Rethinking Thryth (II)

Did Offa of Angel's murderous queen actually kill anybody?

In the first part of this deep-dive post on the Thryth digression in Beowulf, we concentrated almost exclusively on the opening four lines. These mark an abrupt switch of discussion from the virtuous wife of King Hygelac, named Hygd, to the bloodthirsty queen of Offa of Angel.

Here they are again:

… / Næs hio hnah swa þeah

(She [i.e. Hygd] was not abject for that)

ne to gneað gifa / Geata leodum

(nor too niggardly with gifts to the Geatish people)

maþmgestreona / mod þryðo [ne] wæg

(With precious treasures; she had [not] a violent temper [or, she had not the temper of Thryth])

fremu folces cwen / firen ondrysne

(the goodly queen of the folk, her dreadful criminality.)

Having identified the right name of Offa’s queen as Thryth, and the phrase that introduces her as a subtle pun that is very difficult to carry into modern English, we proposed a loose translation along the following lines:

... Yet not too humble for that;
Nor too niggardly with gifts    to the Gothish ranksmen,
Not thrifty with treasures;    tempered in heart
Unlike that vibrant folk-queen    of fearsome crimes.

The rest of the passage will be treated in this second part of the post. As is typical for the digressions in this poem, the style is highly compressed and allusive, and assumes a general knowledge of Germanic lore that is not even possessed by scholars today. Practically every other line is subject to multiple interpretations. We shall take them in small doses, before ending the post with a retranslation of the passage.

Getting the Story Straight

Having just told us that Thryth engaged in fearsome criminality, the poet goes on to give us some of the details. Thryth, it would seem, is very beautiful, but metes out savage punishment to almost any man who dares to gaze upon her beauty.

nænig þæt dorste / deor geneþan

(there were none so daring as to dare to risk,)

swæsra gesiða / nefne sinfrea

(of the dear companions – save for her lasting lord –)

þæt hire an dæges / eagum starede

(that on her, by day, he gaze with his eyes;)

Our first question is: who are these men? And who is the lord?

The formula swæse gesiþas (‘dear companions’) normally refers to the comitatus gathered around a warlord. Sinfrea means ‘lasting lord’ or ‘permanent lord’, which might conceivably refer either to Thryth’s husband or to her father; but in light of the fact that many other Old English compound words derived from sin- ‘ever-’ refer only to marriage (such as sinscipe, ‘wedlock’ and sinhiwian, ‘to marry’), one would expect that it refers to her husband. We are led to imagine a tense situation at the hall of Offa of Angel after his marriage – in which the haughty, touchy queen, obliged by custom to circumambulate the hall at feasts and hand out ale and treasure to the retainers, instead tries to get them executed for ogling her.

Alternatively, Thryth is a young princess not yet married, and the men that she accuses belong to the comitatus of her (presumably all-too-doting) father. Frederick Klaeber, in his highly influential edition of Beowulf, leaned towards this interpretation of sinfrea and put a further twist upon it:

swæsra gesiða, i.e. the retainers at the court. – sinfrea, either the ‘father’ or ‘husband’. In the latter case, nefne sinfrea means ‘except as husband’. All the unsuccessful suitors were to be executed.

This would alter the picture entirely, not only turning the hall into that of the father, but also making Thryth into a Germanic Atalanta meting out death to unsuccessful suitors. There is no textual evidence for any of this, nor is there much traditional grounding; although there is a Germanic parallel to Atalanta in the form of Brunhild, who sets challenges for her suitors and kills them if they fail, our sole alternative account of Offa of Angel’s marriage (in the Lives of Two Offas, discussed in the last post) makes no mention of his having won his wife in such perilous fashion.¹ ‘Femme fatale’ personages in legend are not all of one type and should not simply be conflated with one another.

There’s a subtler ambiguity in the last line. Although most translators interpret its sense as “that he gaze on her with his eyes”, we cannot tell from the grammatical form whether the meaning is not in fact “look her in the eyes” or “gaze in her eyes”. All three examples could conceivably describe a lustful gaze (or, to put it another way, visual attraction to her beauty); but in the latter two cases, it is likely that Thryth is less concerned for her womanly honour than for her queenly pride and pre-eminence over lower-ranked people in the hall.

ac him wælbende / weotode tealde

(but he could consider himself destined for slaughter-bonds,)

handgewriþene / hraþe seoþðan wæs

(tied [or woven] by hand; rapidly afterwards)

æfter mundgripe / mece geþinged

(after grasp by hand, to the sword he was consigned)

þæt hit sceadenmæl / scyran moste,

(so that the shadowed-tool could decide it [the matter],)

cwealmbealu cyðan / …

(declare the killing-bale.)

