by SeamusHeaney (Translator)
Composed toward the end of the first millennium, 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 beginning of the twenty-first century, Nobel laureate 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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
Edition: Bilingual
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 08 Feb 2001
ISBN 10: 0393320979
ISBN 13: 9780393320978
Book Overview: By the 1995 Nobel Laureate for Literature and author of The Spirit Level , winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year (1996).
Prizes: Winner of Whitbread Book Awards: Poetry Category 1999 and Whitbread Book Awards: Book of the Year 1999.