Beowulf: A New Verse Translation

A brilliant and faithful rendering of the Anglo-Saxon epic from the Nobel laureate.

Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.

Drawn to what he has called the four-squareness of the utterance in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.

Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 02/15/2000
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.16lbs
Size: 9.42h x 6.24w x 0.99d
ISBN: 9780374111199
Award: ALA Notable Books - Winner
Award: Costa Book Awards - Winner
Award: Costa Book Awards - Winner

About the Author
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, The Spirit Level, District and Circle, and Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the most important Irish poet since Yeats.

This title is not returnable