BEOWULF: A NEW TRANSLATION

Composed towards the end of the first millennium, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is one of the great Northern epics and a classic of European literature. It’s about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on - physically and psychically exposed - in that exhausted aftermath. In his new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work which is both true to the original poem and an expression of something fundamental to his own creative gift.