generally understood as much of the mechanism of rule and privilege as Machiavelli understood, they would no longer be deceived into accepting that rule and privilege, and they would know what steps to take to overcome them.

In other words, the ‘hard-headed’ Burnham gets the exact same message from Machiavelli as did Rousseau, named elsewhere in his book (p.100) as a purveyor of myths about “the innate goodness of man, the will of the people, humanitarianism, and progress”.

But, one might be tempted to retort, so what?

Is there no truth to be had from Machiavelli just because he had his axes to grind (as everyone does, and as everyone honest admits)? And is not the collective wisdom of Florence, a popular republic that fell to tyranny, a worthy foundation for a teaching that serves to heighten our awareness against the machinations of the powerful?

I have no argument against this in general. Certainly hard men can make bad times, and those who have to live in such times and deal with such men could not find a better teacher than Machiavelli. But we have alluded to other teachers in the Western canon, some of whom spoke of other dangers that can also make bad times in other instances – such as a certain insatiable monster that might be said to rear its head wherever a vast mob of people is entrusted with political power. On dangers such as these, Machiavelli has little to teach us.

And this brings us to the real problem with The Machiavellians.

As you may have gathered from its title, most of this book is not about Machiavelli, but about the followers of his tradition – the ‘Machiavellians’, Defenders of Freedom. These are identified by Burnham as the elite theorists of the late 19th and early 20th century: Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels, Georges Sorel (with caveats) and Vilfredo Pareto. Burnham evidently counted himself among these Machiavellians, and wrote his book in order to introduce them to the postwar Anglophone world. And as we have seen, Curtis Yarvin held that book in very high regard, and did much to set both Burnham and the elite theorists into the foundations of the modern dissident right.

Herein lies the problem. The dissident right, by definition, dissents from the ‘current regime’, on the grounds that it is dysfunctional, deceptive and (increasingly) tyrannical. This regime is based on an ideology called liberal democracy, which Yarvin (following Hans-Herman Hoppe) is best known for having named as the cause and not the cure of its evils. And while the notion that this democracy is not ‘real’ democracy is still quite popular on the dissident right (as are other forms of cope), it is evident to any reasonable person that the regime is not a de facto monarchy or small oligarchy, ruled by the sort of hard men who might be suspected of living by the teachings of the Prince. Its dysfunction, tyranny and so on seem rather to arise from a hypertrophy or decadence of the sort of republican order advocated in the Discourses.

Thanks in large part to Yarvin, most dissident rightists have become comfortable with this observation, and some have built theories upon it. But when they want deeper guidance, and prearranged theories on which to build their own, it is typically elite theory to which they turn. And this means turning to Machiavellians – men who may not have identified as followers of Machiavelli,12 but who were characterized by the same ideological mixture: commitment to liberalism and democracy, concern with their susceptibility to tyranny and oligarchy, and an illusion of scientific objectivity generated by penetrating scepticism of every other ideal.

All of the thinkers discussed by Burnham (except maybe Sorel) fall into this category, as is proven by his extensive quotations from their writings. Mosca believed that rule by some form of oligarchy was inevitable, but that it could be deprived of much of its power by liberalism and legal restraint (e.g. ‘juridicial defence’); what he opposed was the abolition of such restraints in the name of the people. Michels thought that democracy was in the strict sense impossible, since all political parties, trades unions and other such populist organizations were hopelessly bound to the ‘iron rule of oligarchy’; but in Burnham’s words, for all that he “does not at all conclude that we should abandon the struggle for democracy” (p.167 – there’s that Machiavellian realism again!) – “or, more strictly, for a reduction to the minimum possible of those autocratic tendencies which will nevertheless always remain”. Pareto, according to Burnham (I haven’t read his huge tetralogy in full), advocated the maximum possible ‘circulation of elites’ by free competition – “after the analogy of the theoretical free market of classical economics, or the biological arena of the struggle for survival” (p.208) – writing large the old Roman principle of constantly replacing consuls so as to avoid concentration of power.

None of this constitutes the sort of ‘forbidden text’ tradition imagined by Neema Parvini (one of the most popular elite theorists in the dissident right). Its enemies, now long-defeated, were the 20th-century mass movements that threatened to establish new tyrannies on the basis of popular sovereignty – the anti-liberal interpretation of ‘democracy’ that the elite theorists exposed as an illusion. Its own substance has been absorbed into the modern democratist state – which is not to say that the result much resembles the liberal ideals of Mosca or Pareto, still less anything that might have been imagined by Machiavelli.

This point is best illustrated through Burnham’s final chapter (from p.223) on the dangers of his own time – much of which has an eerie ring to it, not because so much of it went unheeded, but because so much was apparently taken on board. He begins by restating his thesis on the ‘managerial revolution’, the ascendancy of the scholarly-administrative class over the capitalist one. He then makes a wrong prediction on the the details (understandably for 1943), namely that the army will become a major political player and infuse the new elite with the forceful, conservative ethic of Pareto’s ‘lions’. He further predicts (again, understandably) the rise of a new ‘Bonapartism’ – “the evolution of the form of government toward that wherein a small group of leaders, or a single leader, claims to represent and speak for the whole people” (p.238) – which would reduce or do away with elected parliaments and instead legitimize itself through mass plebiscites.

Finally he makes the remarkable statement that although popular rule in the strict sense is an illusion – a fundamental tenet of elite theory, repeated many times throughout the rest of this book – it can be transformed into a fact by state toleration of political opposition to elites, who are thereby forced to hold onto power by making concessions to the masses. “Through a curious and indirect route by way of freedom, we return to self-government, which we were unable to discover by any direct path” (p.247). Thus does elite theory return to democratism, and thus does Machiavellianism return to all that which it decried as irrational myth.

Had Burnham been right on all his predictions, we would be living under a communist or fascist state. Had he been wrong on all of them, we would be living in a bucolic liberal society (or, if you prefer, a Dickensian dystopia). As it stands, he was broadly correct on the managerial revolution, but wrong in his expectation that it would keep the forms it assumed in times of revolution and war.

Instead, it has carefully preserved the political forms of the old dead bourgeois liberalism. This results, on the one hand, in an appearance that does not match reality; but on the other hand, this alters the state at a fundamental level, since the managerial state avoids subjection to the Politburo and Supreme Leader that reliably appear wherever liberal forms are swept away. Protected against the mass of the people by the structure of the state, and against the nominal leaders by all sorts of legal and institutional protections, it begins to resemble a sort of modern Athenian demos under its ceremonial archons13 – albeit one that lacks fully developed institutions, owing to the shadowy nature of its rule, which might be further compared to the de facto rule of the Medicis in Florence before this was formalized de jure.

Thus, there are still elections and parliaments; mass plebiscites are few and far between; those ‘oligarchical’ politicians and parties critiqued by Michels have been much reduced in power and importance; and there is a huge, sacrosanct media and activist class representing tolerated opposition. So many ‘concessions to the masses’ have been made that major Western states are trillions in debt, with whole swathes of populations reduced to political ballast and economic dead weight, and foreign populations mass-imported both to pad the ballast and to lift the dead weight. As many have noted, this last in particular spells grimmer developments in the future, given that the native populations of the West are already scapegoated and demonized – something that also follows naturally from democratism in theory and practice.

No cabal of scheming elites would, or could, come up with a system of government like this. It is a product of the unelite, a ruling mob driven largely by irrational tribalism and institutional structures, as well as the need to maintain its client base. Yet it very much suits this unelite to focus both its own and its subjects’ attention on elites – the tyrants elected by the people, the oligarchs commanding the corporations, and anyone else who may one day attain the requisite power to try to reform the regime or replace it altogether. The fact that Donald Trump, after ten years in and out of the White House ranting against the ‘deep state’, has found it easier to start a war with Iran14 than to reduce the bureaucracy or enforce immigration law against its will should suffice to illustrate how threatening this elitism really is.

The sort of oppositionism represented by populists and conspiracy-theorists (who might be termed ‘low’ or ‘vulgar’ Machiavellians), as well as somnambulant liberal conservatives, 1967-vintage leftist power analysts, and other ‘real-democracy-has-never-been-tried’ types, feeds into the project of scapegoating the last vestiges of monarchy and aristocracy for the failings of the actual power structure. And the promise of dissident right elite theory, as well as that of dissident right everything, is that it can offer something better. Simply by virtue of its lack of attachments to the regime, it may be closer than anything else to keeping that promise.

But as we have said, it is everywhere guided by the spirit and tradition of Machiavelli. And so, as it were in spite of itself, it ends up affirming three core teachings of liberal-democratist ideology:

1. Beware the oligarchs.

At the beginning of the second chapter of The Ruling Class (p.50-53), Mosca lays out the basic principles that Michels encapsulated in the phrase ‘iron law of oligarchy’. Having quoted him at length elsewhere, I will paraphrase more briefly here. He argues that all government is in reality that of an organized minority, an oligarchy (‘rule of the few’), the position of which is always stronger than that of the leaders above it and the masses below it. The leader is weaker than the oligarchy because he must depend upon it and cannot do away with it (unless he replace it with an entirely new oligarchy); the masses are weaker because they are less organized than the oligarchy, standing before it as a disordered thousand before a concerted hundred, which can always apply its full force against isolated individuals of the larger group.

The sense of bleeding-obviousness in this reasoning lends it such force that the reader is often tempted to swallow it whole, without stopping to notice certain caveats. For one thing, Mosca partly contradicts his own logic when he says (on p.52) that “what Aristotle called a democracy [i.e. Athenian demokratia] was simply an aristocracy of fairly broad membership”. Since the Athenian demos was limited, and its ‘active’ element (adult males) still more limited, this is true; but since this limited demos was still vast, and yet able to avoid domination by smaller oligarchies within it, Mosca has effectively admitted that a ‘hundred’ do not always and everywhere triumph over a ‘thousand’. This does not contradict his basic logic, which still holds true in the sense that the ‘thousand’ in Athens ruled the larger and less organized ‘ten thousand’ represented by their slaves, resident foreigners and colonial subjects.

The question, then, is whether the institutions of the state are large, numerous and sophisticated enough to admit the ‘thousand’ and allow it to organize against the ‘hundred’. And here we must remember that the state of which Mosca was thinking, back in Italy at the turn of the 20th century, was much more limited than those that sprawl across the modern West. Perhaps the maxim ‘all government is oligarchy’ ought to be updated to ‘all modern government is an oligarchy of broad membership’.

This problem is not one of principle but of of emphasis. Imagine a burgher republic ruled by a democracy (i.e. broad oligarchy) of small traders, shopkeepers and artisans, who tolerate the wealth of great merchants but never allow them to grow too powerful in politics. Now imagine a school of political theory within this state that portrays its rulers as super-rich, gold-bedizened moneybags, simply because this is its stereotype of the ‘capitalists’ or ‘bourgeoisie’ to which every member of the ruling class technically belongs. In the same way, dissident rightists often seem to confuse the concept of a ‘managerial elite’ with that of a broader ‘managerial class’ (or even better, ‘clerical class’, including those who direct the state as well as those who administer it).

