After beowulf, p.1
After Beowulf, page 1
AFTER BEOWULF
NICOLE MARKOTIĆ
COACH HOUSE BOOKS, TORONTO
copyright © Nicole Markotić, 2022
first edition
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: After Beowulf / Nicole Markotić.
Names: Markotić, Nicole, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210298197 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210298286 | ISBN 9781552454428 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770567146 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781770567153 (PDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Beowulf—Adaptations. | LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS8576.A7435 A69 2022 | DDC C811/.54—dc23
After Beowulf is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 714 6 (EPUB), ISBN 978 1 77056 715 3 (PDF)
Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email sales@chbooks.com with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)
«Af god begyndelse haabes en god endelse.»
Danish saying: «Good beginnings make good endings.»
This book is dedicated to
Suzette Mayr and Susan Holbrook
– For all the reasons!
CONTENTS
The Epic Speaks
Measure His Name
Sequel: Payback
Andropause
Fortuna
AfterWyrd
Dramatis Personæ
Notes and Acknowledgements
About the Author
The Epic Speaks
(a chapter of gestations)
Hwæt!
Fête your reading eyes on the Spear-Danes –
an upheaval of knotted throngs – nicking
rapier wit, spearing through clotted air
flooring gruff flesh, belly-aching
their journey betwixt these pages
AKA Bright-Danes –
AKA Ring-Danes –
the Victory-Danes –
those Shield-Bearers –
ringing round their king’s castle, guffawing
as they bluster and harangue, gusting to wallop
a jinxed villain, the poem’s oh-so-funky
baddie
Shyldings –
those gossip-rag stars! –
w/ crafted linden shields coated
in herring oil, waterproof
as a waxwing’s bohemian
plumage.
Each warrior a successor of that Shylding prototype.
The First: Shyld –
an orphan sprouted into that
one good king
whose moniker anointed this Dane-land.
Once a krona-less foundling, Shyld
lived to exact
pay from each trounced
enemy, and then
he trounced them
again.
King Shyld died at his exact time to die, his
watery funeral boasting
boatloads of gold tablets and silver
candlesticks and ingot piles and mounds
of other nest-egg swag!
Shyld provides the funeral-frame metronome:
expired sea voyage for a king emeritus
elegiac vessel sutures the boat-baby castaway
into his vintage shrine
line by line (by chronic cæsura)
wave into wave
predicts the terminus funeral
the closing words (see lines 3180–3182).
Ice-clad vessel piled with emancipated rings and blades
jewels and gold bling
– boat-loaded and snapshot ready –
set sail
foresee toward the ultimate ‘no more’:
«Fate unravels as Fate speaks.»
An urn-tossing burial by lost at sea;
the icon-lore of Shyld
and his future pedigreed offspring.
Victory-Danes, with trenchant name-branding
rise, uprise, arise
campaign without elections
teeming with troops and archenemies
and rampage woes
and oh-wells.
So, how to applaud stalwart heathens?
or sing the derring-dos
of kings-in-the-making?
These Victor warriors so have their hate-on
for the dæmon swamp heathen, yes? Oh yes.
Lived they but today, Nowadays’ heavenly
Lord would call to them, yeah?
Yuh-huh, abscamalutely; re-
ligion back-formation.
Let the gestations begin!
So. In order:
he came,
then he came,
and then: (somebody’s daughter), and
then:
(trumpets, trumpets)
the (f.) hornèd great dwelling:
HEOROT HALL
(f.) doe, fawn, stag
(m.) buck, hart, stag
proper name, decorous progeny, love object,
more on that, anon …
alight with wicks of twisted moss.
Stepping stones:
Shyld, ‘that one good king!’
Shyld, to his son, Beow, to
that free-for-all Half-Dane, to
the stronghold-loving Hrothgar.
Aside Ode to that other Beow:
sheltered inside the Prologue, he lives
for line 18, survives until line 56.
Hailed as gut-punch offspring
of gutsy King Shyld, Beow’s
celebrity-heroism gets chopped
off at the suffix.
Famed for one and three-quarter score:
the other Beow
lived long enough to beget another begatting.
He ruled as a son
sandwiched between
eponym father Shyld, and
Half-Dane, the half-bred A-lister son.
