Strong Like Beowulf

Beowulf | Translated by Maria Dahvana Headley | MCD Books, 2020

When I was a child, play was violent. We wrestled, had water balloon fights, shoved each other into the lake. Play was the joy of being in my body with other kids, testing my strength against theirs. But as I aged from childhood into teenage girlhood, I became isolated from increasingly boy-dominated play spaces. I got older, we got stronger, they got rougher, and we all knew that I didn’t want to get hurt.

The summer before sixth grade, I went jump skiing for the first time. I wanted to prove myself strong and capable, but I ended up in a cast for the rest of the summer. After that, the fear of violence and the threat of injury tainted both individual and competitive sports. I cringed away from arm-wrestling; even thumb wars were too much. I removed myself from play-violence, from sports, from exercising altogether.

Boys could exercise for fun, I thought, but if a girl exercised, she was obsessed with her image. I was uncomfortable in my changing body, and I looked down at girls who sought power in theirs. For boys and girls both, I figured there must be an ulterior motive to exercise, whether it be camaraderie or vanity or entertainment. And if I could pursue those ends through an activity that couldn’t physically hurt me, why wouldn’t I?

I found camaraderie, vanity, and entertainment in theatre—it was play without consequences. Everything was carefully orchestrated: scenes choreographed so that no one would get hurt, fights so fake I didn’t even touch the other performers. I did musicals, but I danced as little as possible. I proclaimed myself “bad at dance,” but in reality, I feared trying too hard and looking silly or vain. I danced poorly on purpose. My clumsy moves were a character choice—it was the stepsister or the old lady’s fault, not mine. I played goofy or uptight characters, safe and invulnerable behind the mask of performance.

During my freshman year of college, I took an aerial silks class. Climbing into the air on nothing but cloth and my own strength was exhilarating at first. Looking down from the ceiling, I pictured myself tall and powerful, high above the ground, but I soon grew frustrated at my physical limitations. One grueling climb up to the ceiling left me winded and aching. And, worse, I didn’t have the core strength to turn myself upside-down without flailing and falling.

I watched the instructor, on her third class of the day, demonstrate a pull-up. She showed no sign of fatigue, performing every move with ease. After a few seconds of holding the same pull-up, I crumbled to the floor in shame. The girl I shared a mat with struggled just as much as I did, but that was no comfort. I wanted to be capable of any move—why wasn’t I?

Embarrassed, I took to the group’s core warmups: planks, crunches, pushups. I moved through them on my dorm room floor when my roommate wasn’t looking. But the sound of my heavy breathing was overwhelming. I couldn’t stand to listen to such an obvious reminder of my weakness. So, I found a free audiobook I had bookmarked on my laptop years ago—a classic, an epic poem—and listened to it one part at a time as I did crunches and pushups and held increasingly dreaded planks.

I had heard of Beowulf before, sure. I had even tried—and failed—to read a different translation a few years earlier. I didn’t understand what the big deal was. He was just a man who was good at war. Who cares?

But in Maria Dahvana Headley’s 2020 translation, there he was:  Beowulf the strong, Beowulf the mighty, Beowulf the respected. Beowulf didn’t do pushups, but he was formidable. For him and his men, strength was about survival. It was about turning his body into a weapon—the sharpest he could—to carve the world into one he could live in.

And yes, Beowulf’s strength was violent. Battles swarmed my ears—man against man, against monster, against dragon. Man harnessing his will to commit shocking acts of violence. I was vaguely horrified by the rising death toll, but I still felt emboldened by the idea that these feats were committed by a body, not unlike my own. I found comfort in the fact that we’ve all got one. All our ancestors, back to Beowulf and beyond—they all had a body. A body, shaped by years of effort, could be welded into a tool to protect oneself in the face of a hundred enemies. A thousand years ago, that’s all a body was—a tool for survival.

Listening to Beowulf, I began to harness a medieval view of my own strength.

In Beowulf as in middle school, strength is reserved for men. From the first line of the poem, which Headley translates as: “Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!,” strength is tied to masculinity. Men were “brave, bold, glory-bound”—everything I wanted to be but felt excluded from. But Beowulf focuses so little on gender that manhood becomes universal, inviting me, for better or for worse, to identify with the male characters. Like them, I fought in pursuit of strength and ability.

I hadn’t felt strong in my body since I was a child. Like the characters I’d played on stage, I’d been a guest in my own skin.

Sweaty and itchy on my dorm room carpet, I settled back into my body. I felt my arms stretch and ache and move. I hefted no sword; instead, I was one. I built my strength against the floor. No battle befell me, but the next week, climbing the aerial silks with ease, I felt something akin to victory. ▩