Synopses & Reviews
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.
Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. He lives in Dublin and he regularly teaches at Harvard University. His many other books include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, and Finders Keepers. Whitbread Book of the Year Award
Beowulf is the Old English elegiac narrative of a Scandinavian protagonist and prince who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. Beowulf then returns to his own country, the conquering hero and lord of the land, only to die after an intense fight with a dragon. The poem concerns encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live in the exhausted aftermath. As noted in the Evening Standard, Seamus Heaney's "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." Drawn to what he calls the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities a fresh and convincing reality for today's reader. Also included in this new and widely acclaimed version of the epic is Heaney's intelligent and candid introduction, which, as Andrew Motion wrote in the Financial Times, "does everything it should to dust down and exhibit the poem, exploring its origins, investigating its form, and establishing its structure." "Seamus Heaney's Beowulf rises from the dead . . . Mr. Heaney's translation beats with a recurring pulse, from homely and concrete to elevated and back again . . . An epic must flow to remain alive. Mr. Heaney's flow of language, action, and character is poetry's fight against dying."Richard Eder, The New York Times
"This handsome edition helpfully provides the Anglo-Saxon original on the pages facing the translation and includes an eloquent introductory essay . . . [This is] a translation that manages to accomplish what before now had seemed impossible: a faithful rendering that is simultaneously an original and gripping poem in its own right. Heaney is as attuned to the poem's celebration of the heroic as he is to its melancholy undertow . . . [Here is a Beowulf] for which generations of readers will be grateful."James Shapiro, The New York Times Book Review
“A work of the greatest imaginative intensity. Heaney supplements his supple and highly readable version with an insightful introduction, which serves as both an aesthetic defense and a classical explanation of the poem . . . Heaney's flexible adaptation has its own adhesive music, a keen contemporary authority . . . The deep value of Heaney's free adaptation is that it opens the poetic world of Beowulf to us. He captures the overall swing and pitch of the poem, even as he pursues the direct narrative utterance and the larger architectonics. As with his own poems, he has found a capable strategy for transforming mythic energy into verbal action . . . [This] Beowulf has an elemental grandeur, a ruthless beauty, and incandescent dignity that belong only to the greatest poetry.”Edward Hirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Review
"[Heaney is] the one living poet who can rightly claim to be the 'Beowulf' poet's heir."--Edward Melson,
The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
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.
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."