Scan down only so many lines and non-
eponym Beow
wanes.
That first, Beow-non-Wulf
falls
as the parade of sons surges,
each one begatting a son, a son, a son
(sometimes one
queen).
Yes, next:
Kingbee Hrothgar, so
keenly «milks the cow by the throat.»
Hail Hrothgar! war prince and war-mighty,
hall-builder (yes, yes, storybook hubris)
a hero’s greatest-hits playlist, he
built his fortress, (f.) HEOROT, hart-house
to build, to command men
to hew stone, to haul over roots and
up hills, to sand and whittle, to erect
the keep, to decorate the Great
Hall – a pretty great haul – with
boar heads, and embroidered
banners, and nouns sculpted into timber.
Hrothgar, then, raises his HEOROT (f.):
a home, wrapped
around the brawling hall, cuddling
the take-me-to-your-leader throne room:
court of ruler wanglings
and coleslaw manglings
(oh: anticipate! anticipate!)
HEOROT, my (f.) HEOROT, where
( … yes, ’tis I, Reader,
authorial me… )
I hear and my eye spies
vast wall weavings and full-frontal
stag runes, oft-painted shields, cross-stitch samplers.
Oh, and surplus rings, surfeit torques, and needlepoint
runners warp and weft
the tower’s palisade
and bedeck this glut of rising gables.
HEOROT (f.): foreknowing and forewaiting
HEOROT (f.): Hrothgar’s stone promise
a palace of words
the pacing of words.
HEOROT (f.) – whole, gabled, trumpeted – right up until
its sturdy beams slip into enflamed prophecy:
the approaching domed doom
(no, not that monster,
just blistering family blood).
Selling daughters won’t save
that fabled galleria:
(f.) HEOROT: the Dane’s hart
mounting its own mythology:
of present-day tremblings
cloudberry seeds ground into the rafters
its future smeared with grey ash
now: end: on: the bloodiest lust.
Herewith trespasses
Grendel – no introduction – breaks into
the Introduction
foul foundling, heaping with narrative potential
(contrast: that ‘one good king’
repeating line, colossus-driven)
his celebmentia gains real estate
then fades to black, fades
into macabre backstory.
To recap:
the first Beow gatted Hrothgar, a grandson who
fabricated the great hall (f.), HEOROT
– gatting the future:
to sting, to flutter, to bleed –
egads! the Victory Danes really could use one of those
Norse beserker hero-prompts, pronto.
Ebic spoiler: three banquets and two funerals.
Then!
Begin
then, and then, and them.
All them begatting escorts
dusty exhaustion into that (f.)-tipped
(f.)-hall, HEOROT:
Begin (again) with the troll, the brute, the terror, then
tweet the deets of the Spear-Danes and their antiquity
exploits, while accolading the Almight.
Surely that rewrite erases, chases, clownsels
the woebegone Grendel?
Grendel, only named 102 lines deep
moon-stretched and woodland au-contraired, he
infuses wild artichokes, munches horse
chestnuts, outgrows the hemlock and yew trees, and
forlorns his buckeyed self.
Then, finally, commence:
neglect to invite that prehistoric godzilla
this tale’s pongy beast. Such
neglect entwines in a scriptured haunting, that
canonical overlook, so foreseeable
with ensuing narrative penalties.
See Genesis, esp. margin curlicues; check
out those olden-days folktales; read
about petrifying crones, snubbed by no party
invites.
The lack of an invite-script
jilted the raging varlet, Grendel, into a fairytale’s
doomed rubicon.
Drawn by minstrels, yet
denied entry into the hymns
no cameo in tribute chanting.
Host and herds embrace every basil leaf ’s low-branched unfurling
every formica ant climbing glass shoots
to await its cyclical vocation
every aloof octopus arm, still
cognating × infinity
foraging
every stringy snake-snack
everyone but Grendel, Saxon’s cradle-
monster.
Grendel! Son of grotesque
gone-daughter of Cain.
Or is he the gone-son who lunges
back and back and back, through
the father of father of gone-
father, looped to great-grampa Cain?
