Beowulf (a new verse translation, bilingual)

by Seamus Heaney

New York Times bestseller and winner of the Costa Book Award.

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, 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 beginning of the twenty-first century, Nobel laureate 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.

Beowulf might be recommended for older teenagers and adults.

Bilingual in Old English and modern English.

Softcover, 256 pages.

Published by WW Norton.  Printed in the United States.

Seamus Heaney was born in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966, and was followed by poetry, criticism, and translations, which established him as the leading poet of his generation. In 1995, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996), and Beowulf (1999). Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O’Driscoll, appeared in 2008; Human Chain, his last volume of poems, was awarded the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He died in 2013.