The conviction that all states must be ruled by small oligarchies, the ‘hundreds’ as opposed to the ‘thousands’, results in an endless futile quest to discover the ‘true oligarchy’ that must lurk behind the appearance of managed chaos in the Western permanent government. Yarvin perhaps came closest to finding this Unholy Grail when he identified it as the academy-media complex, a.k.a. the ‘Cathedral’, which he called a ‘clerical oligarchy’. But leaving aside the fact that the Cathedral itself is decentralized (something that Yarvin admitted, because he was more inconsistent on elite theory than many of his followers15), its immense power to direct the state is an effect of the scattered nature of the ruling mob and its need for constant ideological coordination. What it possesses is the authority of a sophist and demagogue, not the formalized position of a theocracy.

This in turn can lead to problems in the realm of practice. Those inclined to win elites over with persuasion (perhaps by hanging out with arthoes in expensive New York neighbourhoods and waiting for a ‘cultural movement’ to emerge) may come to think that this alone will suffice to change the ways of the regime, as it undoubtedly would were the regime more oligarchical than it is. Those inclined to a more aggressive policy may be tempted to see a regime-changing potential in the periodic outrages against elites fomented by the media (case in point, the Epstein scandal16), whereas these in fact serve to reinforce the democratist power structure in much the same way as the ostracisms of ancient Athens.

2. Beware the tyrant.

It may seem unfair of me to attribute this teaching to dissident elite theorists, since they have no conscious intention of making it. Yarvin’s main point has always been that personal tyranny would be preferable to collective tyranny, and this has been to some extent absorbed by everyone who has watched Trump failing to do the will of his voters due to the #resistance of the ruling mob.

The problem in this case is one of omission. In light of what we have said on Machiavelli, it is reasonable to suppose that any unsuspecting Renaissance prince or pope who picked up his book and decided to live by it would probably have done more ill than good to his position. His new ability to lie and cheat his way past unsuspecting dupes who still believe in personal honour and virtue would no doubt bring him some short-term benefits; but in the long term, no power structure can survive without what Mosca called a ‘political formula’, a principle of moral authority in which the rulers must themselves believe. Once everyone else in the state got around to thinking like a Machiavellian, the republican revolution would be only a matter of time.

There is something of this self-defeating Machiavellianism in Yarvin’s neo-monarchist theories. In the early days of UR, they were part of a broader vision, called ‘neocameralism’ – not a true monarchy or tyranny, but an alternative republicanism modelled on the joint-stock corporation, in which a board of absentee shareholders would run the state for profit and delegate enough power to a ‘CEO-dictator’ to keep the bureaucracy or subject masses from usurping power. This was subjected to savage criticism by Yarvin’s libertarian commenters: why wouldn’t the dictator just usurp power? why wouldn’t the shareholders just turn themselves into privileged nobles? why wouldn’t both just decide to evict their subjects and build expensive golf courses over their homes? To his discredit, Yarvin responded not by dropping, revising or defending neocameralism, but by downplaying its structural element17 – and playing up the one element of his theory that did not depend on them, namely the preference for one tyrant over many.

One problem with this is that it still doesn’t work. As per Mosca, the position of any individual ruler is secondary to that of the entire ruling class on which he depends, and the sort of Orwellian surveillance state envisaged by Yarvin could only be run by the class that Burnham called ‘managers’. Just as Roman emperors were theoretically absolute but in reality beholden to the soldiery, Yarvin’s CEO-dictators would end up beholden to the managers, who would have a thousand ways to distort their perceptions and selectively negate their actions.18 And then we would be right back at clerical rule (since a manager is just a corporate bureaucrat), perhaps minus the special-rights clientage system, but also minus many other previously-acquired rights that democratism has never quite dared to sweep away.

But the deeper problem is the lack of any element in this theory that transcends the concerns of Machiavelli’s Prince (or Hobbes’s Leviathan, a work transparently influenced by Machiavelli), that is to say secure possession of power by any means necessary. The old legitimist kingdoms that developed into absolute monarchies had the backing of the Christian religious establishment; they had a sacral element inherited from pre-Christian tradition; they had aristocratic ideals of honour and virtue; and they had the analogy between the property rights of the sovereign prince and those of everyone else of humbler station. Yarvin has none of that (except maybe the last), nor does he have any other ideal with which to replace the liberal-democratist one; despite his knowing full well the importance of Mosca’s political formulas, he thought that he could do without one, most likely because he thought that Mosca did without one.19 And as a result, every word that comes out of him acts as a terrifying admonition against tyranny, despite his insistence that it would be preferable to what we have now. Old Machiavel laughs down the length of the ages.

By no means am I complaining that Yarvin has failed to dress up his theory in superficial idealistic tart-glazing (the worst possible step for a Machiavellian to take, because it destroys even his virtue of honesty). Much as democratist ideals have genuinely altered the managerial state, the introduction of deeper ideals into Yarvin’s neo-monarchism would alter it at all the way down.

Dig deep in the bleak desert of his theory and you will find three ideals: right of property, considered to apply to power as well as to wealth; rule of persons, considered superior to the rule of collective bodies and legal-institutional machinery; and freedom, which is supposed to result from secure possession of power. The problem with the state he envisages is that these ideals do not permeate it; instead, they teeter at its tip, upon what is in every other respect the same modern society of human livestock milling and feeding under bureaucratic governance. Were we to apply the ideals throughout the rest of society, we would end up with what Jack Vien calls ‘personalism’ – a breaking of the ‘source code’ of liberalism, in which the power initially monopolized by the liberal state and then distributed across the administrative class and delegated to its political clients is instead parcelled out as a form of property to those who can acquire it.

Without going deep into this idea, note that in the scenario of a ‘restoration’ it would act less as a convenient myth than as an essential practical change: that is to say, without some sort of changed distribution of power relations throughout society, the clerical class would retain total power in a latent form and could simply re-usurp it as soon as the sole sovereign happened to drop the ball. Of course there are a million problems with it – first and foremost the fact that modern man has become so accustomed to a livestock existence – but there are and always have been a million and one problems with liberal democratism, and yet this has never stopped those who believe in it from striving to overcome them. And that brings us to the next point.

3. Democracy is a myth.

Having taken the stupefying medicine of amoralism (which, as we have said, Machiavelli only pretended to take or at least did not drain to the dregs), dissident right elite theorists think they are doing damage to democratism when they describe it as a myth, a delusion, an impossible ideal. Did they think that Michels was joking when he wrote that the struggle for democracy would go on in spite of the ‘iron law of oligarchy’? Or that Burnham was, when he found his way back to the ideal of popular self-government by his curiously indirect route?

Let us put it this way: to attempt to annihilate an ideal by driving it back into unmanifested possibility is like trying to kill a fish by throwing it back into water. And an ideal that can survive the blackest waters of pessimism, free from the vulgar material aspirations of optimists, is truly an ideal to be feared. What endangers it is not drowning, but beaching.

What I am saying here is that dissidents would be well advised to stop trying to expose the myth of democracy, give up the quest to find the ‘true oligarchy’, and admit that the current regime is implementing the democratic ideal to the fullest extent that political reality allows. It consists of two parts: first, collective rule by the largest possible political class (demokratia in the Athenian sense), and second, the binding of the largest possible majority of passive subjects to that ruling minority by the exercise of political clientage (democratism in the modern sense).

This obviously looks tawdry or dystopian next to the shimmering fantasy of ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’. But those who dismiss it as something less than ‘real democracy’ invariably prefer what is either contrary to reality, or contrary to the ideal, or both:

• that the distinction between the active ruling class and passive subject population be abolished by the endless electronic voting of ‘direct democracy’ (which would violate the basic laws laid out by Mosca);

• that the liberal parliamentary system be abolished and the economic structure absorbed by the political one in a communist revolution (which reliably leads to tyranny and economic stagnation, hence also to clientage stagnation);

• that special-rights laws for minority groups be abolished as anti-majoritarian (forgetting that the coalition of groups entitled to special rights, which includes all women, is the true majority, and that those entitled to no special rights are a minority that anyone would expect to find repressed and discriminated against in a majoritarian state);

• that anti-white racism in general be prohibited on the same grounds (forgetting here that the US has an informal global empire and alliance system in which whites are a racial minority, and obviously an ideal political scapegoat);

• that the state extend tolerated opposition into complete free speech (something that no regime has ever done with regards to its sacred political formulas20);

• that the power of the administrative class be broken (following which the only practically possible collective rule would be in small city-states and nobilities, as it was before the establishment and expansion of the modern state);

• and, last but not least, that the disempowerment of elected officials should be reversed on the grounds that it is anti-democratic (perhaps the strongest of these arguments; but as the work of Michels tells us, these politicians were essentially elective monarchs and oligarchs, whose new role as ceremonial archons is far more in keeping with the customs of ancient Athens).

Note that I am not saying any of this is good or just, simply because it conforms to the democratist ideal. (Nor am I saying that everything in line with that ideal is necessarily evil and unjust – although the ultimate persistence in democratism of the political vices it most reviles should be all too clear at this point.) My point is that the democratist ideal deserves to be taken seriously; that it is not, in Parvini’s words, a case of ‘BS, BS, BS, BS, therefore I rule’; and that viewing it in such terms not only allows it to avoid all responsibility for what it has wrought, but also blinds us to our desperate need to formulate a better ideal.21

And if it be objected that the ideal we have in mind is quixotic, perhaps impossible to achieve in modern times, and certainly incapable of turning out in the future exactly as it did in the past, we need only quote these words in response:

Although the envious nature of men has always made it no less dangerous to find new modes and orders than to seek unknown waters and lands, because men are more ready to blame than to praise the actions of others, nonetheless, driven by that natural desire that has always been in me to work, without any respect, for those things I believe will bring common benefit to everyone, I have decided to take a path as yet untrodden by anyone, and if it brings me trouble and difficulty, it could also bring me reward through those who consider humanely the end of these labors of mine. If poor talent, little experience of present things, and weak knowledge of ancient things make this attempt of mine defective and not of much utility, it will at least show the path to someone who with more virtue, more discourse and judgement, will be able to fulfill this intention of mine, which, if it will not bring me praise, ought not to incur blame.

This of course is none other than Machiavelli in the opening paragraph22 of the Discourses, his extended meditation on the long-dead political forms of the Roman Republic. Was Machiavelli, then, a quixote? I would not hesitate to call him just that – provided that we understand a quixote to be someone who sets out to recreate the past, and ends up either falling into delusion or breaking new ground. It should go without saying that Machiavelli, like Confucius, was of the second sort – for by the whim of Fortune or the wisdom of Providence, which may have wished humanity to look upon its own vanity, it was granted those who followed him to erect his ‘new modes and orders’ and to carry them across the whole world.

But Fortune was not kind to Machiavelli himself, and one consequence of this was that he had to instruct Lorenzo; and for that purpose, as we have said, he had to masquerade as an amoral realist, something that he was not and that was far inferior to what he actually was. And, again as we have said, it is this aspect of Machiavelli and his tradition that the dissident right has taken for its teacher – and, in some cases, further debased into an outright parody of its original. This we might call, with a nod to another less-than-consistent amoralist, Machiavelli’s ape.

Whereas Machiavelli was wise, his ape is only clever. Whereas Machiavelli was a republican and proto-democratist, his ape is a pseudo-aristocrat and tyrant-apologist. Whereas Machiavelli found new modes and orders, or at least pointed the way to them, his ape aspires only to screech and scramble in their ruins. And though we might discourse further on this imposter, and the sort of life philosophy taught at his paws, I think the picture above really says it all.