So it would seem that Thryth has one or more victims bound and put to the sword (sceadenmæl most likely means a ‘shadow-patterned’ blade). The use of the word mundgripe ‘handgrip’, used elsewhere in reference to Beowulf’s might, may be another literary pun on a traditional formula – this time at the expense of a prosaic second meaning of mund, ‘lordly protection’. In this case, one would imagine it refers to the seizure of the accused by Thryth’s loyal retainers; but Klaeber wonders² “is there an allusion to a fight between maiden (or father) and suitor?”

As we’ve said, there are probably no ‘suitors’ here. But could Thryth be a virago who overpowers her victims before killing them? This seems unlikely: are we to assume that first the bonds are prepared, second the queen has a brawl with the man she has accused, and third the loser has to be beheaded because she wasn’t content to kill him barehanded (or just humiliate him)? The more natural interpretation is that the bonds are brought forth, the victim is seized, and then the killing is carried out as a punishment for his alleged crime. Even were Thryth to arrest the victim personally, as opposed to siccing her retainers on him, her weapon is clearly her queenly authority rather than physical strength.

A more important alternative interpretation, one that I have not seen discussed before, is that the majority of these lines are hypothetical – that is to say, that Thryth may have a dangerous reputation (presumably brought from her homeland) and perhaps attempts to kill one of the retainers, but is thwarted by her husband and reformed in character before any blood is actually spilt.

Grammar is not a failsafe guide to meaning here, but let’s see what it can show us. The verbs starian (‘to gaze [upon Thryth]’) and tellan (‘to count [himself destined for bonds]’) are evidently in the subjunctive mood (that is to say, possessing the imaginal sense of ‘that he gaze’, ‘he could or might consider’, etc.), since their hypothetical context has already been established.³ But the verb wesan ‘to be’ in hraþe seoþðan wæs ‘rapidly after [the arrest] was’ is used indicatively (i.e. as a statement of fact), and mece geþinged ‘the sword was appointed’ or ‘to the sword [he] was consigned’ uses the past participle of geþingan (‘to determine’). This implies that a man was indeed seized, and a sentence of death pronounced upon him. Yet right after this point the passage reverts to hypothetical mode again (þæt…scyran moste, cwealmbealu cyðan ‘so that [the sword] could decide it, declare the killing-bale’).

One possible interpretation is that Thryth accused one of the hall-thanes, had her retainers arrest him and pronounced a death sentence, but that Offa intervened in such a way as to save his life (perhaps arriving ‘in the nick of time’). Thereafter, one imagines, Thryth gets reformed, and so ends up killing no men at Offa’s court (though she may have done so at the court of her father). This seems not wholly unlikely, given the apparent lack of bad blood shown towards her in later life. But the hypothetical wording alone should not be taken as evidence for it, as this might simply express the typical fate of one of her victims.

… / ne bið swylc cwenlic þeaw

(That’s no queenly custom)

idese to efnanne / þeah ðe hio ænlicu sy

(for a lady to perform, though she be peerless;)

þætte freoðuwebbe / feores onsæce

(that a peace-weaver should demand the life,)

æfter ligetorne / leofne mannan

(for a false injury, from a beloved man.)

Freoðuwebbe ‘peace-weaver’ means specifically an outmarried queen (since it is she who creates a kinship bond between unrelated families), and cwen refers primarily to the wife of a king rather than a monarch in her own right. The sense of the whole passage is that it is a contradiction in terms for a ‘kingwife’, a ‘peaceweaver’, to bring strife to her husband’s hall and carry off the lives of his retainers. At this point I think we can put the ‘perilous wedding’ theory out of its misery.

