Beowolf
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendraofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning!
Ðæm eafera wæs æfter cenned,
geong in geardum, þone god sende
folce to frofre; fyrenðearfe ongeatþe hie ær drugon aldorlease
lange hwile. Him þæs liffrea,
wuldres wealdend, woroldare forgeaf;
Beowulf wæs breme (blæd wide sprang),
Scyldes eafera Scedelandum in.
Awesome, the bane of all English lit majors is soon coming to a silver screen near you. Two separate versions , a Canadian/English/Icelandic version and a big Hollywood production. I’ll go see the former, I’m sure it will be truer to the original pre-10thC epic.
Oh you want a translation of the above? Ah well if you insist but it’s so much more foreceful in Old English.
LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,
from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore,
awing the earls. Since erst he lay
friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him:
for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve,
till before him the folk, both far and near,
who house by the whale-path, heard his mandate,
gave him gifts: a good king he!
To him an heir was afterward born,
a son in his halls, whom heaven sent
to favor the folk, feeling their woe
that erst they had lacked an earl for leader
so long a while; the Lord endowed him,
the Wielder of Wonder, with world’s renown.
Famed was this Beowulf: far flew the boast of him,
son of Scyld, in the Scandian lands.
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Comments
Comment from Doug Alder
Time: February 14, 2005, 7:12 am
No, it is a project of McMaster University. There is no accreditation on thesite for who translated it so I am assuming it was a university project and the translation was done by many while studying Old English.
ETH is not showing up properly in any browser. What’s infuriating is that the capitalized version works in the original but I can not get it to do so here even though the source code it the same. It works if you go to here as well but lowercase eth does not work anywhere with any browser. In all broswers I’ve tested with, thorn looks like a p with an extended vertical line
Comment from Stu Savory
Time: February 14, 2005, 9:11 am
What value of Charset are you using? UTF8? Probably need to reset to latin-1 to get ETH and eth correctly???
Stu
Comment from Doug Alder
Time: February 14, 2005, 9:46 am
That does not appear to be possible in FireFox – it is not listed under the encoding possibilities. Is there an ISO number for it – nothing listed as Latin 1 at all not even in my version of Opera (7.11)
Comment from Doug Alder
Time: February 14, 2005, 9:54 am
I currently have it set to Western [ISO-8859-1] which I believe to be Latin -1 but it still does not display properly
Comment from pericat
Time: February 14, 2005, 11:33 am
Looking at the page source, it appears the problem with the ETH char is that the preceding ampersand is rendered as its numeric entity (&) instead of as an ampersand.
I’ve run into this mis-translation within WP 1.2x in other cases, where the letters I keyed in were ‘over-processed’ by the wpautop and wptexturize functions, and wrote a plugin to make it stop, mainly for use with my photolog. (It has its own problems, so I don’t recommend it unless you write your posts exclusively in html, with tags and everything.)
It looks like the 1.5 version doesn’t have this issue.
You may be able to fix this entry if you re-edit it.
ObTopic: That’s actually a pretty forceful translation. 
Comment from Doug Alder
Time: February 14, 2005, 12:14 pm
Nice Try Pericat – but it didn’t work I had them all set to ampersand eth before but when that wasn’t working I thought I would try setting to the numerical equivalents – which obviously didn’t work either
Comment from pericat
Time: February 14, 2005, 9:39 pm
Were you going to try setting it back at some point? Cos it’s still like that (ampersand-bang-0-3-8-;-E-T-H-;) which for sure will never work.
Though if you’re completely bored with this fussing over a single char, I understand.
(and wpautop plus its evil cousin wptexturize ate the stuff I wrote earlier, leaving only a lone ampersand to stand, meaninglessly, in its place.)
Comment from Doug Alder
Time: February 14, 2005, 10:12 pm
You must be looking at your cache – I just went through the source and all the numbered code had been removed. However just to be certain I went back to the original source code copied it and pasted it back in. The only edits I made were to take out the spacings they used to spread it out to imitate the original layout of the manuscript and to remove the line breaks at the end of each line and that didn’t work so now I’ve grabbed the original source again and all I’ve removed are the line counts and it still doesn’t work. I give up
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Comment from Stu Savory
Time: February 14, 2005, 1:43 am
Seamus Heaney’s version?
Stu
PS: In Opera the letter ‘Eth’ did not get transliterated correctly, it came over as Ampersand ETH
and the letter ‘thorn’ looks wierd in Opera too.
Can someone else pls report what they look like in IE and in Firefox?