Summary and Reviews of Beowulf by Seamus Heaney

Beowulf by Seamus Heaney

Beowulf

A New Verse Translation

by Seamus Heaney
  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • Readers' Rating (8):
  • First Published:
  • Feb 1, 2000, 208 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Feb 2001, 215 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

Evening Standard - Claire Harman
Heaney's excellent translation has the virtue of being both direct and sophisticated, making previous versions look slightly flowery and antique by comparison. His intelligence, fine ear and obvious love of the poem bring Beowulf alive as melancholy masterpiece, a complex Christian-pagan lament about duty, glory, loss and transience... Heaney has done it (and us) a great service.

Financial Times - Andrew Motion
Heaney's introduction does everything it should to dust down and exhibit the poem, exploring its origins, investigating its form and establishing its structure ... Heaney has caught the balance of these things brilliantly; he has made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece.

The Guardian - James Wood
Heaney has turn to Beowulf, and the result is magnificent, breathtaking ... Heaney has created something imperishable and great that is stainless - stainless, because its force as poetry makes it untouchable by the claw of literalism it lives singly, as an English language poem

The Independent (UK) - Blake Morrison
Anglo-Saxon verse is celebrated for its alliterative riffs, its ringing and singing, and ... Heaney does it full justice ... Beneath the battledress, Beowulf is a peacemaker, a man who eases trouble. This fine translation is worth our trouble too.

The Observer (UK) - Michael Alexander
The translation itself rides boldly through the reefs of scholarship ... Beowulf, an elegy for heroism and a critique of feud and fratricide, is alive and well.

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