Beowulf

Translated by Seamus Heaney

A hero battles monsters and a dragon, facing the aftermath of victory.

3.5 Goodreads · 356,191 ratings

259 pages· 1090L

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Bookroo's summary

In a world where monsters lurk, Beowulf, a Scandinavian warrior, confronts the fearsome Grendel and his vengeful mother. Returning home, he faces his final challenge: a deadly dragon. As he battles these formidable foes, Beowulf's journey explores the cost of heroism and the haunting aftermath of triumph. Will his legacy endure, or will the shadows of his victories consume him? This epic tale resonates with timeless themes of courage and mortality, brought to life in a powerful new translation.

From the publisher

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.

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