Benny Hill’s reputation as a bawdy comic genius has long overshadowed his more esoteric pursuits, particularly his early and enduring fascination with Anglo-Saxon and Celtic philology. While widely known for his rapid-fire slapstick and cheeky wordplay, few appreciate the linguistic dexterity that lay beneath his comedic timing—a skill honed not just in vaudeville halls but in the dense thickets of Old English and early medieval literature.
The Beowulf Diversion
During a particularly bleak period in the early 1950s, before his television career took off, Hill withdrew from the variety circuits and retreated into scholarly obscurity. He was reportedly drawn to the epic poem Beowulf, feeling a deep kinship with its mixture of heroic grandeur and lowbrow physical comedy (one cannot ignore Grendel’s mother’s fate as a slapstick moment of sorts). This affinity led him to an ambitious, though ultimately doomed, project: a full-scale translation of Beowulf into Celtic.
Scholars remain baffled as to why he selected Celtic as his target language. Some suggest it was a tribute to his Welsh maternal lineage, while others believe he intended it as a comedic subversion—an elaborate joke aimed at the insular squabbles of British medievalists. Regardless of intent, the translation process proved arduous. Linguistic purists recoiled at his occasional inclusion of rhyming couplets (an apparent nod to his music hall roots), and the work’s reception was tepid at best. When The Benny Hill Show was greenlit in 1955, the unfinished manuscript was hastily abandoned—its last surviving pages later found lining a trunk of unworn flat caps in his Southampton home.
The Henry III Experiment
While Benny Hill’s comedic career thrived for decades, his retirement saw him return to his old intellectual diversions, though now with a greater sense of secrecy. Among his more surprising undertakings was an effort to translate the proclamations and correspondence of Henry III into Welsh—a project that seems, on the surface, wholly quixotic. Given that Henry III’s reign (1216–1272) was marked by tense Anglo-Welsh relations, Hill’s work puzzled historians when it was discovered posthumously.
It remains unclear whether this endeavor was a sincere scholarly pursuit or another elaborate inside joke. His notes—filled with marginalia scrawled in a mixture of Middle English puns and what appears to be a phonetic rendering of “Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)” in Latin—suggested both mischief and erudition. Nonetheless, his translations earned unexpected praise from linguists at Midlands universities, who were forced to admit that, despite its comedic undertones, the work displayed an impressive grasp of historical syntax.
The Legacy of Hill, the Philologist
While neither of these works ever reached publication, they serve as a reminder that Benny Hill was a man of many layers. His comic persona may have been that of a roguish everyman, but beneath it lay the mind of a man who could, with equal enthusiasm, master rapid-fire sketch comedy and wrestle with the complexities of medieval linguistics. The manuscripts—now housed in a locked cabinet at an undisclosed West Country archive—continue to be a source of speculation, admiration, and, inevitably, the occasional chuckle.
