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Edits have recently been made based on Seamus Heaney's translation. However, Heaney's version is a modern poet's personal rendering; Heaney was not a medievalist or a scholar of Old English, and his version cannot be relied upon for any particular word or interpretation of any specific passage (crux or not). He might choose to write "knife" instead of "sword" to fit the sound or metre of a particular line, whether it was correct (if he indeed knew) or not. This is in my view obviously unsafe as an approach, and certainly not encyclopedic; his version says little or nothing about the original poem. I've given an example in Translating Beowulf of how his approach compares with that of other translators: that is a neutral matter, with no assertion of Heaney's correctness or otherwise. Uncritically adopting Heaney's diction as if it were the definitive text is, on the other hand, quite unjustifiable, and we shouldn't go there. Accordingly I've reverted the most recent edits. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:26, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I haven't been able to find a definition for elided metaphor. It would be good to add an explanation where the term is used, or else to link to a new section in the article on metaphors and provide a definition there. B.Bryant (talk) 10:46, 5 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The lead needs to begin, as it always has done, by stating plainly that Beowulf is a poem. For the average non-scholarly reader (think sporty student doing an English minor, forced to do a bit of (Old) Eng. Lit. on the side in between sports, carousing, and courting ...), it is way non-obvious that "epic" implies "poetry", however tautologous that might appear to the 0.0001% of the population who make a study of that matter. Recall, perhaps, that marketing people call The Lord of the Rings (book or more likely film) an "epic", and you will notice that in popular usage, "epic" can apply to prose, film, perhaps music (Wagner?), oh, ... long pause ... [afterthought, much more doubtfully] and are there also epic poems? From this perspective, I hope you -- or at least, other editors! -- may see that we do really need to explain that this is a poem and that it has been labelled an epic. We insiders also know that Tolkien was highly critical of the "epic" label for the poem, but we'll not worry about that now. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:53, 29 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
level-4 vital article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
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