Beowulf and Other Mystical Concepts

Tuesday, February 03, 2009
-19° 51.7’ / -19° 39’ at 7.6 knots. No outstanding activity occurs today. Now there follows a snippet of work from 1500 years ago which—among other things—discusses the extinction of a people:
v. 111…
Many fine heirlooms in a stone house were stowed
From a high-born rich race, disappeared long ago.
They had buried their riches in the ancient old cache,
But death took them over, returned them to ash.
At last only one remained of their race,
And he knew his own fate would be death’s cold embrace.
A barrow stood waiting, a new one, I’m told—
Hewn from the stone to hide all their gold.
This keeper assured that the treasure was hid
And wouldn’t be scattered, or put up for bid.
He said a few words before he lay down:
“All this fine treasure we took from the ground;
Return I it now to where it began:
Mined from the earth by honorable men.
All of my clan has been ruined by war.
They went down to their deaths from here not too far,
And now I’m the last, the last of them all.
Soon I’ll lie down to do death’s certain call,
To snuff out my life--forever to sleep—
And for all of these treasures, there’s no one to keep:
Nobody left to carry a sword;
Nobody left to utter a word;
Nobody left to polish a plate;
Nobody left to sweep up the grate;
Nobody left to shine on a cup,
And nobody left the beds to make up.
Nobody here, the great fires to stoke—
All of their bodies have gone up in smoke.
The people departed, their gear hasped with gold—
Now stripped of its hoops, as time made it old.
The shiner of helmets and war masks now sleeps.
Mail worn in victories and in some defeats,
Through shield-collapse or cut of sword on owner or on borrower,
Decaying now as doth the corpse of that departed warrior:
Nor web mail worn upon their backs—
Nor weapons stowed in neat-done stacks;
Nor trembling harp, nor song of sage—
This ending of our history’s page:
No tumbling hawk within the hall,
And no swift horse from which to fall—
No people left, nor son, nor daughter—
Lost from pillage and from slaughter.”
And so he moved about his world at night or early morn,
Wishing he had died with them, or else had not been born.
Alone, deserted, lamenting, too, one thing he understood:
He’d stand no more when death came down and drained his heart of blood.

That is verse 111, my own translation, of Beowulf, in the scene just before the old harrower dragon discovers their great treasure den. Recall that Beowulf is the earliest work extant in the English language. I have great objection to the recent movie: they got very far from the story, changed the history and the lessons. Another thing I learned lately is that the first work signed by its author was the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, and its author was Shin-eqi-unninni who wrote for King Ashurbanipal. His work was in cuneiform and is the oldest signature known. Gilgamesh came from Uruk over 2700 BC, and that story is the origin of the great flood.

The Beowulf movie depicted Grendl’s mother as a wicked beauty (Angelina Jolie, near nude) who seduced the Danish kings (Hrothgar, et al) and Beowulf. In the original (verses 75-78) she was described as hell-hag, witch, or hell’s bitch, and she was almost as gargantuan as her hideous son. Her attack on Hrothgtar’s mead hall was only slightly less violent than Grindl’s. This mother and son, according to the original, came from Cain’s seed, discarded by God and banished from the world of men. All were either giants or monsters, but the giants had been slain. In the hell-hag’s cave at the bottom of the deeps was the great sword above her mantle that had belonged to a giant. No man could swing it, save Beowulf. It was with this sword that Beowulf decapitated her. She had been too scaly and tough for his own heirloom sword to cut when he smote her head: instead, she broke its blade. No reference exists in Beowulf along Christian lines, but it is filled with Old Testament good and evil, where the chief merchant of good is God Himself. The scale of wars and killing is also Old Testamential—bloody, total, no quarter given, and frequent. One side is always in the right and usually had been victimized by an earlier event involving the opposite side.

