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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 02/15/2000
ISBN: 9780374111199
Pages: 213
Weight: 1.16lbs
Size: 9.42h x 6.24w x 0.99d
Award: ALA Notable Books - Winner
Award: Costa Book Awards - Winner
Award: Costa Book Awards - Winner

Review Citations: Library Journal 12/01/1999 pg. 132
Publishers Weekly 02/21/2000 pg. 84
Booklist 02/15/2000 pg. 1073
New York Times 02/27/2000 pg. 6
Time 03/20/2000 pg. 84
Kirkus Reviews 03/15/2000 pg. 345
Entertainment Weekly 03/31/2000 pg. 65
New York Times 06/04/2000 pg. 40
Commonweal 12/01/2000 pg. 22
Time 12/18/2000 pg. 93
LJ Best Books of Year 01/01/2001 pg. 52