What is the first word of Beowulf in Old English? The first word is “Hwæt.” The poem opens with the famous line “Hwæt! We Gardena…”—an attention-grabbing formula that calls listeners to hear the story of the Spear-Danes and their legendary kings.
Hwæt is often translated as “Listen!”, “Lo!”, or “Indeed!”, though its exact force is debated. It may function less like an ordinary vocabulary word and more like a traditional oral opening, signaling that a formal narrative is beginning. Modern editions differ in capitalization and punctuation, but the opening word remains Hwæt.
Beowulf survives in the Nowell Codex, a manuscript copied around the turn of the second millennium. The poem contains 3,182 alliterative lines and was written in Old English, primarily in a West Saxon literary form. Readers sometimes choose Oft because it begins the next major phrase in some translations—“Often…”—but it is not the poem’s first word. Þā and Nū likewise occur elsewhere in the text, not at its opening.