Ligetorn is sometimes translated along the lines of ‘imaginary insult’, but it is more like ‘lying distress’, ‘spurious anger’ or ‘false outrage’ (lyge is ‘lying’ or ‘falsehood’, whereas torn is similar to ‘outrage’ in that it describes a bitter emotional state caused by another’s actions). This implies deliberate deception, for which there would have been no need had Thryth simply sworn death to any man who looked at her; but such a power of arbitrary fiat belongs to despots and modern total states, not to the sort of rulers described in Germanic mythology. Thryth in all likelihood does not literally execute men for looking at her, nor even for ‘gazing’ (either with or in the eyes); she concocts grievances, makes false accusations, and this is why the men in the hall make sure to keep their eyes down.

huru þæt onhohsnod / Hem[m]inges maeg

(But this was hamstrung [?] by Hemming’s kinsman [i.e. Offa];)

The hapax word onhohsnod is generally translated as ‘hamstrung’, thus figuratively ‘put a stop to (Thryth’s behaviour)’. In the commentary to his unpublished prose translation of Beowulf, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a detailed and erudite discussion of this word, which his son Christopher (to my exasperation) decided to excise from the book with the following explanatory note:

My father thought it probable that Hemming was Offa’s maternal grandfather. The translation depends on the etymology proposed for the unrecorded onhohsnode. The common rendering ‘put a stop to it’ assumes the existence of a verb unrecorded in Old English *(on)hohsin(w)ian, derived from hohsinu ‘hamstring’ (‘hock-sinew’), supposedly here in a figurative sense ‘to stop, restrain’. In the course of a long and detailed discussion of cognate forms in other Germanic languages my father rejected this as ‘a violent and unlikely metaphor’, and noted that ‘nowhere have we found anything but a literal meaning to “hamstring” a horse.’ ‘What has this got to do with the tale?’ he said, teasing the proponents of this etymology, ‘even the racing Atalanta was not vanquished by being hamstrung!’ ... He himself favoured, very hesitantly, another proposed etymology, that of an unrecorded verb *(on-hoxnian), related in some way to Old English husc, hux ‘scorn, derision’ and the verb hyscan; hence his translation ‘made light of that’.

From what little we can gather about Tolkien’s deep dive into the cognates of *(on)hohsin(w)ian in other languages, it would seem that ‘to hamstring’ is indeed a legitimate translation. But his conclusion, I think, shows the inkling of a modern tendency to ‘make light’ of Thryth’s behaviour (on which we’ll say more in time). For the sort of virtuous king that Offa is made out to be by the poet, the unjust killing of a retainer would not be an occasion for any sort of levity.

It is strange that Tolkien mentions the Atalanta story in order to dismiss the idea of hamstringing a person, when surely the closer comparison is to the traditional Germanic tale of Wayland. In the Eddic Vǫlundarkviða, Wayland is hamstrung by a cruel king as a means of confining him to his smithy, and in the high-medieval Thidrekssaga version of the tale this is a punishment for killing a retainer of the king. Although it seems savagely unjust in his case (because Weyland is innocent in the Vǫlundarkviða, and kills with just cause in the Thidrekssaga), it might rather have come across as rough justice to the original audience in the case of a deceitful murderess.

Yet as we’ve said, it is not hie ‘her’ that is hamstrung, but a generic þæt ‘that’ – presumably meaning the unqueenly behaviour of Thryth and not the woman herself. This could mean that Offa, after the killing of one or more of his men, became sceptical of Thryth’s accusations and began to override her judgements upon his men – thus ‘hamstringing’ her desire to kill them. But in our alternative interpretation, in which she had only arrested and condemned a man, it could mean that he intervened in such a way as to ‘hamstring’ the death sentence.

We cannot then avoid the conclusion that onhohsnod(e) is used figuratively, despite Tolkien’s opinion that it is a “violent and unlikely metaphor”. Yet the choice of this hapax word in an otherwise-unattested sense, in a passage densely packed with multiple meanings, might well allude to a more concrete instance of hamstringing somewhere in the background. (To take a wild stab in the dark, had Offa hamstrung his queen’s prized horse for the crime of looking at her, this would be a trick worthy of Petruchio in the Taming of the Shrew.)

ealodrincende / oðer sædan

(ale-drinkers otherwise told;)

þæt hio leodbealewa / læs gefremede

(that she performed less [i.e. no more] harm upon the people)

inwitniða / syððan ærest wearð

(and malicious evils, since first she was)

gyfen goldhroden / geongum cempan

(given, gold-decked, to the young champion)

æðelum diore / …

(of noble ancestry…)

The first line can be translated with almost mechanical literalism as ale-drinkers other[wise] said. This is usually interpreted as a poetic conceit: a typical paraphrase would be “men at their ale told [me] a different story, that she performed fewer oppressions of the people…” Yet although the Beowulf-poet does attribute his tale to oral-traditional sources, typically in short phrases like mine gefræge ‘as I have heard’, nowhere else does he refer to them so specifically.