The dragon also served an entirely separate purpose in Beowulf, the epic. The movie construes it as an offspring of the beautiful witch and the Hero. It was not: it embodied a separate moral that moved the tale along to Beowulf’s death and the subsequent subduction of his country, Geatland. Beowulf never married, and was celebate as far as we know. The prelude to the battle between Beowulf and the old enamel-scaled dragon establishes that Beowulf’s pride has become too great, yet he has a premonition of his death. As the battle rages, it is not Beowulf who renders the telling blow to the dragon, but his most loyal mortal soldier and kinsman, Wiglaf. Had not Wiglaf been courageous enough to fly beneath the dragon’s fire and attack, Beowulf would have been defeated. For fifty years, Beowulf had chosen the finest men to be his select soldiers, and he treated them special. So special, in fact, that they got soft and were no help at all in the battle. Wiglaf could not rally them: that is a signal that Geatland was in danger. So, the movie sucked, as they so often do, but the old tale is wonderful…and it is the oldest one in our language.

Wednesday, February 04, 2009
The 38th day at sea. We are at -21° 14’ and –17° 27.6’. Our speed is 7.8 knots, and we shall be equidistant from land at South America from the nearest land in Africa when we reach -13° 5’ and -24° 2’, and that distance will be 1560 NM either way. We are now 2000 NM from Cape Town.

I like that name, “Cape Town”. It conjures mystery of place and seduces the mind’s eye. My imagination declares it a good place, a place that gives hope that the journey between oceans is possible, the hard part is done. There is an old song, “Far Away Places, With Strange-Sounding Names” I call to mind. Think of Samarkand, the Silk Road, Pergamum…places more alive in the imagination than on the map. Maps set limits: imaginations have none, so discard the map and think of south pole, or Kabenda, or Babylon, or Nineveh, or a spot like the point of no return, or Crazy Woman VORTAC. Mystic places remain so without a map, without too much knowledge. Minds need to imagine: what is it like? What would one see? What manner of creatures lives here? What made the woman crazy (it was the wind, they say)? Imagine having 22,000 feet of water below you. What’s down there? What does it look like? How many gallons is that? Imagine a spice caravan on the silk road: what do they carry, what do they seek? What manner of country and danger are they seeing? How dark the skies, how many stars a thousand years ago? There is a place in Tibet at the headwaters of what becomes the Brahmaputra River, the Yarlung Tsangpo, that can be observed only with greatest effort.



The water is so turbulent and the volume so great that no man has ever been able to run it, so it remains virgin, powerful beyond any measure, remote at the extreme, and in an environment unfriendly to human kind. I would love too see it, to hear it thunder, to understand something about its magnificent power…and yet I so want it to remain virgin, undammed, undiminished by millions of grubby little hands, free of tourists and developers. When John Wesley Powell set out to discover the great canyon of the Colorado, he and his men camped with the Indians on the Green River above the confluence of the two rivers. The Chief told Powell the name of the (Grand) canyon in his tongue and translated it as “mans go in, don’t come out.” That was, of course, before the river had been dammed and diminished, perhaps ruined at the Glen Canyon seeps. Below the Boulder Dam, the river is essentially emasculated, nothing left to give after lighting up Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Powell shot 40-foot rapids in brown, turbulent water. Several men died. A few abandoned the raft and tried to climb out, and all but one of them died. The survivor was found by Indians and spared because he was “tetched in the head”. That is also a good book, by Powell. Nowadays, the river meanders through the Grand Canyon all green and blue, no significant rapids, trails in and out of the depths. The first time I saw it, it was brown and mean. There were speakers (like old drive-in movie speakers) which transmitted the roar of the river to an observer on the rim. Huge, and now mostly tame.

And the happiest name-place of all? The Cape of Good Hope. That is a wonderful name, intimating as it does that things might become better now, that the terrors of the seas and nights of dread and survival are now going to release you. A fair wind will blow, and the safety of your body is assured. When I build my town, it will not be named like my first two were: Litter Barrel and Resume Speed. Rather, I shall name it Good Hope.


Well, shoot. That doesn’t do it, either. Something that is mysterious in “Cape” is missing here. Perhaps I can name it Cape of Good Hope Town: that way we get both capes in there. Something misses, and that is not good. Tell me, what do you suggest? Remember, it must be mysterious, a conjurer of great imaginings, pleasing to the ear and to the mind’s eye. This is a bit like titling a book properly. Probably, we need a far-away place with a strange-sounding name.

One far-away place—from anywhere—is St. Helena.