Longfellow's Poetry and Poets of Europe is xix + 779 pp., in 2 vols. paginated continuously. The chapter "Poem of Beowulf," the first set of literary extracts in the book, occupies pp. 8-10 and consists of 5 individually titled passages in verse translation, given in this order: "Beowulf the Shyld" and "The Sailing of Beowulf," both from William Taylor's Historic Survey of German Poetry: Interspersed with Various Translations (1828); "Beowulf's Expedition to Heort," by Longfellow; and "An Old Man's Sorrow" and "Good Night," both from John M. Kemble's 1837 translation. Longfellow editorially recasts Kemble's two contributions as verse. The 5 extracts respectively translate ll. 53-82, 18-40a, 189-257, 2455-62a, and 1789b-803a.

"An Old Man's Sorrow" (a rendering of ll. 2455-62a, from Kemble's Beowulf, pp. 99-100) reads in full:

Careful, sorrowing,
He seeth in his son's bower
The wine-hall deserted,
The resort of the wind noiseless;
The Knight sleepeth,
The Warrior, in darkness;
There is not there
Noise of the harp,
Joy in the dwellings,
As there was before;
Then departeth he into songs,
Singeth a lay of sorrow,
One after one;
All seemed to him too wide,
The plains and the dwelling-place. (10)

In the course of rendering Kemble's prose as verse, Longfellow introduces many changes of punctuation and one change of wording. In this passage, Kemble's original translation (with his italics for elements not directly expressed in the Old English) had read:

Careful, sorrowin he seeth in his son's bower the wine hall deserted, the resort of the wind, noiseless; the knight sleepeth, the warrior in darkness; there is not there noise of the harp, joy in the dwellings as there was before.

                    xxxv.

Then departeth he into songs, he singeth a lay of sorrow, one after one: every thing seemed to him too wide, the plains and the dwelling-place. (99-100, quoted here from Kemble, A Translation of the Anglo-Saxon Poem of Beowulf [London: William Pickering, 1837], viewed in digital facsimile via hathitrust.org)

Fry, MO1, and MO2 misattribute to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow this translation by Kemble. Longfellow's Table of Contents in The Poets and Poetry of Europe indicates the correct attribution.

Fry, MO1, and GR represent the whole portion of Longfellow's anthology The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845) that contains this translation as a reprint of an 1838 review article. However, this 1845 work uses a greatly reduced verson of the 1838 article as an introductory chapter, giving it the new title "Anglo-Saxon Language and Poetry" (vol. 1, pp. 1-7). This is followed by a series of titled anthology sections containing translated material mostly by others, including 5 passages from Beowulf in a section entitled "Poem of Beowulf" (vol. 1, pp. 8-10). Kemble's translation "An Old Man's Sorrow," which is one of these, was not present in Longfellow's 1838 review article.

BAM.