A kinship duplicating Grendel’s inborn
trade as proto-agonist
– and then, and then, and then –
make way for some trash-talk gatting,
chronicles inseminated by Origin-Tale curse:
goblins | fiends | gnomes | cretins |
giants | ettins | elves | trolls | imps | phantoms |
monstrosities | sprites | vermin | shapes of hell |
freaks
UR-hybrids, all.
Each line scop-ing his contronymic self:
heathen thing; biblical deterrent
poetic and scholarly constraint, beast
laden with porous couplets
nursery-rhyme jingles
and eerie intent.
So. Dusk hues Grendel toward
that pretty (f.)’n Great Hall, HEOROT.
The Grendel conundrum: to drink and sing
and listen to manly poetry? OR
to devour one’s hosts?
Those Ring-Danes pass out
from their Even Song mead-games
their honeyed feasting
on cured pork belly, honey-browned potatoes
and nutmeg pastries. Danish troops
swell Grendel’s brutal beast-breast:
the God-cursed Grendel curses
these Dane Shield-Bearers
(don’t diss the names)
cuts them into limb-sized pieces, bloody
guarantee
– and then.
Each night, an ex tempore invasion
executes miscreant spirit-chores.
«Every night, a cow hauls onto the ice.»
King Hrothgar’s proud (f.)’d HEOROT
engirdled
by men, and their men, and their men
the fearless ghoul
spirits into their midst, mind-dæmon surging
storm-dimpled reminder
of a priori malfunctions, future feuds to feed
pluribus maxims.
Grendel, slaughterhouse beast,
his name a vow
destroyer of air, and
wind, and evening harps.
At night, the bog-ghost grinds
bones into the coarse, mealy earth
thirty skeletons feed his den
– and then.
Bulbous brute, recurring motif, Grendel
wasps and moists the hallowed banquet,
depleting debauched melodies, launching
swan songs
slough dweller, swamp dweller, murky
neighbour, an unbolted postern
a door gaping ajar, an exit latched open.
Those Ring-Danes, sunken in their
sow-and-reap beer-fest
quiver as the apparition blunders
toward them, quaver and trill.
Dawn lanterns the day; gusts and squalls
sprinkle the air with slaughter reek, slices
of sunrise animate
their corpses, and other leftovers.
Their leader, roosted in his pretty great hall, mawkish
for his guards
for his throne
one grey strand slinks
after the extinct breeze.
Sleepytime slumber blooms
into post-gloaming slayage.
And then: another blood-douche; and then: another; every
night: intoxication and gore.
Behold:
gruesome Grendel, pride in handiwork,
enacts his hall-watching hate
through sleet and slush-stones.
Behold:
Grendel the Underlord
plosive petard-hoister
one against the many, heel-goaded
nobody’s king, nobody’s persona
grata.
Behold:
the Grendel
pride in pride
glommed on, while Head Honcho
Hrothgar harrowed, bedraggled
from the neck up
and beholded news across the known lands:
in every woven rhyme
in heart-broke ballads
of ill-fitting battle songs.
Just as … I…
(yeah, yeah, me again … )
I wrap
Grendel into Cain’s genesis, so
do those Ringa-Ding Danes heave
their heathen logic
to relinquish the heathen: a shadow’s
bleak ink on a sepia page.
That Grendel! Would not halt his uppercut attacks or blows
he would not put a pause on payback, yet
spurned paying a kill tax
(not even w/ family discount)
balked at shelling out for
the post-death death toll.
His cresting hands clench and
strangle, they hunt
down.
His hands liquidate all assets.
Hands cast
living bodies into the moors, into
death-shadow dwellings.
Nobody knows Grendel, but, y’know,
they recognize the Lord’s
defrocked homunculus.
Swollen knuckles, bloated hide
wage bone-mulching blows.
The pleb-beast thresholds that great, stand-up
æon-standing (until not) hall
but the throne, enthroned
within HEOROT (f.)
scorns his dusky footsteps
pagan is as pagan does
behold, the hall-pass king!
Behold, now, the Spear-Danes
their dandy faith embraces
purgatorial and gospel tastes.
They brace their repurposed souls
(pause for contemp. sermon)
against the evil imp
(amen … ).
But the baptized (f.) HEOROT waives
its locative case
for twelve winters
