Djelloul Marbrook

We know a lot about Modthryth, the awful queen in Beowulf who has men who look her in the eye put to death gruesomely, but we don’t know how to say her name.

My wife Marilyn and I searched the worldwide web for hours last night. We found enough to fill a mountain of hard drives about Beowulf (Beowulfian Viking ship, inset), and we thought we’d surely stumble on a pronunciation guide or perhaps a concordance that would parenthetically tell us how the dread queen’s name sounded to the Geats. We stumbled in vain. For example, the wonderful Webster’s online sound dictionary doesn’t even list Modthryth.

We’re going to have to deal with this conundrum because Angelina Jolie is going to play Modthryth is a movie, and we’ll have to call her something even if it’s too terrible to contemplate looking her in the eye.

But we were not without resort. We consulted our literary friend Tom Hester of Silver City, New Mexico, a prodigious reader. Tom liked the question but hadn’t a clue. Then we dispatched an e-mail to Bertha Rogers, whose own translation of Beowulf surely equals and in my mind surpasses Seamus Heaney’s for its Vikingesque robustness. Bertha, who runs Bright Hill Press in Treadwell, New York, said to the best of her knowledge Mode-Thryth would do.

Modthryth is sometimes referred to as Thryth. It doesn’t seem quite so daunting to say Thryth, but when you add Mod it becomes a chore. Beowulf is written in Old English vernacular, and while there has been a lot of speculation about how it sounded, no one is quite sure.

Why on earth were we so het up about Modthryth? Well, Marilyn and I have been recording two of my novellas, Saraceno and Skip to Maloo, and everything was going quite smoothly until Marilyn tripped over the queen’s name in Skip to Maloo. These novellas will be published with two others later this year.

By the way, recording a book is grueling. It feels like coming down with the flu. I lost my voice on page 121 of Saraceno. Marilyn did better. But we’ll need time to recover.

—DM