“Beowulf” Opening Line: Not “Listen!”
Having spent a decade at The New Yorker, where the placement of a comma can occasion more blood than flows at a mixed-martial-arts championship, I was tickled to see how adamantly an academic at the University of Manchester insists that the opening word of “Beowulf” should not be “Listen!” but rather “Listen.” Dr. George Walkden argues that the use of the interrogative pronoun “hwæt†(rhymes with cat) means the first line is not a standalone command but informs the wider exclamatory nature of the sentence, which was written by an unknown poet between 1,200 and 1,300 years ago. Got that? Good!
