Oww-oo, Beowulfs from London

By CALVIN TRILLIN

I'm not among those who are astonished that Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf has made the best-seller list. Beowulf is obviously being bought by hordes of former English majors who still feel guilty about not having finished it the first time it was assigned.

I was an English major myself. That was a long time ago, though, and I can't seem to remember whether I read Beowulf or not. That business about Beowulf, the courageous young prince of the Geats, pulling off Grendel's arm and lopping off Grendel's head sounds familiar--and quite justified, in a rough sort of way, I think, since Grendel, a thoroughly unpleasant monster, had been abducting and snacking on King Hrothgar's warriors for years. But I may be thinking of scenes from those Saturday-morning cartoons I used to watch with my kids years ago when we were looking for something educational.

I realize that not being able to remember reading Beowulf is not strong evidence that I completed the assignment. The only evidence I can present on the other side is that when I have one of those nightmares about walking completely unprepared into a final exam, the subject is not Beowulf but a course I took whose name I remember as English Poets of the 17th Century, Not Including Any Poet You've Ever Heard Of. In any case, it is definitely not true that I used to think Beowulf was a story about a wolf--a sort of companion piece to The Lion King or Bambi.

Memories of uncompleted college assignments tend to linger. As an addition to the usual ceremonies that surrounded my graduation, I inaugurated an award given to that senior who, counting all courses in all four years, was, as he received his degree, farthest behind in the assigned reading. It was presented to a classmate of mine who had concentrated on courses in the Russian novel and, by my calculations, had not read a total of 356,000 pages. Twenty years later, I happened to pass the winner on the street, and the poor fellow still had a haunted look, as if even at that stage a couple of hundred pages of The Brothers Karamazov lay between him and peace of mind.

I always thought that another form of lingering undergraduate guilt explained the phenomenal sales some years ago of A Brief History of Time, by the English physicist Stephen Hawking--a book that, I think it's fair to say, is not your typical best-seller-list page turner. I figured that it was being snapped up by liberal-arts types who in their undergraduate days had finessed the science requirement by taking some notorious gut in the geology department and still felt guilty about having blindly accepted the conventional wisdom that physics courses should be avoided at all costs.

I tried the geology ploy myself and managed to get the sort of miserable mark that George W. Bush and Al Gore, according to transcripts that were revealed during the primary campaign, got in many of their courses all through college. Now that I know my performance in geology was an indication of presidential potential rather than what my father said it was at the time, I feel a lot better about it. But I've had no similar reassurance when it comes to Beowulf. I think I'd better go out and buy the book.