Beowulf as Rap, Old English Rhythm in a Modern English Translation: Stanza 1, a Dane's view of a Danish king & of Denmark

This video is an experimental upload of a rapped, modern English translation of the introductory lines of the poem, Beowulf, which was written in the West Saxon dialect of Old English. The translation was meant to be accurate as to meaning and to match on a one to one basis the internal rhythm of the poem, as regularity of rhythm has traditionally been the single most important characteristic of what makes a poem a poem in Germanic languages. Non-rhythmically balanced poetry, whether well alliterated or perfectly rhymed tend to be perceived as doggerel and this has never been the case with Beowulf. For this reason, alliteration was not given more than minimal consideration when translating this introductory section of the poem. After translation, it was apparent that this part of the poem was written in a trochaic meter and the alliterative elements of the original West Saxon English would indicate that, in modern terms, we were dealing with a piece of poetry which, in this section, at least, would be best read as trochaic tetrameter lines, with the exception of the dramatic flourish added by the last word of this section. When performed, it can, of course, be easily sung, but somehow seems to lend itself to a reading style that resembles rap and, for this reason, it was performed in this manner. The translation was first begun in 2016 and forgotten. It was recently remembered, revised a bit on 23 and 24 May 2022 and uploaded to Rumble on 24 May 2022. All work on the translation, the performance of the translation, and the video editing was done by Hikaru Kitabayashi. The artwork was partially based on a sketch done by the Japanese artist, Qbu Kushibuchi.