In the event that Thryth had arrested a man and sentenced him to death, but had not yet carried this out before it was ‘hamstrung’ by Offa, the line could take on a different meaning. In this case it could mean that other retainers in the mead-hall made witness statements to counter the accusations, either to persuade Offa or to dissuade Thryth. If this is the case, then the word þæt in the following line would still make sense, as it can be used in the sense of ‘so that’: e.g. “ale drinkers otherwise told [Offa, or Thryth], so that afterwards she performed fewer oppressions of the people…” As per usual, there might be a double meaning here.

The statement that Thryth went on to inflict ‘less’ harm upon the people (leodbealu ‘people-bale’, which probably carries the sense of oppression by cruel rulers) can be read as a litotical expression for ‘no more’ or ‘none at all’. The implication is of course that she committed such acts in the past, but we do not know for sure whether this was before her marriage to Offa or afterwards. (The idea that she been married to someone else before Offa, or lived for a time as an independent queen, is unlikely in light of the fact that Thryth is being compared to the young bride Hygd).

… / syððan hio Offan flet

(of noble ancestry, since she Offa’s floor [i.e. hall])

ofer fealone flod / be fæder lare

(o’er the fallow⁴ sea, by her father’s counsel,)

siðe gesohte / …

(sought upon her journey.)

Note that both of the two characters corresponding to Thryth in The Lives of Two Offas are exiled from their home kingdoms, the former by her father and the latter by being set adrift upon the sea. It is also significant that the father of the first ‘Thryth’, i.e. the one who marries Offa of Angel, is a reprobate who makes incestuous advances on his daughter and exiles her for refusing him. Although the Lives author deliberately falsified the story of Offa’s wife, apparently splicing it with a different legend involving Ælla of Northumbria, this detail of the incestuous father does not derive from that legend and one is tempted to think that it was part of the original story.⁵

Such an experience in Thryth’s past would provide some explanation for her subsequent behaviour, as well as some proof that her character is not vicious at its root. Yet to read the phrase be fæder lare (‘by her father’s counsel’) as an understated reference to it would be far too great a stretch. It hardly seems to say more than that Thryth was married to Offa in the normal manner of a ‘peace-weaver’. Were the phrase be fæder luste (‘by desire of her father’), however… But we can entertain no more than a sliver of suspicion that such a pun existed in the original poem and got edited out by those who copied it.⁶

On the other hand, the second Thryth in the Lives is full of pride over her lineage and haughty disdain for others, and this equally supports our alternative interpretation of her objection to the ‘gazing’.

… / ðær hio syððan well

(Where [or there] thereafter she well)

in gumstole / gode mære

(upon the throne, for goodness famed,)

lifgesceafta / lifigende breac

(enjoyed [or employed], while living, the fated span of her life;)

hiold heahlufan / wið hæleþa brego

(held high love with the heroes’ chieftain [i.e. Offa]:)

ealles moncynnes / mine gefræge

(of all mankind, so I have heard,)

þæs selestan / bi sæm tweonum

(betwixt the two seas, the very best)

eormencynnes / …

(of the human [or imperially-mighty] race…)

At this point the topic has changed from Thryth to Offa, and there’s not so much for us to say – other than that the use of gumstol (literally ‘man-seat’) for ‘throne’ is interesting in the context of a virago-like queen, since the meter would have been served just as well by the more common gifstol ‘gift-seat’. This could possibly relate to something in the original story. But assuming that Beowulf was written in 8th- or early 9th-century Mercia, and that it draws parallels between the legendary Offa and Thryth and the historical Offa and Cynethryth, it may be a sly reference to the way in which Offa of Mercia raised his wife to an unprecedented level of authority (e.g. by having coins minted in her name and charters witnessed by her).

