Barricaded inside the Pontiac, Richard clutched the pair of volumes to his chest, hoping they might provide clues for decoding the hilt inscription.

The first was a slim volume with a black pasteboard cover and frayed binding. Time and maltreatment had obliterated the inlaid gold lettering, leaving behind only blank indentations. Richard lifted the book to his nose. Old Book scent. Stale and fetid and sweeter than honey. He cracked it open. Tattered, piddle-hued pages fell into his lap. One was the title page:

BEOWULF: A VERSE TRANSLATION INTO MODERN ENGLISH BY EDWARD V. CORGAN, Lecturer in English at the University of Edinburgh, 1953, BONE AND APHID PRESS LONDON : SURREY : BATH

He gathered the fallen leaves, shuffled them into the correct order, and slipped them between the covers, making sure they aligned with their glued counterparts.

A translation of Beowulf from the fifties. Not quite what Richard had been hoping for. That a database search of “Old English” would deliver a translation of Beowulf struck him as a banal fait accompli. He knew next to nothing about Old English or Anglo-Saxon literature, but he did know that Beowulf was the most widely read work from that period. Corgan’s translation was no doubt one among many, perhaps hundreds, to publish in the last century (and there were probably thousands more stored away in the desk drawers and hard drives of linguists, poets, and enthusiasts the world over). Richard turned to a page at random. Corgan favored an alliterative free verse style and archaic diction that seemed to suit the material, but Richard knew right away that he did not care for it. He paged the book from front to back. There was a translator’s note that took up half a page and a three-page introduction. There were no footnotes, endnotes, marginal glosses, appendix, or glossary of character and place names. The lines weren’t even conveniently numbered. Nor was the original poem in Old English presented on the facing pages. So if the “HWÆRCWOM” passage did derive from Beowulf, there was no way of knowing. He concluded that Corgan’s book would be of little use.

Richard took up the second volume and his heart quickened.

Despite its heftiness—at over twelve-hundred pages, it could squash a wombat—the book bore the laconic title Old English Poetry. The three words were printed on the jacket cover in an antiquated gold font with elongated serifs and curlicues. If the publishers wished to invoke “Old English” and all that that designation entailed, they couldn’t have chosen a more inappropriate typeface. It evoked Victorian daintiness and refinement, missing the mark by eight centuries. The book was “Edited by Hubert R. Carver,” which was printed along the bottom of the cover in all-caps Helvetica. The copyright page said 2004, but Richard doubted whether the book had been cracked in its lifetime. To test his theory, he flipped to the middle, held the book by the splayed halves of its thick cloth binding, one in each hand, and bent them outward as far as he dared without ripping pages from the spine. This action produced a distinctive sound that all bibliophiles treasure, the sound that stiff, unloosened pages make the first time they stir within their hardback shell, tightly packed sheets groaning against the crease, yawning themselves awake. He examined the cover again. The photograph the editors had chosen was more in line with the book’s subject. It was of a sheer, rock-ribbed cliff surrounded by swirling mist and bordered by a graycloaked sea. The cliff blended into the ashen distance behind the “Poetry” of the title and dissolved layers of cloud of varying whiteness before disappearing into the void beyond the cover’s edge. For a good while, Richard could not take his eyes off the image. It might well have been the same stretch of coastline where the longship had deposited him and his shipmates in the world of the second sphere.

Old English Poetry was a dual-language edition with forty poems and fragments presented with the Old English on the verso pages and Carver’s corresponding translations on the recto. The poems themselves comprised only a quarter of the book’s page allotment. The majority of the volume was devoted to “supplementary” material: a 65-page annotated introduction, a 20-page “Note on the Translation,” extensive endnotes, appendices (A–J), a bibliography (45 pages, single-spaced), and an Old English to English glossary (a whopping 360 pages). The bibliography and glossary were printed in a typeface that was three points smaller than the rest of the text. Richard chuckled. He knew the drill. In all likelihood, the type size had been shrunk at the eleventh hour because the production editor was under pressure to minimize page count and drive down printer costs, a common corner-cutting fallback that punishes any reader who lacks eagle-eyed vision.

