Composed towards the end of the first millennium the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is one of the great Northern epics & a classic of European literature In his new translation Seamus Heaney has produced a work which is both true line by line to the original poem & an expression in its language & music of something fundamental to his own creative gift The poem is about encountering the monstrous defeating it & then having to live on physically & psychically exposed in that exhausted aftermath It is not hard to draw parallels between this story & the history of the twentieth century nor can Heaney&s Beowulf fail to be read partly in the light of his Northern Irish upbringing But it also transcends such considerations telling us psychological & spiritual truths that are permanent & liberating