Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘A Ship of Death’ appears in The Haw Lantern (1987). It is a translation of lines 26 – 52 of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. Readers would have to wait for twelve years before the full translation was published in 1999.
I am writing from Shearsby in the ‘foggy Midlands’ of England. The village is set about 30 miles south of Breedon-on -the-Hill, where Beowulf might have been composed and 30 miles east of Tamworth, a centre for the Mercian court whose members would have listened to the poem performed with interest. Shearsby may well have been the farmstead of someone called Skeifr (Institute of Name Studies), perhaps a warrior from the Great Heathen Army turning his sword in for a ploughshare. The Initial Old English ‘Sc’ softening to ‘Sh’ in an area of only light Danish influence. Behind the village name might be an early association with the mythical Sceafa: the Sheaf in ‘Scyld Sheafson’ (Anon.).
The Beowulf passage translated from the Anglo-Saxon and included in The Haw Lantern as ‘A Ship of Death’ captures a dual moment of both origin and death as the funeral of a much-loved king, Scyld, draws in memories of the surprise arrival of a lone baby washed up ashore: a foundling in a boat. It describes the preparations for launching a boat out to sea, carrying the body of ‘the chief they revered’ and laden with ‘far-fetched treasures’ and ‘precious gear’. In the midst of this practical stacking of weapons, armour and ‘battle-tackle’ a memory is triggered of a child arriving unexpectedly, alone in a small boat, similarly laden with treasures. The funerary ship will be launched on a voyage into the afterlife. Whilst the Beowulf poet is at first sure, from his Christian perspective that Scyld has ‘crossed over into Our Lord’s keeping’ by the end of the section he admits that no-one ‘knows for certain who salvaged that load’
The lines in this translation mirror some effects of the original poem. Each line has four beats and can be split into parts after the second beat. These parts are usually linked by alliteration, for example:
His warrior band did | what he bade them
The passage also contains vivid imagery helping to set the scene:
A ring-necked prow | rode in the harbour,
clad with ice, | its cables tightening.
It may be a surprise to find a translation of a very English poem in the midst of an Irish poet’s work, but Beowulf makes itself feel at home in the The Haw Lantern. There are direct and indirect links to it from many of the other poems in the book. It is introduced in the preceding poem From the Land of the Unspoken with
but solidarity comes flooding up in us
when we hear their legends of infants discovered
floating in coracles towards destiny
or of kings’ biers heaved and borne away
on the river’s shoulders or out into the sea roads.
And the following poem, The Spoonbait has
Then exit, the polished helmet of a hero
Laid out amidships above scudding water.
Further on in the book, in Holding Course, there is an image of ‘spikes that kept vigil overhead / Like Grendel’s steely talon nailed / To the mead-hall roof.’ The presence of Beowulf can be traced even to individual words passing between the Angle-Saxon of that poem and the local vocabulary; words like ‘thole’ and ‘hoke’ make their ways back and forth across the word hoards.
Translations
A chunk of translation also fits in with the theme of translation appearing in poems like In Memoriam: Robert Fitzgerald, commemorating a translator friend and Alphabets, the book’s first poem that charts the growth of a poet’s mind against the languages and scripts he encounters.
Theme of (re)birth
There is a theme of birth recalled that shows up in this poem with the moment of the child’s arrival and what “those first ones did / who cast him away when he was a child / and launched him out alone over the waves”. This moment of arrival recalled in loss can be found as a childhood reminiscence in the last of the Clearances sequence:
Deep planted and long gone, my coeval
Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,
Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere
The theme can also found expressed as tragedy in Wolfe Tone, whose hero arrives ‘Light as a skiff’ and recalls:
I who once wakened to the shouts of men
rising from the bottom of the sea
men in their shirts mounting through deep water
when the Atlantic stove our cabin’s dead lights in
and the big fleet split and Ireland dwindled
as we ran before the gale under bare poles.
Wolfe Tone’s shipwreck is a far echo of Scyld’s becalmed finding of safe harbour, but an echo none the less.
Another retelling of the legend of Scyld
Seamus Heaney is not the only northern Irish writer intrigued by the legend of Scyld and his strange origins. Belfast-born C.S. Lewis also reused this story for the origin of his hero, Shasta, in The Horse and in Boy, the fifth of his Narnia series.
Listen Now Again
The National Library of Ireland has an exhibition celebrating the life and work of Seamus Heaney during 2020. A virtual book club discussion of The Haw Lantern poems was held on 28 August where this poem was shared.
References
Heaney, S. (1987) The Haw Lantern. Faber.
Heaney, S. (1999) Beowulf. Faber.
Lewis, C.S. (1954) The Horse and his Boy. Geoffrey Bles.
North, R. (2010), The origins of Beowulf: from Vergil to Wiglaf, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Institute of Name Studies. Shearsby: Key to English Place-names. http://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk/map/place/Leicestershire/Shearsby
Anon. Origins of Village Names: Shearsby. [Online] Access from https://www.shearsbyparishcouncil.gov.uk/uploads/history-origins-of-the-name-shearsby.pdf 18/08/2020.
Shearsby History Notes 