"Accomplish[es] what before now had seemed impossible: a faithful rendering that is simultaneously an original and gripping poem in its own right."
-New York Times Book Review

"Thanks to Seamus Heaney's marvellous recreation - in both senses - this dark and gloomy work finally comes out into the light."
-The Economist

"Heaney has turned 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."
-James Wood, The Guardian

"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."
-Michael Alexander, The Observer

"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."
-Claire Harman, Evening Standard

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 invincibly 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 beginning of the twenty-first 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.

Who wrote Beowulf- the oldest known epic poem written in English- is a question that has mystified readers for centuries. It’s generally thought that the poem was performed orally by the poet before a “live” audience, and that in this way it eventually passed down to readers and listeners. Another theory is that the poem was recited by memory by a “scop,” a traveling entertainer who went from court to court, singing songs and telling stories, until it was finally written down at the request of a king who wanted to hear it again.
Because there are three major battle scenes in the poem, some readers believe that Beowulf was composed by three different authors. Other readers claim that the sections that take place in Denmark and the sections that occur after Beowulf returns to Geatland were the work of different authors. The majority of critics agree that because of the unified structure of the poem, with its interweaving of historical information into the flow of the main narrative, the poem was most likely composed by one person.
As you read the poem try to imagine yourself in the banquet hall of a large castle, eating and drinking with your friends. The court entertainer- much like a stand-up comedian in a nightclub- begins telling his story. Your presence in the hall means that you’re probably a member of the aristocratic class, either a descendant of the founder of a particular tribe or one of your king’s followers. (AngloSaxon society was divided into two main classes: the aristocracy and the proletariat. Beowulf, as you’ll see, gives us very little information about the life of the average person in Anglo-Saxon society, but concerns itself exclusively with life in the court and on the battlefield.) Most of the stories were written and recited during this time to entertain and instruct the members of the aristocratic class. The scop assumed that his audience was familiar with the stories of ancient times. It was his job to make them as interesting and as vivid as possible.

Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. A resident of Dublin since 1976, he teaches regularly at Harvard University. His most recent collection of poems is Opened Ground (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).