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So up stands Nestor of Pylos, the wise and eloquent elder of the Achaeans (i.e. Greeks), with an attempt at mediation that will eventually prove unsuccessful. In the course of his speech, he harks back to another famous war in which he participated during the course of his long life, and that stands much closer to myth than does the history of the Trojan War. This is the Centauromachy, or ‘Centaur fight’.

The legend is as follows. King Pirithous of the Lapiths, who lived in Thessaly, invited the Centaurs to his wedding. After one of them got drunk on wine and attempted to carry off the bride, a battle ensued in which the great Athenian hero Theseus came to the Lapiths’ aid. The Centaurs lost, and the Lapiths expelled them from Thessaly.

Nestor presents Theseus and the Lapiths as vastly stronger than the Trojan war heroes, and drops a few of their names so as to make the point that even such godlike warriors yielded to his advice. Some of them are quite obscure (Exadius), and one (Polyphemus) is liable to be confused by the unsuspecting reader for the Cyclops in the Odyssey. Since Homer gallops through the name-list on the assumption that his audience would have known the story, I have taken the liberty of interpolating some words and phrases into the passage so as to slow it down and add more context (see the translation notes for the details).

Perhaps the most interesting Lapith hero is Caeneus, whose tale is told as follows by H.J. Rose in A Handbook of Greek Mythology (pp.256-7):

The other outstanding Lapith [that is to say, other than Pirithous] was Kaineus, originally a girl, Kainis. But, being raped by Poseidon and told she might have what she liked as a reward, Kainis asked to be turned into a man, that no such thing might again befall her, and in addition, to be made invulnerable. Being thus transformed, Kaineus was noted, in some stories, for his impiety, for he would worship nothing but his own spear, probably a trace of some local aniconic cult. He also had some quarrel with Apollo. … Kaineus met his end in the battle [of the Lapiths and the Centaurs]; being invulnerable, he was driven into the earth by the Centaurs’ blows.

The scene of Caeneus’s ‘death’ was a favourite art motif, and can be easily recognized from his partial submersion in the earth.

See the first installment of this series for details on the meter used here. Note with regards to the passage on the Lapiths that the ‘alliteration’ of stressed syllables, or chime, that defines it is liable to be distorted unless names are pronounced in the received way (which is not the same as the Greek way). Pirithous is stressed on the second syllable (chiming on r), as is Caeneus (chiming on n); Aegeus, the name of Theseus’s father, is stressed on the first syllable (chiming with vowels) and rhymes with egregious. The word Centaur is usually pronounced with an s sound in English, but this is completely wrong, and it ought rather to be pronounced with a k sound.

The action begins just after Achilles has insulted Agamemnon and made a solemn oath to fight no more.

Then hard to the earth    he hurled his scepter,
Studded with gold nails,    and sat back down;
And yet Atrides seethed there    on the side opposing;
So arose another:    Nestor of Pylos,
Sweet-tongued orator;    sheerest eloquence
Dripped from him dulcetly    like delicate honey;
In his long lifetime    there had lived and perished
Two generations    that were reared and born with him
In godly Pylos;    now he governed the third.
In their midst he stood,    and spake goodwill:

"O what shame and disaster    has struck Achaea,
"And how Priam and his sons    would be pleased to hear it!
"All the other Trojans    would at heart rejoice
"If they could hear the two of you    in heated quarrel,
"Who in battle and counsel    are the best of Greeks!
"But yield to persuasion:    ye are younger, both of ye,
"Than I, who in old days    oft consorted
"With yet nobler men –    and was ne'er disdained by them.

"I've seen none like them,    nor will see the like again
"Of King Pirithous,    who ruled the Lapiths;
"Or that herdsman of the people,    the hero Dryas;
"Caeneus and Exadius,    noble warriors;
"Polyphemus the Lapith,    who was like an immortal;
"Or Theseus son of Aegeus,    who was equal to gods.
"They were the mightiest bred    among mortal earthborns:
"The mightiest indeed,    and with the mightiest fought –
"With the mountain Centaurs,    and crushed them utterly!

"With such I consorted,    coming straight from Pylos,
"When they called me forth    from my far-off land;
"And I fought my part –    although to fight with them
"Would overmatch the might    of any man alive.
"And they observed my counsels –    to my speech they yielded –
"So yield ye also,    since to yield is best.
"Agamemnon –    mighty as you are –
"Do not seize the girl    that the Greeks awarded him;
"And thee, Pelides –    do not think to set
"Your face against his –    for no higher glory
"Has been granted by Zeus    to a sceptred king.
"Though your strength be great –    though you be goddess-born –
"Nathless he stands the lordlier    in lands and men.
"Son of Atreus!    Cease your anger,
"And leave it to me,    by polite entreaties,
"To calm the choler    of Achilles here,
"Who is the bulwark of our side    in this bitter war."

The kingly one answered him,    Agamemnon:
"Indeed, elder,    on all these things
"You have fitly spoken;    but this fellow here
"Will not sate his desire    'til he stands o'er all:
"Over all lording,    over all commanding,
"And all deeds dictating;    but I doubt that one
"Will abide his lordship    or obey his words.
"The immortal gods    have made him a spearman,
"But they gave him no licence    for disgraceful insults –"

He cut in and answered,    deific Achilles:
"I'd be called a coward,    and a cheap nonentity,
"If everywhere, in everything,    unresistingly
"I bow to your bidding.    Let your beck and call
"Be laid upon others –    I'll no longer yield.
"But now hark, and hold this    in your heart and mind:
"I'll not strive for the girl –    I'll not set my hands
"On thee, or any other    who intends to come
"And remove once more    what to me you gave –
"But of what sundries are mine    beside my swift black boats,
"I'll not suffer one    to be seized unwilling:
"Should you come and try me,    let this crowd observe
"Your black blood billow    round the blade of my spear!"

Thus fails Nestor’s attempt at mediation – setting the stage for Agamemnon’s requisition of Briseis, of whom we shall have more to say in the next installment. In the meantime, if you’re at all interested in the question of whether Homer’s epics were orally-composed or not, don’t skip the translation notes below.

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Notes

Two generations that were reared and born with him…

This order of words might seem confusing, but it is straight from the original and ought not to be reversed. The meaning is that Nestor’s own generation of men were reared around him, then another generation was born, then both generations died off during his lifetime – leaving him to govern the third generation as king. One would assume Nestor’s age to be at least sixty, and probably a lot older given the reverence in which his age is held (see here for a discussion of this question).

Pirithous…Dryas…Caeneus and Exadius…Polyphemus…Theseus son of Aegeus…

As mentioned above, I have interpolated some words and phrases into this passage in order to help the modern reader along. The ethnonym ‘Lapith’ is not found in the original; nor is Pirithous specified as ‘King’; nor are Caeneus and Exadius described as ‘noble warriors’. Polyphemus is given the epithet ‘equal to a god’ (ἀντίθεον antitheon), and Theseus described as ‘like to the immortals’ (ἐπιείκελον ἀθανάτοισιν epieikelon athanatoisin), but I have reversed these in translation because it seemed that the greater compliment was being paid to Theseus. Dryas is not called a ‘hero’, but he is given the epithet ‘herdsman of the people’ (ποιμένα λαῶν poimena laoon), which is precisely equivalent to the Old English folces hyrde used of kings.

I doubt that one will abide his lordship or obey his words

The line in the original text is very interesting, and I would like to see it analysed by someone with more (i.e. any) expertise in Ancient Greek. Here it is in full, with a crude transliteration and literal translation:

πᾶσι δὲ σημαίνειν, ἅ τιν᾽ οὐ πείσεσθαι ὀΐω (pasi de seemainein, ha tin’ ou peisesthai oioo) - And give orders to all, which I think that no-one will obey

It contains two ambiguities, which seem more likely to be intentional than coincidental:

1. The pronoun τιν᾽(tin’), i.e. τις, which could mean ‘anyone’ or ‘someone’ – thus Agamemnon’s meaning could be “I think that no-one will obey Achilles” or “I think that one [i.e. I myself] will not obey him”, and translations differ on this;

2. The word πείσεσθαι (peisesthai), which according to Wiktionary could be the future middle1 infinitive of πείθω (peithoo) ‘to obey or yield to persuasion’ or of πάσχω (paskhoo) ‘to suffer something at someone’s hands’ – thus the reference could be either to obeying Achilles’ dictates or to suffering his dictation.

What should really interest us here is the fact that these ambiguous words are found close together, indeed in the same line. In the course of my self-studying and translating Beowulf (on which I have a much better grasp of the language and scholarship), I have found not only that double meanings exist in the text but also that they tend to be clustered together in certain passages. The most obvious reason for this clustering would be that the poet slowed down his writing pace in order to write these passages, and moved at a faster pace through the larger narrative sections of the poem in which there is little or no ambiguity to be found.

Although the existence of intended ambiguity in Beowulf is controversial (and, truth be told, most of the leading scholars don’t seem to like it at all), the basic idea of that poem’s having been composed pen in hand by an author who could speed up and slow down his writing pace is not. And this is because the contrary idea – that Beowulf was orally-composed, in the preliterate style, while a scribe took it down – has been quite decisively refuted and no longer commands much allegiance. But in the case of Homer, the oral-composition theory stands on stronger ground: there are no literary references in the text to contradict it, the style of the poem is more obviously influenced by oral-compositional techniques (e.g. it has developed type-scenes, whereas Beowulf does not), and there is of course the formidable work of Milman Parry purporting to show that Homer’s choice of epic formulas was determined by the need to construct hexameters in the heat of performance.

By no means has Parry’s thesis gone without question. David Shive attempted to refute in his book Naming Achilles, by offering proofs that Homer’s formulas are not purely determined by meter but also by conscious choice. But as Gregory Nagy observed in his review of the book, Shive does no more than prove that Homer’s formulaic technique was less mechanical than Parry had to make it out to be in order to construct a theory of its mechanics. Since Parry’s disciple Albert Lord, working with his teacher among illiterate oral poets in Yugoslavia, claimed to have found at least one poet skilled enough to break his formulaic technique at will2, this clearly does not constitute sufficient refutation.

But what if it could be proven that the Homeric texts contain instances of intentional ambiguity, and that these are found clustered together, implying a slowing-down of compositional pace? Now I am not saying that this one instance would constitute sufficient evidence, nor that I am qualified (in any sense of the term) to interpret it correctly. But if a scholarly rereading of the corpus were to be carried out, and if it were both to confirm this instance of intended ambiguity and to find others like it, then surely the implication would be that the Iliad and Odyssey were not composed at the fast pace of oral performance. We would have to assume literary composition, or a very slow and leisurely oral dictation, or fixation of the poems in memory prior to their transcription (a possibility backed up by the analogy of the Rig Veda). Needless to say, none of this would tarnish Parry’s discovery that the style and diction of these poems are everywhere indebted to the recompositional techniques of oral poetry.3

Having said that, however, the older lays-theory scholars like Karl Müllenhoff were anything but stupid, and the idea of looking for interpolations in the more overtly religious parts of the poem is not fundamentally wrong. If they exist, this is precisely where we would expect to find them.

Although Beowulf may not be the pure pagan lay that modern antiquarians wanted it to be, nor is it everything that Christians of its own time1 might have wanted it to be. Its unconverted fourth-century Danish king, Hrothgar, goes about hailing the One True God like an Old Testament patriarch; and its hero, who does the same, apparently makes it into heaven (or at least soðfæstra dom, the ‘doom of the true’ or ‘judgement of the just’) without having so much as heard the name of Christ. In all likelihood each homily and digression in the poem is the work of its original poet, who seems to have been devout enough in terms of belief; but it stands to reason that later copyists would have felt the need to omit a questionable line here, or add a more ‘orthodox’ one there, lest some overzealous abbot be moved to chuck the whole thing on the fire long before its infamous stay at Ashburnham House.

