The Old English Refrain Nobody Can Quite Translate

The Old English is quoted from the Exeter Book text as printed in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records; the verse translation quoted is Francis B. Gummere's of 1909. Plain prose renderings are made for this article.

Here is the sentence. Five words in Old English, repeated six times in a poem forty-two lines long:

þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg! ¹

The usual English is "that passed over, so may this."² It sounds like a proverb, and perhaps it was one. But the grammar of the original is odder than the English lets on, and the oddness is where the meaning lives. Both pronouns, þæs and þisses, are in the genitive, the "of" case, so that a strictly literal version comes out as something like "of that it passed over, of this it so may," which is not a sentence anyone would say.² Translators have had to decide what the verb's subject is, and the decision changes the poem.

What the Poem Is

"Deor" survives in a single copy, in the Exeter Book, a manuscript of Old English poetry made in about 970 to 990 and given to Exeter Cathedral, where it still is.² The poem has no title in the manuscript; it takes its name from line 37, where the speaker says Me wæs Deor noma, "Deor was my name."¹ Nobody knows who wrote it or when, and the suggestions range widely.²

Its shape is unlike anything else in Old English. Five short stanzas, each closed by the refrain, name a sufferer from Germanic legend: Weland the smith, hamstrung and enslaved by King Nithhad; Beadohild, Nithhad's daughter, pregnant by Weland's revenge; a third case so garbled in the manuscript that scholars cannot agree what it says; Theodric, who "waited for thirty winters"; and Eormanric, the Gothic king of "wolfish mind," under whom "Sat many a subject sorrow-bound, / waiting but woe."³² Then a reflective passage, then a sixth stanza in which the speaker tells his own story: he was the poet of the Heodenings, "dear to my master," until another singer, Heorrenda, "by grace of his lays has gained the land / which the haven-of-heroes erewhile gave me."³ A court poet has lost his job to a better court poet. And the refrain, one last time.

What the Refrain Does

Read the stanzas without the refrain and you have a catalogue of misery: mutilation, rape, exile, tyranny, and at the end a small professional humiliation set beside them without apology. Read the refrain after each and the catalogue becomes an argument. Every one of these griefs, the line says, was once the present, and is now the past. Weland's captivity is over. Beadohild's terror is over. Thirty winters ended. Eormanric died. The refrain is a machine for turning "this is unbearable" into "this will have been."

That is why the grammar matters. The genitives can be read as "as for that, it passed; as for this, it may too," with an impersonal it, the passing of things being something that simply happens.² Or the passing can be given a subject. Gummere, in 1909, chose one, and made it a person: "That he surmounted: so this may I!"³ Now the refrain is not a law of time but a boast of endurance, and it changes person from stanza to stanza: "That she surmounted" after Beadohild.³ Tolkien, translating the line for his own purposes, kept it impersonal and made time the agent: "Time has passed since then, this too can pass."² Three translators, three theologies. In one, sorrow wears out on its own; in another, a man wears it out; in the third, time does the work.

Gummere himself was not sure his choice was right. His note on the last refrain asks: "Who? Is the refrain here a kind of echo? Is this Deor who surmounted his troubles, as also may the hearer or reader who repeats the poem? Was the whole a general poem of consolation?"³ The questions are the honest ones. The Old English lets all of them stand.

The Passage in the Middle

Between the fifth legend and Deor's own story comes a passage that has no refrain and no name in it. Gummere:

Sitteth one sorrowful, severed from joys; all's dark in his soul; he deems for him endless ever the anguish-time! Yet let him think that through this world the wise God all awards with difference, on many an earl great honor lays, wealth at will, but woe on others.³

In the Old English the sufferer "thinks to himself that the portion of hardships is endless," and the remedy is a thought: that the "wise Lord," witig dryhten, "changes things often throughout this world," showing favour to many a man and to some a "share of woes."¹ This is the nearest the poem comes to saying what the refrain means. Griefs end not because sufferers are strong but because the world turns, and turns by the will of a God who distributes fortune unevenly and not for ever. Readers have noticed how close this is to Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy King Alfred had translated into English a century or so before the Exeter Book was written, and whose Lady Philosophy makes the same point about Fortune's wheel; but the poem does not name Boethius, and the resemblance may be no more than that two people in the same tradition said the same true thing.

Why Scholars Argue

The poem's genre is disputed: it has been called a consolation, a lament, an ubi sunt poem ("where are they now?"), and even a begging poem, a displaced minstrel's application for a new position.² The scholar John Miles Foley put the difficulty plainly: "Cut off from its traditional background, 'Deor' makes little sense."² Each stanza assumes that the listener already knows the story of Weland, or Theodric, or Eormanric, and can supply the ending, which is what makes the refrain land. We mostly cannot. The third stanza is the extreme case: its text is "ungrammatical and its meaning uncertain,"² and every translation of it is a guess. So the modern reader hears the refrain without being able to hear what it answers, which is a little like hearing "amen" without the prayer.

There is also the question of tone. Is the last stanza, in which the great sorrows of legend are followed by a poet who lost his land grant, a joke at the speaker's expense, or a serious claim that a small grief is still a grief? Gummere's footnote leaves it open. So does the poem.

The Answer

What did Deor mean by "that passed over, so may this"? The honest reply is that the Old English means less, and more, than any translation of it. Less, because the sentence has no subject: it does not say who surmounts or what heals. More, because the missing subject lets the listener put in whatever the case requires: God, time, patience, or oneself. The poem is a list of things that ended, offered to someone in the middle of a thing that has not. Its consolation is not that grief is small, since the griefs it names are enormous. It is that grief is dated. The poem looks back on suffering, while the refrain turns toward possibility: mæg, "may." That is as far as the poem will go, and it is exactly as far as an honest consolation can.