Richard held up the Corgan and the Carver, one in each hand. Corgan’s book was intended as a quick read of a famous text; for entertainment purposes only, no legwork required. Carver’s, contrarily, was a megalith, with an exclusive audience of two: the determined student and the hard-nosed academic. Richard pictured the latter as an older, frizzy-haired chap with tea and chalk stains on his fingers and a pipe protruding from the pocket of an oversteamed houndstooth jacket donned with oddball regularity. One of Ivan’s peers no doubt, a co-eccentric deserving of some gentle joshing for his obdurate stuffiness.

Richard set down the Corgan and turned to Old English Poetry's Contents page. There was a section devoted to translations of the Bible from Latin into Old English vernacular (Genesis, Exodus, Daniel), a section of verse homilies (Christ I, Christ II, Christ III, The Dream of the Rood, Christ and Satan), and a section of longer poems recounting saints’ lives (Andreas, Elena, Juliana, Judith, Guthlac). Carver also translated Beowulf in its entirety, demoting Corgan’s book even further. The largest of the poetry sections was called “The Elegies.” Looking at some of these titles—Deor’s Lament, The Ruin, The Wife’s Lament—it was clear that these Anglo-Saxon chaps were diligent in their expounding of mortality and death. But there was also a section called “Riddles,” which reassured Richard that the literature of that age was more than an endless fountain of religion and tears.

At that moment, something Richard had overheard Ivan say to one of his students crawled out of a tide pool of memory. Milena, her name was. He still remembered that, although her face had long since been lost. She had dropped by the house one Saturday afternoon to meet with Ivan so they could dissect the assigned reading from that week.

There was a period of about five years during his father’s teaching career at Long Island University that Richard had referred to as the Open Door Period. On the first day of each semester, Ivan announced to his classes that in lieu of office hours students were permitted to meet with him at his residence on evenings and weekends, no appointment necessary. As long as they didn’t come calling after nine or before noon, and provided that Ivan was at home, they were welcome.

It was no surprise that the majority of Ivan’s students took him up on his offer. The chance to encounter a professor (a notoriously reserved species, rarely glimpsed in secluded settings) at his home was no doubt intriguing, certainly more so than meeting in a bomb shelter of an office blasted out of the concrete catacombs of one of LIU’s interchangeable academic halls.

Ivan relished the ego-boosts. The electric currents generated by those impressionable scholars seeking guidance from a man they looked up to as some sort of incorruptible luminary fed directly into that region of Ivan’s persona responsible for self-admiration (and pomposity). Richard had to wonder: Would Ivan’s students have been so fawning had they known that their Obi Wan couldn’t get enough of the Bee-Gees, Hammer horror flicks, and pro wrestling; that he detested student activism; that he whistled Shirley Temple numbers while watering the lawn in his bathrobe and sock garters; that he left masturbation stains on the shower tiles? Out of respect, Richard never mentioned any of this to his father’s flock. Not that Ivan would have minded. Though he didn’t go around blabbing about his lowbrow, anti-elitist, non-pseudo-intellectual-sanctioned pleasures, he was forthright with everyone, self-conscious of nothing.

“Go, you’ll be better off,” Ivan once said to an MFA candidate who was thinking of dropping out and joining the Army. “You’ll regret it if you don’t. Graduate programs are just stopgaps so you can bide time and figure out what’s really important in your life. The piece of paper they’ll eventually hand you won’t be worth diddly shit. I can’t claim to know a damned thing about the military, but if the Army is in your heart, in your blood, then leave. Leave now.” The young man took Ivan’s advice and dropped out of LIU the following week. Ivan corresponded with him for over two years. After a while, the letters became less and less frequent until they finally stopped altogether. Ivan mentioned this to Richard one Thanksgiving as they watched the Giants lose to the Lions. “So what happened to him?” Richard asked. Ivan’s normally animated face drooped and went still. “I think he made it to corporal” was all he said. Very odd.