In my few years of self-studying this poem (no, I don’t have any academic qualifications in it), I have found only two places in which the aftertraces of such chopping and changing may or may not be present. They occur within a short space of each other in a controversial part of the second chapter, in which the monotheistic Danes begin to backslide into idol-worship under the persecutions of the cannibal troll Grendel. The specific lines in the original text are 175-183a; the accompanying translation (which becomes more literal in the relevant parts) is my own.

Hwilum hie geheton æt hærgtrafum

(Sometimes they made sacrifice at sheltered fanes)

wigweorþunga, wordum bædon

(of idol-worship, uttering prayers)

þæt him gastbona geoce gefremman

(that a slayer-of-spirits might succour do them)

wið þeodþreaum. Swylc wæs þeaw hyra,

(‘gainst the plights of their people. Their practice was thus,)

hæþenra hyht; helle gemundon

(their heathen hope; hell they cherished)

in modsefan; Metod hie ne cuþon,

(in their minds and hearts; the Measurer knew not,)

dæda demend, ne wiston hie drihten God;

(the Deemer of deeds; had no idea of Lord God,)

Ne hie huru heofena helm herian ne cuþon,

(Haven of the Heavens; knew not how to praise him,)

wuldres waldend.

(the Wielder-of-Glory.)

(From line 183b onward there follows a little homily about the dangers of thrusting one’s soul into the fire in order to achieve an earthly change of fortune; in my view this has nothing suspicious or otherwise untoward about it, hence it is omitted here.)

What first drew my attention to these lines is the fact that J.R.R. Tolkien – who famously defended the artistic unity of Beowulf in opposition to the lays theory – was prepared to raise doubts as to their authenticity. His reasoning, laid out in the scholarly notes to his posthumously-published translation, was that they constitute a “flat contradiction of one of the leading ideas of the poem”:

The ‘leading idea’ is that noble pagans of the past who had not heard the Gospel, knew of the existence of Almighty God, recognized him as ‘good’ and the giver of all good things; but were (by the Fall) still cut off from Him, so that in time of woe they became filled with despair and doubt – that was the hour when they were specially open to the snares of the Devil: they prayed to idols and false gods for help.

And the contradiction:

This resides in the words ‘nor had they heard of the Lord God’ [ne wiston hie drihten God; in my version, ‘they had no idea of Lord God’]. This is quite unlike the minor discrepancies to be observed in Beowulf (and in many other major works of literary art). What is the explanation? Can the theology of the Danes...have differed from that of their wise king? Is that what the poet means? … But a little consideration will show that this is no way out. The lines do not merely say that the witan [Danish counsellors] were obstinate heathens, who had recourse to idols in time of stress and temptation – that would be no discrepancy: they declare that they were wholly ignorant of God and his existence. But it would be quite impossible for any wita to associate with King Hrothgar for a day and remain in such a state.

As Tolkien notes, however, there is a distinction to be drawn between this phrase and the much less serious connotations of the one above it, Metod hie ne cuþon (‘they knew not the Measurer’, i.e. God):

Cunnan and witan are properly distinct like Latin cognosco and scio… cunnan is properly ‘know (all) about, understand (the nature of)’, in the sense that you know persons and places; witan ‘know facts’. So that strictly Metod híe ne cúþon (*180…) might mean no more than ‘they had little or no knowledge about Metod (the power that orders and governs the world, God or Providence)’. But ne wiston híe Drihten God (*181…) can only mean ‘they did not know of the existence of God at all, did not know of His being even.’

It would seem, then, that although Tolkien insisted on regarding the whole passage as an interpolation, the contradiction that led him to do so is wholly located in line 181b ne wiston hie drihten God – the meaning of which is reinforced by line 182, which adds that the Danes ‘knew not [how] to praise [or honour]’ God (ne hie huru heofena helm herian ne cuþon). This latter may or may not be taken as contradicting the leading idea of the poem, depending on whether herian ‘to praise’ is taken to mean formal worship, or the sort of praise that King Hrothgar and other Danes constantly offer up to God.

Might these two lines, then (181 and 182), be regarded as possible interpolations by some later copyist who had more narrow religious ideas than the original poet? Let us look at them again, more closely:

dæda demend / ne wiston hie drihten God

(the Deemer of deeds; had no idea of Lord God,)

Ne hie huru heofena helm / herian ne cuþon

(Haven of the Heavens; knew not how to praise him,)

No scholar to my knowledge has raised objections to these lines on metrical grounds, since a lot of leeway is permitted for the insertion of unstressed syllables at the beginning of a half-line. But from a purely aesthetic point of view, they have an obvious ‘gabbling’ quality created by these unstressed syllables, as if the ideas represented in them had to be squeezed into a tight space and not unfolded at the poet’s normal leisure. Another interesting thing about them is that they can be excised from the text without damaging the sense of the passage at all (and arguably, while improving it, by turning the focus from the supposed natural ignorance of the Danes to their conscious decision to ignore God).

Here’s how this part of the passage looks without them:

Swylc wæs þeaw hyra,

(…Their practice was thus,)

hæþenra hyht; helle gemundon

(their heathen hope; hell they cherished)

in modsefan; Metod hie ne cuþon,

(in their minds and hearts; the Measurer knew not,)

wuldres waldend.

(the Wielder-of-Glory.)

Emended thus, the passage would (we might guess) be accepted by Tolkien as wholly in keeping with the religious ideas of the poem. Metod hie ne cuþon (‘the Measurer they knew not’) in this context clearly refers to the dark and ignorant spiritual state of the Danish idolaters at the time of their wilful decision to ignore God; it is no more a general statement on the condition of all pre-conversion Germanic people than is helle gemundon in modsefan (‘hell they cherished in their minds and hearts’).

Now let us move to the main argument of this post. Common sense ought to tell us that any other interpolations from this same source are likely to be found in the same part of the poem, on other delicate religious points, just as the handprints of a thief are more likely to be found in the room from which he has stolen something and which contains the objects of his desire than in a separate wing of the house. Might there, then, be any more imperfectly-concealed ‘monkey business’ in this passage? Let us take a second look at the preceding lines:

Hwilum hie geheton æt hærgtrafum

(Sometimes they made sacrifice at sheltered fanes)

wigweorþunga, wordum bædon

(of idol-worship, uttering prayers)

þæt him gastbona geoce gefremman

(that a slayer-of-spirits might succour do them)

wið þeodþreaum. Swylc wæs þeaw hyra,

(‘gainst the plights of their people. Their practice was thus…)

This word gastbona, ‘ghost-bane’ or ‘slayer of spirits’, is a typically double-edged Beowulvian expression (like modþryð or byrgan þenceð). By turning to heathenism in the hope of slaying Grendel, an evil ‘spirit’ (gæst), the Danes are condemning their own spirits or souls (also gæstas) to eternal death. Here we must vouch another piece of common psychological sense: that when we find one such ambiguous word in a text like Beowulf, we are more likely to find others nigh to it than far away, just as we are more likely to find a second item of buried treasure in the same place that contained a first than by combing a much wider area outside it; and that the reason for this is that the poet must have slowed down his writing process in order to choose his words carefully, just as a man who buries treasure walks a long way before stopping and digging in one spot. This would be reason enough for us to examine this passage more carefully even if there were no question of secondary alterations.2

The referent of gastbona is clearly some unnamed pagan god, and the most obvious candidate would be Thunor – that is to say, Thor, whose name in Old English was equivalent to the word thunder. As the Norse tales tell us, it was Thor who went around slaying giants (jotunns or jǫtnar, known in English as ettens or eotenas, the species to which Grendel belongs) and other evil spirits on behalf of humanity, and one would imagine that the tendency of new Christians to crawl back to him in a crisis was notoriously hard to stamp out.

Thus it seems a little suspicious that once the gastbona is mentioned in line 177, the very next line that follows happens to chime on the letter-sound þ or th – as if the poet were consciously or unconsciously evoking the name of Thunor. And when we look at the first verse in that line – wið þeodþreaum, ‘against the plights of the people’ – our suspicions are whetted further. Just as the two lines we have just discussed looked a little ‘stuffed in’, this one looks a little ‘strung out’.

Although the compound þeodþrea ‘people-plight’ is apparently unique to Beowulf, a look at the corpus examples for the simplex þrea ‘threat, plight, affliction’ in the Bosworth-Toller dictionary shows that it is usually spelt þream in this grammatical form (plural in dative case, denoting indirect object), although it is also found as þreaum. The difference is that the more common spelling þream implies pronunciation as one syllable, and the less common þrea-um as two. Whatever the spelling, however, one imagines that it would have been most natural to run the word and its inflectional ending into a single syllable in speech.

The reason why this matters at all is that almost all half-lines in Beowulf and other ‘classical’ Old English poems obey the rule of Five Types, often named for their nineteenth-century discoverer Eduard Sievers. This is a taxonomy purporting to show (though not at all to explain) the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables that were favoured and avoided by Anglo-Saxon poets. The basic forms of these types are best memorized in modern English by means of a mnemonic such as the following:3

TYPE A: Ambling adders (DUM-duh-DUM-duh)
TYPE B: With bumbling birds (duh-DUM-duh-DUM)
TYPE C: Became clustered (duh-DUM-DUM-duh)
TYPE D1: Dire death-struggle (DUM-DUM-Dah-duh)
TYPE D2: Droves death-destroyed (DUM-DUM-duh-Dah)
TYPE E: Earth-staining end (DUM-Dah-duh-DUM)

There are many more sub-rules for legitimate and proscribed type-variants, as well as plenty of academic debates over how best to categorize them, and it must be said that my own understanding of the rules is far from perfect. But what becomes clear even from a cursory look at the types is that each one has at least four metrical ‘beats’ representing stressed, semi-stressed and unstressed syllables (expressed here as DUMS, Dahs and duhs). The verse wið þeod-þreaum can be read as a legitimate Type C line (duh-DUM-DUM-duh), but the alternative *wið þeod-þream would end up too short (duh-DUM-DUM), with only three syllables.

This is by no means a watertight case for tampering, since there are other verses in Beowulf that come up short and have to be read with more syllables according to more archaic rules.4 But given the present context, one has to wonder if the original line was not something like *þunor wið þeodþream – ‘thunder ‘gainst tribe-plights’. According to the inventory of Sievers types laid out in Geoffrey Russom’s Syntax of Beowulf (pp.33-7), this would be a variant A-type called A6 (DUM-duh-duh-DUM-Dah), equivalent to other such examples in Beowulf like þolode ðryðswyð (‘suffered the stout-heart’, line 132a) or beorhtode bencsweg (‘rang out the bench-noise’, line 1161a).

Here’s that reconstructed line in context:

þæt him gastbona geoce gefremman

(that a slayer-of-spirits might succour do them:)

þunor wið þeodþream. Swylc wæs þeaw hyra,

(thunder ‘gainst tribe-plights. Thus was their practice…)

Had the Beowulf-poet written such a line, it would have been very much in keeping with the wry and punning style that produced gastbona in the line above it.5 Since there was no capitalization for names in Old English texts, the word þunor might be read as thunder or as Thunor – as an effect produced by the god in response to Danish prayers or as the name of the god himself. By no means would it constitute an uncharacteristic pagan invocation by our Christian poet; rather it would serve to subtly denigrate the old religion, and further emphasise the wretchedness of the idolators, since the idea of Grendel’s being scared off by a magic thunderclap is comically feeble. Most importantly, considering the gradually hardening English religious environment in which the poet and his work had to live, the line has plausible deniability: now you see the thundergod, now you don’t.

