What? Beowulf and William Morris’s New Old English

Towards the end of his life William Morris published a translation of Beowulf that was unsuccessful with the public. Having looked in detail at his earlier translations from Old Norse in my book William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas, in this talk I look at the linguistic choices Morris made in the Beowulf translation in comparison to the choices he made in his translations from Old Norse. I consider whether his agenda for translation had developed in the intervening time and offer some suggestions for why this translation failed to find an audience.

Ian Felce received his PhD from the English faculty at Cambridge University where he looked at William Morris's interest in Old Norse literature and his saga translations. He is interested in medieval studies as well as medievalism, particularly in in how medieval narratives have influenced each other across different languages, especially those that were at some point spoken in England. He has published on Old Norse literature, including on the earliest texts that were likely sources of sources of Shakespeare's Hamlet. He has been working outside of academia but is now starting to research again. A larger project is on the "male Cinderella" trope across Old English, Old Norse, Anglo-Norman and Middle English texts.