Beowulf

So, in the spirit of cultural enrichment – and with half a mind to arm myself with British culture for the next encounter with a Reform supporter, who probably wouldn’t know Beowulf from Baywatch – I thought I’d better dip into the thing. Beowulf, that is, not Baywatch - and not just any Beowulf, mind you, but Tolkien’s translation – the man who spent his spare time inventing entire languages, which tells you all you need to know about his hobbies. And lo, I found the original ring-givers, the fire-breathing dragons, and the sort of hall-brooding doom that Tolkien later parcelled up as Middle-earth.

But good grief, what a slog. It’s Homer on steroids – every time you think you’ve hit a nice, punchy sentence, the thing turns into three pages of embroidered waffle about whose uncle’s cousin once slew a sea-monster. This isn’t a story you read, it’s a story you endure. Like a Reform Party leaflet, only with more dragons and fewer tax breaks for landlords.

And then it struck me – of course it’s waffle. It wasn’t written for someone curled up on the sofa with a nice glass of red. It was for bellowing across a smoky mead-hall to half-cut warriors slapping each other on the back. The endless kennings and genealogies are just bardic throat-clearing, the oral equivalent of “meanwhile, in a hole in the ground…” Without the embroidery, there’s no performance. Without the performance, you’re just left with the plot – which, boiled down, is: bloke fights monster, bloke fights monster’s mum, bloke fights dragon, bloke dies. Hardly Dostoevsky.

And here’s the real irony. Reform voters love to bang on about British culture, but the foundations of the whole heroic code they fetishise – loyalty, gold-giving, dying gloriously in battle – come straight from Scandinavia. From Danes. From immigrants. The very same foreigners they’d like to keep out if they washed up today on a Kent beach with a shield and a longboat.

The contrast is almost comic. Yukio Mishima could sketch an entire character in a single phrase, describe a death in a sentence so sharp it drew blood. Beowulf, by contrast, gives you forty lines just to say “he put his armour on,” and not merely “put on his armour” either, but “buckled the war-bright, ring-bound byrnie of hammered steel about his shoulders, each plate forged by cunning smiths long dead, so that the light of morning broke upon him like the glittering spray of the whale-road at sunrise.” You can see why the scop needed a captive audience.

So yes, Beowulf is tedious to read. It’s meant to be told, not read. But it’s also a reminder that British culture didn’t spring from the cliffs of Dover fully formed. It was imported, translated, embroidered, and retold. If only today’s self-proclaimed cultural guardians understood that their precious “tradition” was written down by a monk with an eye for a Norse yarn.

But don’t expect them to grasp that nuance. They’d skip the waffle, miss the point, and just insist it should all be condensed into a slogan. Something stirring, something heroic, something… three words long. Something like: “Stop The Boats.” The bardic refrain of our age, chanted over and over by the beer-bellied slogan-shouters, the flag-waving hall-hobbits, the grievance-thanes of Clacton – all presided over by their ale-bench ring-giver, Farage, who dispenses not gold but promises, and never quite pays out.