But evidently some monkish copyist with metrical skills6 judged that this turn of phrase did not help the poem’s already tenuous claims to Christian orthodoxy, and deigned to efface it with a stroke of his pen. He is to be thanked for it, I suppose, as long as the result was that his good abbot had to warm his feet on some other great treasure of Germanic cultural heritage.

Or perhaps not – since all of this is really just cunning guesswork, and there is not the slightest bit of hard evidence that the Beowulf text was monkeyed with at all. As always when reading my unqualified speculations, take with a large pinch of salt.7 All I know is that from now on, as I continue to probe through the wilds of this and other Anglo-Saxon poems, I shall keep my mind’s ear open for the distant roll of thunder – and yes, perhaps even for the muted crack of wood…

Tip Jar

Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War1, brings a much later scepticism to bear upon the ancient story of the poets:

Agamemnon, it seems to me, must have been the most powerful of the rulers of his day; and it was for this reason that he raised the force against Troy, not because the suitors of Helen were bound to follow him by the oaths which they had sworn to Tyndareus. Pelops, according to the most reliable tradition in the Peloponnese, came there from Asia. He brought great wealth with him, and, settling in a poor country, acquired such power that, though he was a foreigner, the whole land was called after him. His descendants became still more prosperous. … It was to this empire that Agamemnon succeeded, and at the same time he had a stronger navy than any other ruler; thus, in my opinion, fear played a greater part than loyalty in the raising of the expedition against Troy.

Be that as it may, in the traditional account of Homer, the formal motive of the lesser Greek chiefs fighting under Agamemnon’s leadership is loyalty to the oath. And this sets the context for the latest installment of our alliterative-verse rendering2 of the Iliad, in which a meeting of the Greek host degenerates into a furious quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon – culminating in the withdrawal of Achilles from the war. What we are seeing here is not an act of military insubordination, but the revolt of an essentially free agent who believes that he has been mistreated.

The cause of this mistreatment has been explained in the first and second parts of the tale. Agamemnon took as war-bride Chryseis, the daughter of a priest of Apollo, and refused to give her back to her father when he came to ransom her. This incensed the god and caused him to send a plague upon the Greek host. Achilles called a meeting, at which the soothsayer Calchas pointed out the cause of the plague, and prophesied that it would not end until the girl was sent back with no ransom-price. Agamemnon reluctantly agreed, but stipulated that the other Greeks were obliged to compensate him with an equivalent honour-prize (γέρας):

“But see to it at once that a reward is found,

“For to make amends to me. Unmeet ‘twould be

“If it were I alone in the Argive troop

“Who should want an honour-prize; as all ye witness,

“The prize that was mine own now elsewhere wends.”

This equivalent prize will turn out to be none other than Briseis, the war-bride of Achilles. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us see what Achilles has to say to the speech just made by Agamemnon, and let the meeting head downhill from there…

To which swift-foot Achilles    responded thus:
"Son of Atreus,    overstanding all,
"And as greedy for gain    as you are great in rank:
"How shall us greathearts    grant you a prize?
"None are lying about here!    The loot from cities
"That we captured and sacked    has been claimed and doled,
"Distributed generally;    unjust 'twould be
"To regather it again    from all the Grecian host.
"But for the moment send    the maid to her god,
"And you shall take repayment –    three or fourfold –
"When the walls have fallen    around well-fenced Troy,
"And Zeus has granted us    to sack and to gut her."

But answered the lordly one,    Agamemnon:
"O divine Achilles,    valiant as you are,
"Do not steal to subtlety!    Deceitful wit
"Shall not persuade or escape me;    you shall slip not past me!
"What it is you want?    To be well-repaid,
"While I sit down emptily    and sore with lack?
"You demand I give her;    our greatheart host
"Must then compensate their king    with an equivalent prize,
"To gratify my heart.    But should they grant it not,
"I shall seize it myself!    I shall set my hands
"Upon the prize allotted you,    and lead her away;
"Or the prize of Odysseus,    or the prize of Ajax,
"And whomever I visit    shall be filled with gall.
"But such may be considered    at a seemlier time.
"So now come, let us haul    to the heaven-bright brine
"A sable ship,    staffed with rowers,
"Stuffed with a hecatomb;    and set on board
"Fair-chéeked Chryseis –    and let charge be taken
"By some man of counsel    who shall make the trip:
"Idomeneus or Ajax;    or deific Odysseus,
"Or thee, Pelides –    terriblest of men –
"By making sacrifice    to seek appeasement
"Of the long-armed god,    and to lift his scourge."

Yet he responded scowl-browed,    swiftfoot Achilles:
"O my, so covetous,    cloaked in shamelessness
"With loot upon the brain!    Who would liefly serve you
"In this host of Achaeans?    Your hest obey?
"Wage war at your command?    Or wend on a mission?
"I came not for vengeance    on these foreign spearmen!
"No Trojan has touched me;    none thither drove
"My horses or beeves;    none has harmed or plundered
"Any fruit of field    in my fertile Phthia,
"Nurse of the mighty –    for remote she lies,
"Protected by much territory    between us standing:
"The deep-valed mountains    and redounding sea.
"O grossly shameless one,    we gathered behind you,
"Dog-eyed ingrate,    to do you honour –
"Yourself and Menelaus –    to settle the wrong
"That you suffered from those Trojans,    that you turn not to heed.
"And at that you threat me    that you'll take my prize
"That I earned by mine efforts,    and the Argives gave me!
"I have never taken    from the throng-filled cities
"Sacked on our adventures,    any share your equal:
"Though my hands bear the brunt    of the hardest fighting,
"When we fall to the dividing,    by far the greater
"Of the prizes is yours;    and with paltry winnings –
"Yet dear-beloved –    to my dark-tarred ships,
"Wearied by war-works,    my way I take.
"But my course I'll turn now,    with my curve-prowed boats,
"To my home Phthia;    and I hardly think
"That you shall pile up treasures    in proportion to your greed
"When I, who am dishonoured,    aid you no more."

And the host-king answered him,    Agamemnon:
"Well then fly, and fleetly,    if you feel in heart
"Such ardency of urging    to be out and gone.
"Do not stay for my sake;    I'll beseech you not;
"I have others around me    who will honour me more,
"As will the highest Counsellor,    all-wise Zeus.
"I regard you loathest    among God-kept kings:
"For in strife you rejoice,    and in shedding blood,
"In combat and carnage.    Yet perchance your might
"Is the gift of some god,    and thus no ground to boast on.
"So hence you to your home,    with your house-companions,
"To lord the Myrmidons.    No loss I count you,
"And I reck your raging    not a wretched jot.
"But I threat you thus:    just as taken hence
"By Apollo the Fulgent    is my prize Chryseis,
"And I send her on my ship    with my sworn companions,
"Fair-cheeked Briseis    will surely be mine.
"I shall move upon your camp    and demand your prize.
"Thus lessoned, you shall learn    your lower place –
"And another shall be cowed by it,    and know far better
"Than face-to-face with me    to vaunt his peerhood."

He so bespake him;    and the shaggy breast
Of the son of Peleus    was seized by pain;
Divided and debating:    if to force a path
With his unscabbarded blade,    through the scattering crowd,
And lay Atrides    lifeless at his feet;
Or if to stop his gall up    and restrain his heart.

And as he doubted in his mind,    and drew from its sheath
His trenchant sword,    Athena came,
From heaven descending;    snow-armed Hera
Had sent her swiftly,    for the striving pair
She dually regarded    as dear to her spirit.
So the Spear-Shaker    stood behind him –
Appearing to none of them,    apart from him –
And grasped his gold locks.    Jarred, he turned round,
And instantly knew her    by her eyes that flashed
With a terrible light.    He thus bespake her
With feather-fletched words:    "O why have you come,
"O child of the Aegis-Bearer,    all-wise Zeus?
"Would you witness for yourself    the wanton insolence
"Atrides inflicts on me?    I tell you outright:
"His overfórceful bombast    might just burst the life from him."

Owl-eyed Athena    returned these words:
"From heaven I've been sent here    to stay your anger –
"So will you obey me?    White-armed Hera
"Dually regards you both    as dear to her spirit.
"So halt your hand now,    and heft no sword,
"With your tongue retort to him –    let that suffice.
"For I foretell you truly    that the time shall come
"When you take for this outrage    a threefold payment
"In splendid bounty-gifts!    Stay, obey us!"

Swift-foot Achilles    responded thus:
"O Goddess I will hear you,    though galled in heart,
"For 'tis always best    to obey your words:
"Who hears the gods    is heard by them louder."

Such words he spake;    and on the silvered hilt
Laid his heavy hand,    and homeward thrust
His sword into its sheath;    he did not scorn obedience
To the word of Athena.    She went Olympusward
To mingle with her kindred,    the immortal gods,
In the high halls of Zeus,    the Aegis-Bearer.

But ceasing not his anger    'gainst the son of Atreus,
Pelides spoke out    with scathing words:
"You stout sack of wine,    with the shameless eyes
"And aspect of a dog,    and the heart of a deer!
"When the host takes arms,    I have not ever seen you
"Arm yourself for battle;    or an ambush dare
"With the doughtest Achaeans;    the din of war
"Is like the call of death to you,    and cows your heart.
"Much rather would you range    through the rear of the host
"To steal from whomever    dares dispúte your words.
"You're a people-eating king,    holding pówer over nobodies
"Tamed to abuses –    or else they would make
"This loathsome outrage    the last you wrought.
"But I'll speak against you,    and I'll swear an oath
"By this very sceptre –    that will sprout no buds,
"Nor bear more leaves,    nor boughs bring forth –
"Since 'twas severed from its source    on the slopes of mountains,
"And lopped by the bronze blade    of leaves and bark –
"And is carried by the justicers,    Achaeans' sons,
"Those who guard the ordinances    got from Zeus –
"By this sign I swear now    a resounding oath:
"That Achilles will be missed    by the Achaeans' sons;
"And the time shall come    when you will crave his aid;
"When haplessly you grieve,    and cannot help your men,
"When man-slaying Hector    mows down droves of them;
"You'll rend your heart then,    and rue the day
"That you did no honour    to the doughtest Achaean."

With that, he throws down his sceptre and sits out the war in the very face of the Trojan host. And just as he foretold, this proves to be disastrous for them, because Achilles is by far the greatest warrior among the Greeks. Next time we shall see how the elderly Nestor tries (and fails) to smooth things over.

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Notes

As mentioned in previous posts, while I do alright in Old English, I have next to no knowledge of Ancient Greek. All the same, I worked from the original text (as well as from translations) for every line and almost every word of this ‘rendering’. This practice can only lead to the development of extremely unqualified opinions on textual interpretation, some of which are given below. Just remember to take them with a pinch of salt (and if you know the language and see anything that is downright wrong, feel free to let me know in the comments).

How shall us greathearts grant you a prize?

