Beowulf" composed between the seventh & tenth centuries is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel & later from Grendel's mother. He returns to his own country & dies in old age in a vivid battle against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous defeating it & living on in the exhausted aftermath. Heaney's celebrated translation honours what is remote & intuits what is uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century in this founding masterpiece of English poetry. Now for the first time the Old English text
- which survived only in a single scorched manuscript now held in the British Museum
- can be read in conjunction with the translation on facing pages."