Well, we definitely took hrefn blaec as black raven, not as blackbird. And he does appear many times, usually rending the corpses of the slain.
The Wulf is a monster of a poem, and our version is about 300 lines shorter than the original, simply because our language is so much more economical than Anglo Saxon and we wanted to avoid the padding found in so many translations.
When we finally read Heaney's translation, Alan dubbed it the Heaneywulf, the epic poem of the Celtic people!
Janet, I regard it as 8th C. and written in Scandinavia. It is monotheistic, no Christ, no conception of the trinity, no mention of the Germanic pantheon, only the All-father. So I date the poem by its theology. I believe the poet had some familiarity with the Old Testament, not the New. So it certainly couldn't have been written in England after St. Augustine converted the country.
Last edited by Tim Murphy; 08-01-2015 at 06:58 AM.
|