The word used is μεγάθυμος (megathymos), which naturally evokes for us the Latin term magnanimous (apparently derived from the similar megalopsykhos ‘great-souled’, used by Aristotle to describe the Golden Mean between vanity and petty-mindedness). Since thymos is more like spirited passion than heart or soul, this cannot be the sole meaning of this word; but it does apparently contain the meaning ‘high-minded’, and crops up twice in this scene where the voluntary giving of a prize to Agamemnon is mentioned, so the association is probably not wrong. Elsewhere in the Homeric corpus the same word is used with the apparent meaning of hearty or courageous (as can be ascertained from a word search in the very useful Chicago Homer).

To seek appeasement of the long-armed god…

The god is of course Apollo, and the original epithet is ἑκάεργος (heka’ergos), which probably means ‘far-working’ and refers to his quality of being an archer. If the meaning is rather, as some have argued, ‘free-working’, then perhaps liberant will do.

Those Trojans that you turn not to heed

The specific phrase used here is τῶν οὔ τι μετατρέπῃ οὐδ᾽ ἀλεγίζεις (crudely transliterated, ton ou ti metatrepe oud’ alegizeis), meaning ‘of which you take nor regard nor care’. It is not entirely clear (at least not to me) whether this means that Agamemnon is failing to heed the Trojans, the war, the efforts of Achilles and the other Greeks, or all three. But from the order of words, one is led to think that the primary referent is the Trojans; and from the fact that the word metatrepo ‘to show regard for something’ literally means to turn toward something, one is led further to suspect that Achilles is making a veiled accusation of cowardice against Agamemnon, a suspicion that becomes stronger as he goes on to complain that he must always bear the brunt of the fighting. Of course, once all semblance of civility has broken down, he does not stint from openly accusing Agamemnon of cowardice.

Well then fly, and fleetly…

This sarcastic pun on Achilles’ signature epithet (‘fleet-footed’ or ‘swift-footed’) is not in the original text, but is hard to resist when translating into this metre.

So the Spear-Shaker stood behind him…

The standard traditional epithet for Athena is Pallas (Παλλάς), which apparently derives from a verb πάλλω (pallo) meaning ‘to brandish a weapon’ or ‘to poise or sway a spear before it is thrown’. Since Athena was often depicted with a spear, Spear-Shaker or Spear-Poiser would be the likeliest candidates for a direct translation; and since both the name and epithet of Pallas Athena are associated in later tradition with wisdom and learning3, the resemblance of Spear-Shaker to the name Shakespeare is not unwelcome, as long as it does not become too obvious.

With feather-fletched words…

This is the famous Homeric epithet ἔπεα πτερόεντα (epea pteroenta), usually translated ‘winged words’. Since Ancient Greek, like many other languages, used the same word for wing as for feather, I suspect that the true image in the mind of Homer was along the lines of ‘words shot like fletched arrows’ and not ‘words flapping around on wings like birds’. The epithet is often thought to denote words spoken in a high passion, or particularly to the point; but according to oral-formulaic theorists (memory fails me as to which ones, but probably Milman Parry and/or Albert Lord), no special use of the term for such words can be discerned in the corpus.

The wanton insolence Atrides inflicts on me…

For ‘wanton insolence’ read ὕβρις (hybris), which has been ported into our own language as hubris. While the English term refers to an essentially inner pride, the Greek original had more to do with external behaviour that crosses the bounds of reason and propriety (a clue to this can be found in the related verb ῠ̔βρῐ́ζω hubrizo, meaning ‘to run riot’ or ‘to insult or maltreat others’). The word outrage can sometimes serve as a translation for this word, as long as it is understood to refer to the behaviour and not the reaction to it; the word abuse, while being much-abused these days, also has its virtues as a translation in certain contexts.

His over-forceful bombast might just burst the life from him

Needless to say, Achilles’ meaning is that he may end up killing Agamemnon for his arrogance, but this is not the way he words it to Athena. He accuses Agamemnon of ‘over-forcefulness’ (ὑπεροπλία hyperoplia, ‘hyper-oply’, conceivably ‘ultra-armament’ and often translated as presumptuousness or arrogance), and says that it may ‘destroy his life’ (θυμὸν ὀλέσσῃ thymon olesse, literally ‘destroy [his] thymos or spirit’, this being understood to leave the body like a breath of smoke at the moment of death. The image that naturally suggests itself to me is that of Agamemnon bursting from his own self-inflated bombast. But one might also recall in this connection a much later scene in the Iliad, in which Hector is temporarily puffed up with power so that he can wear the armour of Achilles (taken from the slain Patroclus who was wearing it) in which he is doomed to go to his death.

With the shameless eyes and aspect of a dog…

The word ‘shameless’, used elsewhere by Achilles of Agamemnon, is my own interpretation of his assertion that the Mycenaean king has ‘the eyes of a dog’. It seems most likely to me that this refers to the shameless, greedy look of a hungry cur, the sort who would certainly have roamed the battlefields of the Trojan war looking to despoil the dead of their fleshly armour.

A people-eating king, holding power over nobodies tamed to abuses, or else they would make this loathsome outrage the last you wrought

This is somewhat expanded from the original, in which Achilles simply takes for granted that Agamemnon would not be alive to perpetrate abuses if his subjects were not worthless nonentities. Note that Achilles is not using the ‘people-devouring’ (δημοβόρος demoboros) accusation against Agamemnon in direct reference to the present situation, because he is not one of Agamemnon’s subjects; rather, he is just throwing it as a generalized insult like coward, wine-bibber, etc., or perhaps making the assumption that someone who would take an honour-prize from a fellow king must perpetrate even worse abuses on those subject to his rule. Needless to say, ‘people-eater’ was seen as a shameful epithet for a king (and it is worth making a mental note of this for when someone tries to tell you that the notion of kingly benevolence to subjects came into being with Christianity or Platonism or whatever).

Note here also that Agamemnon does in fact end up being murdered (and cuckolded) by one of his subjects, namely Aegisthus.

Carried by the justicers…who guard the ordinances got from Zeus…

For δικασπόλοι (dikaspoloi) and θέμιστας (themistas) we might as well read ‘judges’ and ‘laws’, but it seems appropriate to avoid our accustomed terms. Those who arbitrate justice in the Homeric world are the kings and noble leaders like Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, and so on. What they guard is not a body of written law, but that which was personified by the goddess Themis: “right custom, proper procedure, social order, and sometimes merely the will of the gods”.

It would not be unfair to refer to the New Years’ Resolution as the Janus Resolution. Not all of them fail, but most of them do, and those that succeed must therefore do so in spite of and not because of collective cultural reinforcement. Partly for that reason, I am wary about making Janus Resolutions these days.1

But I’ve made and broken such resolutions before, not always at New Year’s; and more recently, I have had occasion to observe the making-and-breaking process from a more detached perspective, in the lives of others who are struggling with weight loss and alcoholism and other bad habits and addictions. What is interesting is that the eventual failure of a resolution is often written into it from its beginning. This might take the form of excessively demanding strictures that are bound to be broken by lapses (which are then taken as justification for giving up entirely), or endless exemptions and ambiguities that also lead to lapses and giving up, or simply a total lack of effort towards keeping the resolution early on. In short, a Janus Resolution always has a ‘second head’ that pulls it in the opposite direction to that intended.

This might be explained through the language of multiplicity, in which different aspects of a person (or even separate and mutually-opposed ‘selves’) are responsible for the sabotage of the resolution. Another possible explanation is that those who make Janus Resolutions don’t actually want to keep them at all. The latter theory can be found in by a certain highly controversial self-help book, which for the time being I shall quote first and name later:

We all display a kind of inconsistency among our beliefs, our wishes, and our actions in our own lives, although it may be easier to recognize in the lives of others. We have all listened to an argument play itself out between two (or more) voices within our own minds—one preaching about what we should do, and the other helplessly apologizing and explaining about how we would if we could but we can’t. We all share an awareness, if we are honest, that on some fundamental level, the apparent struggle among our beliefs, actions, and desires is a false one. More often than not, the “struggle” has emerged after a choice has already been made, though perhaps unconsciously. The “struggle” manifests itself mostly as effort: “trying” to decide; “trying” to be good; “trying” to keep our word. The false struggle is invented by our minds as a distraction, to “draw fire”—to draw the fire of our attention and keep us from seeing that we have already chosen…

The conditions we produce in our lives, the actions we repeat against our will…somehow we have perpetuated them, despite our professed beliefs and our efforts to change. ... The person who says he wants to lose weight, but says he just can’t give up midnight snacks, may believe he is in a struggle between “being good” and “giving in” to his cravings, but in fact he has already chosen to keep snacking. The “struggle” that he describes serves to hide this fact…

Instead of amalgamations of parts having contradictory and uncontrollable purposes, suppose we consider ourselves to be already what we long to be: functional, integrated wholes who produce the results we choose, effortlessly, with our entire beings. Suppose we all, already, are that. All the apparent contradictions and dichotomies—the fat person struggling to be thin, the sinner trying to be good, the workaholic longing for time with his family—are actually smokescreens, false struggles enacted by our own minds to hide from others or ourselves our true intent. Our true intent is to do just what we do.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that this explanation is the true one. Why would anyone make a resolution that he has no intention of keeping? The obvious answer is that it lets him think of himself as one sort of person in theory while being another sort of person in reality. His present, day-to-day ‘false self’ might be a fat person addicted to eating junk, but his as-yet-unactualized ‘true self’ is a slim person who exercises and eats healthily. It is, of course, all too easy to see which self-image is true and which is false.

But such a self-delusion cannot be maintained unless some effort is being made to become what one is presently not. This creates an imaginary threshold between the present ‘false’ life and the future ‘true’ one, which is crossed by the making and performing of a resolution and then crossed back again by a lapse and renunciation. Someone who chronically makes and breaks Janus Resolutions, whether or not he does so at New Year’s, lives most of his life on this imaginary threshold – which, according to the argument from non-multiplicity, is precisely where he wants to be. And the fact that most people now live by such imaginary thresholds, rather than the natural ones presided over by the old Janus, would be the reason why the patron god of transitions is now the demon of hypocrisy.

It follows that whole modern societies can be deluded by Janus Resolutions, and entire political mythologies erected on the endless crossing and recrossing of an imaginary threshold. Communist societies are famously devoted to a historical transition that has never actually happened, and fascist ones according to the theory of Roger Griffin (see Modernism and Fascism) are much the same way. And our own democratist political order, being in many ways much more similar to these two than it is to any premodern order, is also much the same way – the difference being that it has more than one political cult, thus more than one Janus-threshold.

Perhaps the ‘woke’ left is the most obvious example. Much could be said, for example, on transgender ideology as a personal and political myth of threshold-crossing – one that can never succeed, because it is based on what is perhaps the boldest medical swindle in history.2 But they say you should write about what you know, so let’s look not at the ‘woke’ but at the ‘awakened’, that is to say the online dissident right.

The dissident right (the latest of many rebrands – a classic symptom of Janus-delusion) is founded on a basic myth of transition from a ‘false’ collective ego to a ‘true’ one. The past and present ‘false self’ is mainstream conservatism, which is failed and cucked and co-opted and cravenly subordinate to the left and all the rest of it. The longed-for ‘true self’ is the new right that will replace conservatism and finally defeat the left, and of which the present-day dissident right is the advance guard. Conceptions of this true right vary from one mind to another, from the aesthetics of fascism to those of much older orders; but suffice it to say that it is always conceived as young, smart, unafraid, awakened, willing to do whatever it takes to win.

