Book Description
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.
Notes
Seamus Heaney lives in Dublin and teaches at Harvard
University. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1995. His most recent book of poems is Opened Ground.