yes, beowulf is a little hard to get to.
the main problem is, that - being metric verse - all people who translated it over the years, either kept the verse and "interpreted" the contents, or kept the basic contents but did away with the verse, which resulted in almost prose-like versions of poetry... =/
the translation you gave is very liberal, and features a lot of linguistic "eye-candy". if your interest in it is solely
reading beowulf, heaney's version is wonderful.
but for an insight into old english, look elsewhere.
a more down to earth translation would be:
Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
above being The Harvard Classics version of beowulf.
as of the german aspect:
the bitch is it's late old to early middle german it's familiar with, not current day german.
if you've got a vague grip of old german, quite a few words are recognisable. however, the sentence structure, the sequence of the grammatic parts is way of, also the stark absence of auxilliary verbs is confusing.
my on-the-fly madly-tripping german translation would be:
Also, wir von alter Tage (<-being basically a saxon genitive, which is defunct in nowadays german) Speer-Dänen (<- likewise) {ihren} Volkskönigen, deren Edlen (<- ditto) Heldentaten gehört.
cyninga = Könige is the most striking "german" word.
old english and german in those days were virtually identical.
but beowulf is as old as it gets. a little later already, still pre-Norman invasion, it becomes way more acessible to someone who speaks german.
here for instance the west-saxon version of Matthew 7:24-5 of the late tenth century (nigh on a thousand years ago...)
Ælc þara þe þas min word gehierþ and þa wyrcp, biþ gelic þæm wisan were, se his hus ofer stan getimbrode.
Ða com þær regen and micel flod, and þær bleowon windas, and ahruron on þæt hus, and hit na ne feoll;
soþlice hit wæs ofer stan getimbrod.
if you've read the st. james' version of the bible, it should be very graspable. and for a german-speaking person it sounds almost german.