Yet whatever their dreams of tomorrow may be, today the more radical rightists must support conservatives and compromise with conservatism, and so the threat of lapse is always present. And sometimes it erupts from the core of the movement. That is what has happened this January, with the shootings of leftist activists Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis.

This is the sort of thing that people have been xeeting on Xitter:

Admittedly, none of these are particularly ‘based’ or well-known individuals, though their sentiments chime with those of such big names as Morgoth and Darryl Cooper. I have chosen the examples for their particularly evident Janus-facedness.

Note that none of them are saying that they changed their minds on mass deportations. They are not saying they supported the enforcement of US immigration law in theory, but got cold feet after seeing it end up hurting some people who are not ‘appropriately’ brown and criminal-looking. Whatever you may think of these positions, they would all be examples of basically honest self-reportage. The same cannot be said for what these people are saying: that ICE agents should arrest and deport vast masses of illegal immigrants from the US, without ever endangering the leftist activists who choose to drive their cars into said agents or confront them on the street while armed with loaded handguns.

In principle – we will get to the practice in a moment – what these people are demanding is as chimerical as the decision to stuff yourself with snacks while resolved to lose weight. What did they think ‘mass deportations’ meant?3 Either the immigration laws on the books are to be enforced, as per Donald Trump’s election promises, or leftist activists and the media will get to veto the ones they don’t like by making their enforcement practically impossible. Yielding to the latter means ending up back at the sort of ‘rule of law’ tolerated by the bad old conservatives, in which one side has the rule and the other gets the law. However you split the hairs, it is ultimately a question of which is to be master: the magistrates and legislature elected by the popular sovereignty of the mass electorate, or the demokratia of the media, activists and extended governing class that presumes to circumscribe that sovereignty.

Hence the calls from the rough end of the right for these lapsers to ‘lock in’: to harden their hearts, man up and stay the course. This may seem reasonable enough on the current topic4; but once we zoom out a little, things no longer look so simple. The modern hypocrite-Janus has two heads, remember, and woe to him who trusts either.

Let us start with a statement of the obvious: Minneapolis, home of St. Floyd, is a leftist open-air insane asylum located in a notoriously leftist state far up north on the US-Canadian border. One has to wonder why a huge surge of ICE agents was being deployed to deal with the relatively small numbers of illegal aliens there, while little was being done to restrict their widespread employment in Texas and other red states. And the answer would seem to be that Trump wanted to generate online videos of triggered libs rending their pussy hats over ICE raids (perhaps so that the White House Xitter account could set them to pop songs and convert them into AI slop memes), so as to fob off his schadenfreudy base without having to touch the thankless task of weaning pro-Republican big and small business off illegal labour.5

This means that he sent his troops into a trap, and got people killed and lives destroyed largely for the sake of edgy street theatre. Apparently Trump’s enemies are still taking all of this much more seriously than he is; it is no exaggeration to say of some of them that they are engaged in a low-level guerrilla war, and the tactical playbook for that was laid out a decade ago by William S. Lind in his 4th Generation Warfare Handbook (with reference to the guerrilla insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan). It mainly consists of mingling with ordinary citizens, harassing the occupying force (preferably after taking enough pot-shots at them to make them suitably jumpy and trigger-happy), goading them into hamfisted reactions that get people killed and then using the resultant outrage to fuel the cause.6 All of this works best in a community sympathetic to the agitators, which is why Minnesota was the perfect place for the left to establish its power of legal nullification before (no doubt!) seeking to expand it to other states.

This, then, is the problem with ‘locking in’ – it tends to end up in a lockstepped performative larp behind some Pied Piper of a leader, and towards an avoidable disaster, a pattern foreshadowed in the Charlottesville protest of 2017. At this point the signal-spiral is broken, and the ‘based’ diehards go the same way as the ‘squishy’ backdowns. And the reason why this sort of thing happens, in lieu of effective political action, is that the ‘based’ are no less deluded in their own way than the ‘squishy’; in the terms of our analogy, the former correspond to the fifty-point weight loss resolution that demands eight days a week of hard gym training, and the latter to the inevitable lapse and resultant binge on the snack pile in the fridge.

So what is to be done? Well, since we are clearly Not OK, let’s go back to our mystery self-help book. The argument continues as follows:

Our unwillingness to explore the possibility that what we have is what we want—that our lives function, that we are comfortable and fear change in most areas of our lives—prevents us from producing change in other areas. Our energy is totally invested in maintaining our lives the way they are, and the phony struggle for change only conceals the ways in which the status quo serves us. Our apparent battle for change is a tempest in a teapot…

As long as I identify my “self” only as that desire to change and not also as a presently more powerful desire to remain the same, I will remain stuck. In a sense, I can change, finally, only by giving up trying to change.

In order for things to get better, they must first get worse. In order to get out of debt, we have to acknowledge how it serves us to be in debt. In order to lose weight, we have to be in touch with, and confront, how we also want to stay fat. We have to stop paying attention to our struggle and turn our awareness to the ways in which these circumstances we claim we want to change serve us—the payoffs. Only after experiencing ourselves the way we are, dropping our phony struggle to change, and telling the truth about all of it, can we create the lives we have been saying we want.

This examination of our subconscious desire to avoid change, and of what lies beneath the phony struggle, can get us “unstuck.” It also leads to a deeper place, a scarier place, than that of mere struggle to change. Struggling to change is what you do to hide from something worse. Struggling to change is a way to avoid facing the abyss, and if the abyss could be avoided, it would be a good idea.

These book from which these quotations are taken is Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton (Chapter 10, pages 206-210). Its thesis is that almost everyone in modern society is deeply corrupted from constant pathological lying, which has a way of spreading inwards and causing self-delusion. Its solution is to tell the truth, all the time, everywhere and to everyone (except government officials!), to the point of blurting out practically everything that crosses your mind.

Yes, Blanton is a bit of a nutcase. No, I would not be able to recommend his advice to anyone – even to those whose opinions are mostly acceptable to the judgement of their fellow-citizens in a free and fair democracy – at least not without appending a warning and perhaps also a long legal disclaimer.7 But none of this means he is wrong about the modern habit of pathological lying, its connection to deeper self-delusion, and the corrective power of the elementary truthfulness called honesty.

So how does this work when we transpose the principle from a struggling, conflicted, self-deluded individual to the struggling, conflicted, self-deluded dissident right?

Well, in this case we have some inking of how it works, because the dissident right has a reputation for telling the truth – albeit one largely acquired during earlier, nameless incarnations, when anonymous people writing on the internet were truly irrelevant to official politics. Had the integration with politics not taken place, we might today have a very different sort of online dissidence – perhaps one that aimed at truthfulness rather than a unity of rightist opinion, and allowed many disparate opinions to exist within it, stipulating only that they thrash out their differences without recourse to a liberal conceptual language that has come to describe our reality about as well as Don Quixote described the sights and souls of La Mancha.8

But whether or not this was ever likely, in the event it was not to be, and the present-day dissident right has become surgically attached to right-wing populist politics. As such, more than ever, it wields truth and honesty strictly as rhetorical weapons against its political enemies and everyone outside its demographic core, which is of course low-status white males (LSWMs9). The truths may be true (though they have long been degrading to untruths – to quote Blanton again, “truth turns to bullshit in the mind as food turns to excrement in the body”), but the motives for telling them are essentially spiteful and thus inevitably hypocritical.

Thus, dissidents will tell those who have undergone irreparable ‘gender transition’ surgery that it cannot in fact turn them into the opposite sex. They will tell childless thirtysomething career women that they have wasted their lives pursuing a simulacrum of a masculine life path. They will tell those who think of themselves as idealistic rebels that they are in fact conformist power-sniffers, the sort of people who would have been card-carrying Nazis in 1930s Germany. They have no time for the myths and excuses that justify endless official discrimination against whites on the grounds that this is needed to build a free and fair pan-racial utopia. But whenever that dangerous and unpredictable weapon known as the truth slips its holster, and starts firing in the direction of the dissidents and LSWMs and their chronically-failing political causes, they either shrink from it entirely or discover a new appreciation for prudent caveats and sheltering nuances. Typically they ‘rationalize’ this hypocrisy by declaring the truth in question to be a blackpill, and accusing anyone through which it expresses itself of demoralizing them.

What, then, did they think they were doing to everyone else? And why do they think that anyone else should have listened?

Were the dissident right to somehow become embodied as a single individual, he would surely make a great song and dance of his honesty – and yet stand to the radical honesty of Blanton much as ‘Zarathustra’s ape’ stood to the philosophy of Nietzsche, who excoriated him as follows in Thus Spake Zarathustra (Chapter LI):

What was it that first made thee grunt? Because no one sufficiently flattered thee—therefore didst thou seat thyself beside this filth, that thou mightest have cause for much grunting; that thou mightest have cause for much vengeance! For vengeance, thou vain fool, is all thy foaming; I have divined thee well! But thy fools’-word injureth me, even when thou art right!

Ironically, in striving to give away the ‘blackpills’ (truths) and monopolize the ‘whitepills’ (delusions), the dissident right injureth only itself. But it’s a simple matter to swap these prescriptions around. Let us imagine that dissidents were to approach their own self-justifying myths and excuses as if they were the official ones that justify the democratist state and its client groups.

Take for example the essays and occasional commentary posted on this site, in which I have certainly not been practicing this principle. I have deplored the tendency of rightists to sink into complacency after very limited victories, and noted that both the ‘whitepill’ and ‘blackpill’ seem to serve them as convenient excuses to give up dissent. I have allegorized conservative politics to a fraudulent casino that constantly absorbs the energies of dissidents, who compulsively return to it time and time again. I have wondered why the right constantly neglects the contest for intellectual authority for rearguard actions in the realm of political power. And in this post I have criticized the partisans of squeamishness and performative cruelty alike. The tacit assumption that runs through all of this is that externally-imposed delusions, no doubt serving the interest of the Current Regime, are perverting the dissident right from its ‘true’ nature and what it ‘really’ ought to be doing to win.

But a more parsimonious (and Blantonesque) interpretation of the facts would be that these delusions are internally-generated squid-ink, and serve the interest of the dissident and wider conservative right in doing just what it does. And most of what it does can be understood as the natural survival strategy of a weaker faction desperately trying to simulate more power than it actually has.

In this analysis, rightists tend to win a little before declaring victory and giving up because they lack the political energy for prolonged struggle with the left. They do not try to take authority (beyond the lowest-hanging fruit) because they lack the energy for this as well, to say nothing of the intellectual ability. And their vacillation between squishiness and performative hardness might best be understood as representing the two sides of Batesian mimicry: the paralyzing fear of a predator that you do not have it in you to defeat, and the impetus to present yourself to that predator as more of a threat than you really are. This is a more complex phenomenon than the relatively straightforward predator camouflage represented by leftist ‘virtue-signalling’.

This analogy of the right to a prey animal holds not just for the loserly LSWMs and struggling MSWMs in our movement (who would never have formed a ruling class in any society), but also for the strong, virtuous and competent in our ranks. In a society deeply pacified by a violence-monopolizing state, which has in turn become bloated and decadent due to its swallowing most social functions into itself, traditional strengths and virtues cease to function as advantages. The perennial tendency to aggression, violence, brigandage, now comes from within the state-machine, and hinges on a game of avoiding the threat-detection mechanisms of the government as well as the public perception of participation in its terribly absolute power. And, of course, mobilizing both against one’s targets. This is what leftism does, and does well, by a whole host of mechanisms that are built into its ideological nature and thus difficult or pointless for the right to replicate: the passive-aggressive provocations, the vitilitigation, the majoritarian scapegoating (note to white nationalists, this does not work in your favour), the use of women as informants and enforcers, the willingness of power-players to ride upon the least-resistance paths of social collapse, the outsourcing of more direct forms of violence to tacitly tolerated criminals outside the formal command chain of the state.

