“Tollkühn” in German Beowulf translations

Now this is just for scholarly fun. I don’t mean to imply anything serious by it, but if you’ll indulge me, I think you may find this interesting. (Yes, I have seen a girl naked; and no, I do not play World of Warcraft. Why do you ask? :)

Last month, I posted some new thoughts on the etymology of Tolkien’s surname. In that post, I quoted Tolkien’s explanation for the name, where he gives German tollkühn “foolhardy” as its etymology. Shift gears with me now. We all know that Beowulf was, in some ways, at the center of Tolkien’s professional study of ancient Germanic literature. How do the two come together? The answer is in ... hwæt for it ... German translation! (Okay, I know that was bad, but give me a break; I’m just trying to entertain you people! :)

If you have access to a rather ponderous tome entitled (with an acute lack of flair) The Translations of Beowulf: A Critical Bibliography — put together by one Chauncey Brewster Tinker (as Dickensian a name as you’re likely to find in real life) — you’ll quickly see what I mean. If you have a copy (and doesn’t everyone?), follow along ...

Tinker shows that the German word tollkühn is used in three different translations of Beowulf from Old English into Modern German (all of the same passage). The first of these is Karl Simrock’s 1859 translation, with caesura (which I’ve replaced with // below). Here’s a little taste:

Bist du der Beowulf, // der mit Breka schwamm,
Im Wettkampf einst // durch sie weite See?
Wo ihr tollkühn // Untiefen prüftet,
Mit vermessnem Muth // in den Meeresschlünden
Das Leben wagtet? [1]

Chew on that for a moment ... Okay. Moving on, we have G. Zinsser’s “selection” (just the first 836 lines of the poem done into German iambic pentameter) of 1881. Zinsser doesn’t represent the half-line structure visibly as Simrock does, and the translation is very loose (as you can see, four and a half lines in the original expand to a full six below). A bit of its flavor:

Du bist gewiss der Beowulf, der einst
Im Meer mit Breca um die Wette schwamm?
Ihr masset damals euch in kühnem Wagen!
Das mühevolle Werk euch auszureden
Vermochte niemand, tollkühn setztet ihr
Das Leben ein und schwammt ins Meer hinaus. [2]

Finally — in Tinker, at least; perhaps there are other examples yet to be mined? — there is Therese Dahn’s “paraphrase,” apparently done with Simrock’s translation in hand. From a “selection” to a “paraphrase” — things seem to be going from bad to worse for German admirers of Old English literature in the late 19th century, don’t they? This was meant to be an abridged prose version suitable for General Readers, whatever that meant in 1883. But evidently those General Readers appeared in droves, as the book went through numerous editions, including an eleventh edition in 1891, just a year before Tolkien’s birth. Dahn had an innovative solution to the poem’s most difficult cruces: “obscure words, phrases, and lines are omitted.” Now why didn’t I think of that?! (What? No, I am not rolling my eyes! :) Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s a bit of her version:

Bist du der Beowulf, der einst im Wettkampf mit Breka durch die See schwamm? Wo ihr tollkühn in vermessenem Mut euer Leben in den tiefen Wassern wagtet? [3]

For reference, here’s the original Old English against which these efforts were made (give or take; I haven’t searched out the specific editions each translator used, though Tinker gives ample details if anyone cared to):

Eart þú sé Béowulf, // sé þe wið Brecan wunne,
on sídne sǽ // ymb sund flite,
ðǽr git for wlence // wada cunnedon
ond for dolgilpe // on déop wæter
aldrum néþdon? (ll.506–10)

The word for which our three Germans turned to tollkühn is the noun dolgilp “foolish pride, vain-glory”, which is a compound (sometimes hyphenated) of dol “foolish” [Anyone thinking of Tom Bombadil? :)] + gilp “pride, haughtiness”. Thus the choice in German, whatever other faults those translations may have, is quite apt. The English translations I’ve seen offer various solutions — “wantonly”, “idle boasting”, “vainest vaunting”, and so forth — in its place. Seamus Heaney takes us in a somewhat different direction (as he does throughout his translation) with “sheer vanity” [4]. But none of these seem quite as good as “foolhardy” to me. Does anyone know of an English translation that uses this word?

So, in a sense, Tolkien’s name was stamped right onto the poem of which he made such close study. Fitting. I would be very interested to know how Tolkien rendered and annotated these lines himself, but unfortunately, Tolkien’s translations have not been published. Even working from the Old English, Tolkien would hardly have missed this, but I also wonder whether he knew of the use of tollkühn in the German translations that appeared only a generation before him? It’s almost as if Simrock, Zinsser, and Dahn were presaging the arrival of a new Shirriff in Beowulf town. And indeed, in 1936, when he challenged the dismissive and critical milieu of the current scholarship with a groundbreaking essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Tolkien might have been aptly described by many as tollkühn. But he opened the gates to the modern study of the poem, and Beowulf has never been more popular than it is today (even if it is as a cartoonish blockbuster movie).


[1] Tinker, Chauncey B. The Translations of Beowulf: A Critical Bibliography. Yale Studies in English, Volume XVI. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1903, p.62.

[2] Ibid., p.127.

[3] Ibid., pp.133–4.

[4] Beowulf. Translated by Seamus Heaney. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000, p.35.