The Morris-Wyatt translation is thoroughly accurate, and is, so to speak, an official commentary on the text of Wyatt's edition. It is therefore of importance to the student of the _Beowulf_.
As a literary rendering the translation is disappointing. In the first place, it must be frankly avowed that the diction is frequently so strange that it seems to modern readers well-nigh ridiculous. There are certain sentences which cannot but evoke a smile. Such are: '(he) spoke a word backward,' line 315; 'them that in Scaney dealt out the scat,' line 1686.
Secondly, the translation is unreadable. There is an avalanche of archaisms. One example of the extreme obscurity may be given:--
'Then rathe was beroom'd, as the rich one was bidding, For the guests a-foot going the floor all withinward.' l. 1975-76.
It would seem that the burden of 'rathe,' 'beroomed,' and 'withinward,' were sufficient for any sentence to carry, but we are left to discover for ourselves that 'rich one' does not mean rich one, but ruler, that the 'floor' is not a floor but a hall, and that the guests are not guests, but the ruler's own men.
Morris himself was conscious of the obscurity of the work:--
'For the language of his version Morris once felt it necessary to make an apology. Except a few words, he said, the words used in it were such as he would not hesitate to use in an original poem of his own. He did not add, however, that their effect, if slipped sparingly in amid his own pellucid construction and facile narrative method, would be very different from their habitual use in a translation.... As the work advanced, he seems to have felt this himself, and his pleasure in the doing of it fell off.' --Mackail's _Life_, ii. 284-5.
Finally, the version does not _translate_. Words like 'Spearman' for _Ocean_, and combinations like 'the sight seen once only' for _the face_, can be understood only by the intimate student of Old English poetry, and there is no reason why such a person should not peruse _Beowulf_ in the original tongue rather than in a translation occasionally as obscure as the poem itself.
If one can peer through the darkness of Morris's diction, he will discover a fairly pleasing use of the so-called imitative measure. The verse is not nearly so rough as the original; many of the characteristic substitutions are avoided. There is evident a tendency toward the 'rising verse' and the anapestic foot. The feminine ending is frequently used. The verse is, therefore, not strictly imitative in that it retains the Old English system of versification, but rather in that it attempts to suggest the Old English movement by the use of four principal stresses and a varying number of unstressed syllables. Morris's verse is the best of all the 'imitative' measures.