There is little point in your or my proclaiming that these devious predation tactics do not work on us, because the fact of leftist power shows that they work on almost everyone else including many on our own side. And while it is theoretically important to understand how leftism builds a ruling unelite and a client kakistocracy, composed of those whose status would be much lower in previous social orders, I suspect that the popularity of such theories has much to do with the cope factor – that is to say, the wish of the man being subjected to the tyranny of his supposed10 natural inferiors to intone the old formula of Lu Xun’s Ah Q, “It is as if a son is beating his father!” But unless this man has a way to change the political and social structure in which he plays at a forced disadvantage, he must learn to lump it – and it is by no means clear that he would be able to better himself in the event of its collapse. While it is probably true that the Mouse Utopia we have erected has to die so that our species may continue to live, one imagines that the immediate results of this will be good for the criminal gangs in informal alliance with the left11 and very bad for the domesticated males who idly fantasize about ‘burning it all to the ground’.

And this brings us to the strange inability of radicalized rightists to kick the old habits of janitorial conservatism. Could it be that the payoffs of conservatism – status quo preservation, sporadic relief from leftist predations, ceremonial leadership over the state – far outweigh the slight sting inside that comes with electoral consent, and perhaps even constitute the best possible deal for the prey animals of Our Democracy? Could it be, perhaps, that the ‘true nature’ of the dissident right and its white male demographic core is in fact best expressed by mainstream conservatism, and not by quixotic fantasies of kingship or theocracy or ethnostatism? Could it be that, without conservatism, the predations and humiliations would be much worse – and the uprising of sturdy yeomen who have proved all their counts and begun to hate as far away as any other imaginary transition?

Remember, I am not necessarily asking dissidents to accept any of this as true (or, if its truth be granted, as the be-all-and end-all of the truth) – only to practice this sort of bleak and brutal honesty on themselves and their own from time to time, and accept that this is the sort of conclusion that may result from it.

If the conclusion is true, then it is a hard truth to swallow. For if it is true that conservatism was the shelter and not the prison of our people, then it is just as true that it is cracked and crumbling – partly as a result of pressure from a dominant political faction that has become too greedy to grant it any honour, but more so as a result of deliberate subversion by a dissident right now beginning to recoil from what it has done. Just as Blanton warns, honest self-examination can lead us to the ‘abyss’ – or, in modern parlance, the blackpill. But it can also lead to the whitepill, that is to say, the light at the end of the tunnel – for what is falling cannot be pulled, and only by following a via negativa away from delusions and dead ends can we hope to make it out of the wreckage in one piece.12

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The indictment of Agamemnon is made by one Calchas, who seeks the kingly protection of Achilles before daring to speak up against the overlord of the host. Calchas is a mantis, or practitioner of divination – specifically the art of augury by which future events are divined by the flight and behaviour of birds. He was also able to predict the future by examining entrails, an art known as haruspicy. These practices were important to the Romans as well as the Greeks, as can be divined from the fact that our own terms for them come from Latin.

And what price, according to Calchas, must Agamemnon pay for his transgression? As we shall see, he must release Chryseis as a free gift to her father, along with a sacrifice of a hundred oxen (a hecatomb). So Agamemnon loses honour, owing not only to the loss of his war-prize (partly valued as a symbol of honour won in battle) but also to his forgoing the splendid ransom initially offered for the girl.

Although Agamemnon is generally portrayed as arrogant and selfish in the Iliad, he had good reason to become exasperated at the words of Calchas and to blame him for always being the bearer of bad news. Prior to the events of the poem, when Agamemnon had offended the goddess Artemis by killing one of her stags at the hunt, it was Calchas who instructed him to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia in order to appease the divine wrath and allow the Greek ships to reach Troy. For him to refuse to sacrifice one of his own family, while asking so many others to die in his brother’s cause, would not have been the ‘done thing’. In the famous painting of this scene by Timanthes, Agamemnon is shown with face veiled because the master painter did not know how to portray his grief.

So they gathered in council,    together assembling,
And swift-foot Achilles    stood to spéak amóng them:

"It seems now, Atrides,    if we scape with life
"From the war and the pestilence    that wastes our host,
"We must go pell-melling homeward,    repelled and routed,
"In defeat, from this fight!    But let's first consult
"Some prophet, or a priest,    or a prober of dreams –
"For dreams are from Zeus –    for to show what cause
"Has so incensed the archer-god:    what act or fault?
"Let altars smoke!    Let hecatombs be paid –
"So that for vows we may have broken    he may blame us not,
"And thus soothed by the smouldering    of spotless lambs
"And blemishless goats,    his bane may lift from us."

He spake, and sat;    and the son of Thestor,
Calchas the augur –    who all things knew
Of what was, and what is,    and what will be after –
Who was best among bird-seers,    blessed by Apollo
As a soothsaying oracle –    whose arts had guided
The ships of the Achaeans    to the shores of Troy –
This sage stood up now,    and spake goodwilling:

"God-loved Achilles!    I would gladly tell you
"What has caused the choler    of the king Apollo
"Who shoots from on high.    But I will say it only
"If you swear me a pact –    that with speech and hand,
"With word and with deed,    you will do me aid –
"Defend me with your might.    Unless I miss my guess,
"The ruler of Argives,    who reigns supreme –
"He who sways this host –    will be incensed to hear it.
"And woe to the underling    who angers a king!
"Today he might bite back    the bile in his chest,
"But his vengefulness will fester    and be vented in time.
"So tell me for truth:    will you protect my life?"

Fleet-foot Achilles    fitly answered:
"Take courage, Calchas,    declare what prophecy
"You learned from the god –    beloved of his father,
"Far-shot Apollo –    whom in prayers you seek,
"And discover knowledge,    for Danaeans' sake,
"Of divine foresight.    In this force of troops
"No man shall be so bold,    while I breathe the air
"And look on the daylight,    to lay upon you
"A heavy hand    at the hollow ships –    
"Not even if you name    Ágamémnon,
"Who boasts himself above us    as the best of the Greeks."

And so blamelessly the seer,    emboldened, spake:
"'Tis nor for vow nor for hecatomb    he harries us so,
"Oppressing us with pains;    but his priest was wronged
"When Agamémnon dishonoured him –    his maiden's ransom
"Scorning to accept,    and not setting her free;
"For the sake of this affront,    the afar-shooter
"Afflicts us with his arrows;    and no end will come
"To the murrain of our host;    he'll withhold no shames,
"'Til unpurchased and unransomed –    with no price exacted –
"The bright-eyed girl    goes back to her father,
"And a blessed hecatomb    bleeds in Chrysa.
"Thus might we be pardoned,    and appease the god."

So he spake, and sat;    and the son of Atreus
Arose, heroic    wide-rúling Agamemnon –
Baleful black wrath    overboiled his heart,
And his eyes were like embers,    hotly blazing.

Ill-stáring at Calchas,    he bespake him thus:
"Oracle of evils!    Not e'er has come
"Any good for me    from your grievous tongue;
"Ill-tidings are your joy;    and tidings glad
"From your words and works    have never ónce come forth.
"Divining midst Danaeans,    you announce to all
"That the far-shooting one    afflicts us so
"For the sake of his priest;    for that the splendid ransom
"For Chryseis the virgin    I refused to trade.
"Much did I prefer    the maid to have
"And hold within my house;    for in every way
"She more charms me than my wed wife,    Clýtemnéstra;
"In no wise is she worse:    in her woman's form,
"In her mind, in her works –    a matchless girl!
"Yet I'll loose her regardless –    for I'm loath to watch
"My people go on perishing    in pyre-smoulders –
"But see to it at once    that a reward is found,
"For to make amends to me.    Unmeet 'twould be
"If it were I alone    in the Argive troop
"Who should want an honour-prize;    as all ye witness,
"The prize that was mine own    now elsewhere wends."

Notes

Although the original text was and is all Greek to me (see the first post), I gave some thought to the question of how best to render certain words and phrases in English. The reasoning behind these choices is explained below.

O God-loved Achilles…

Wherever the capitalized word ‘God’ is used here, the reference is to Zeus in his capacity as the highest Olympian god. The original term Διῒ φίλε (Dii phile) means ‘Zeus-beloved’, but the form of the word naturally evokes the Latin Deus (which is in fact a closer relation to it than Greek θεός theos, generic ‘god’ or monotheistic ‘God’).

We must go pell-melling homeward, repelled and routed…

‘Pell-melling’ and ‘repelled’ are intended to reproduce something of the effect of πᾰλῐμπλᾰ́ζομαι palimplazomai, ‘to be driven back in wandering confusion’, the p and l sounds of which seem to suggest the plashing sea over which the Greeks would have to return home (and on which Odysseus will wander in confusion for ten years after the conclusion of the war). A more literal translations might be ‘routed and set roaming’, or ‘wherved round to wander back’ (see here for the definition of wherve).

The bright-eyed girl goes back to her father…

The word in the original is ἑλικώπις (helikopis), a common epithet for a beautiful young girl, which literally refers to eyes that ‘turn’ or ‘roll’. The fact that helix ‘spiral’ is also a component of the word helicopter (the other is pteron, ‘wing’) is apt to stir the modern mind to a somewhat comical image. But we can interpret the idiomatic meaning of ‘spiralling-eyed’ as ‘swift-eyed’ or ‘quick-eyed’ (signifying the eyes of a bright and lively girl who is always glancing around), or perhaps ‘rolling-eyed’, assuming that the act of rolling one’s eyes upward (which I have seen a little girl produce with no obvious outside influence, and not in the culturally-accepted context of exasperation) was considered typically or charmingly feminine.

Most older translators read the word instead as ‘black-eyed’, but this would seem to be a much less useful traditional epithet and the interpretation has fallen out of favour.

The son of Atreus arose, heroic wide-ruling Agamemnon

The line in the original is ἥρως Ἀτρεΐδης εὐρὺ κρείων Ἀγαμέμνων (crudely transliterated, heros Atreides euru kreion Agamemnon), which as we can see contains the Greek ancestor of the English word hero.

The modern concept of heroism, even where not traduced by improper extension to the commonplace, refers to an essentially self-sacrificing masculine virtue such as that of a dutiful conscript soldier. But the ancient Greek concept was about greatness, not necessarily goodness, and strictly speaking was limited to mythical demigods and individuals whose magnificent achievements entitled them to cultic worship after their deaths. Assuming that the use of heros here is not solely metri causa (i.e. for the sake of meter, as per the theory of Milman Parry), one would think that it is intended to emphasise the mighty stature of Agamemnon as he rises to castigate the soothsayer.

In her woman’s form, in her mind, in her works

Agamemnon praises four qualities of Chryseis: her frame, her stature, her mind, and her works. ‘Woman’s form’ (not necessarily to be taken in a narrowly sexual sense) is arguably an unwarranted interpretation of the first two; it is partly metri causa and partly a case of listening for the dog that didn’t bark.