The visitors often arrived bearing cookies, coffee, sandwiches, or alcohol, and stayed for hours at a time to chatter once the formalities of reviewing essay outlines and lecture notes had been observed. The house’s paper-thin walls could not prevent Ivan’s resonant voice from filling every room when it thundered proclamations. It was Richard’s policy to cease whatever he was doing and listen. Literature was the default topic, of course, but Ivan could hold court on almost any subject and had a fondness for discursion. His preferred tactic, executed with an exuberant ease that often baffled his listeners, was to embark upon a topic and follow where it led, picking up speed, gesturing, flailing, and then, when it seemed as though he might never shut up, provide the topper: “No person, tribe, or nation can declare sovereignty over another person, tribe, or nation and call itself civilized” (geopolitics); “The perfect morning ritual—better than a drowsy lay” (buttered wheat toast with grapefruit sprinkled with brown sugar); “That last shot of Antoine’s face in 400 Blows has become more familiar to me than my own reflection” (French New Wave cinema); “Those furry philosophers could outwit Solomon” (chipmunks that continually evaded the strategically placed traps in the backyard gardenia patch).

Some visitors listened rapturously, soaking up each word, while others took it to Ivan like pugilists. He never shied away from a clash of opinions. “They think they know so much, and they do,” Ivan once said to Richard’s mother while they did the dishes—she scrubbing, he drying. “But their focus is dangerously narrow. They’re like hatchlings, imprinting on whatever abstruse, homogenous, feminist, neo-Marxist, counterrevolutionary assumptions they were exposed to this week.” Grace Waters took a long drag from her unfiltered Camel and passed her husband a salad bowl. Ivan dabbed at it with the towel and set it, still dripping, on the drying rack. “They forget that literature is a vast ecosystem, constantly growing, fluid, teeming with personalities, realizations, crippling beauty, exultant anguishes, not models and theories. They peer into one or two books and expect to learn all there is to learn. They think that by reeling in a salmon they’re suddenly expert anglers.” An exasperated Grace whisked the dishtowel from Ivan’s hands and smacked him on the behind. “You tired old fossil,” she said, and they laughed and smooched.

Milena and Ivan had moved from his study to the foyer. He was leaning against the banister, enjoying a steaming cup of Earl Gray with lemon, while she was slumped halfway up the staircase sipping a bottle of Coke through a straw. And Richard was above them both, standing just outside his bedroom, ears like satellite receivers capturing every word. They were in full-on deconstruction mode. The topic was a precarious one, full of pitfalls: Hardy, Auden, Frost, Lowell, and others, and how these (dead white male) poets channeled their obsessions through irrevocability, estrangement, and death. The conversation swerved and sidled for many minutes. Milena held her own, reciting lines with confidence ("Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me…"). But it was Ivan who did most of the verbalizing, as was typical. At one point, he noted offhandedly: “One thing these guys shared was an obligation to draw their inspiration from deep bloody wells of Saxon grimness, imposing it not only on their art but on their own relationships to the universe.”

Richard was pleased that this memory had not decayed. It felt good to hear his father’s voice again, to know that it had not been forgotten. And the words felt meaningful as well. Their impression lingered in his mind even after Ivan’s voice drifted away.

Deep bloody wells of Saxon grimness.

His eyes scooted up and down the Old English lines on Carver’s verso pages, searching for anything that resembled the passage from the sword hilt. Thumb and index finger worked in furious lockstep as he flew through a hundred pages without blinking. Two hundred.

“Check the glossary?”

“No,” he told himself, and closed Carver with a thwump. He placed him on the passenger seat beside the Corgan. Something had restrained him from going straight for the glossary. It was as if he had not yet earned that privilege, as if there was much he needed to learn before the hilt’s meaning could be made known to him.

“Calm down, Rich. Take it slow. Go home. Read.”

He started the car and tried to relax as conditioned air blasted his face.

Next Chapter: Part Three: Diversions, Digressions, Discoveries, Chapter XII