A Second Look

In the course of this long analysis of a very dense passage, I have offered several unorthodox interpretations, some of which seem warranted while others are obvious logical stretches. I should clarify here that my intention is not so much to ‘debunk’ the conventional understanding, and replace it with a new one, as to show what a complex web of ambiguity pervades these digressive episodes in Beowulf.

Given that we are ill-equipped to resolve this ambiguity, the best that a modern translator can hope to do is to reproduce intact as many of its ‘threads’ as possible, by avoiding careless choices of wording that would snap the connections to possible alternative readings. What follows is my own attempt to practice that ethos on this passage. Remember, the original topic of discussion is Hygd, and the switch to Thryth is announced by a pun on her name.

... Yet not too humble for that;
Nor too niggardly with gifts    for the Gothish ranksmen,
Not thrifty with treasures;    tempered in her heart
Unlike that vibrant folk-queen    of fearsome crime.
There were none so daring    as to dare to risk,
Among the merry band of men –    save her married lord –
That he meet her with eye-gaze    in open day.
Else he'd count himself destined    for deadly bonds,
To be bound on him by hand;    hotly following
A custodial seizure,    the sword was deemed –
So that the shadow-patterned blade    might settle the matter,
And declare the death-doom.    No queenly way
For a lady to behave,    though her looks be peerless –
That a weaver-of-peace    should deprive of life,
Out of false outrage,    a valued man!
Yet that was hamstrung    by Hemming's kinsman.
Ale-drinkers    other tales told:
Such that violence on the people    she performed no more,
Nor malicious enmities,    since erst she came
To be yielded, gold-decked,    to the youthful champion
Of ancestry noble;    since to Offa's court,
By advice of her father,    o'er the fallow waves
She went upon her journey;    and well thereafter,
Famed for goodness,    on the virile throne,
The lifespan allotted her    she lived and used:
Held high love    with the heroes' leader –
Who of all mankind,    we've heard it said,
Was the very best –    twixt both the seas –
Of our widespread race.

The third and final part of this post will address some of the distortions of feminist ‘scholarship’ on the subject of Thryth, and offer extra support for some alternative interpretations discussed here.

1. In the ‘fourth edition’ of Klaeber’s Beowulf, updated after the death of Frederick Klaeber to reflect current scholarly opinion, the idea of executed suitors is stated with less forthrightness and traced to G.V. Smithers. Useful context is added on other parts of the digression, but the name of the queen has been changed from Thryth to Fremu – a step backward from Klaeber’s understanding.

2. Apparently on the suggestion of one Stefanović, who wrote a paper in 1934 that I have not been able to access, and whose full name I have not even been able to find out.

3. By the line nænig þæt dorste / deor geneþan ‘there were none so daring as to dare to risk’ and the half-line þæt hire an dæges ‘that on her by day (he gaze, etc.)’ The subjunctive mood for non-factual statements is still found in modern English (consider for example the difference between “hallowed be thy name” and “hallowed is thy name”), but it had more distinct forms in Old English and could be used more often without a specific modal verb (like ‘would’, ‘might’, etc.). Although some subjunctive forms of verbs are different from indicative ones, in the singular present tense of starian and past tense of tellan they happen to be the same, so the mood must be inferred from context.

4. 'Fallow’ is a strange descriptor of waves, since it can also refer to the brownness of horses and the yellowness of leaves, but may refer to a generally ‘dismal’ or ‘earthy’ coloration. It is technically unrelated to the ‘fallowness’ of land.

5. The earliest known source for the Constance tale is Nicholas Trivet’s Anglo-Norman Chronicle, the relevant parts of which can be read at HathiTrust.

6. My suspicion that some parts of this poem have been ‘sanitized’ for Christian sensibilities was first aroused when I studied the Finnsburg episode, and came across the phrase sume on wæl crungon (‘some [men] had fallen in the battle’) in the context of a bloody hall-siege followed by a disgraceful peace treaty in which the survivors had to swear fealty to the killer of their lord. Although this might easily be read as an example of Anglo-Saxon litotes, it might also imply that some of the men chose suicide over dishonour (hence that only some of the dead fell in the battle, as others had died by their own hands), and that one or more lines describing this had perhaps been edited out. Obviously both incest and suicide would have been highly controversial for a Christian audience, yet both seem to have featured in the original Germanic mythology, at least if the life story of Signy in the Norse Völsunga saga can be taken as any indication.