Beowulf (Bilingual Edition)

Seamus Heaney

Feb 2001 · W. W. Norton & Company

About this ebook

New York Times bestseller and winner of the Costa Book Award.

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.

Ratings and reviews

Mr. Seamus Heaney did the imposible!. Not only to provide us with a wonderful translation of this most significant poem, but to be able to follow it stance by stance, line by line in old saxon. Truly a very gifted scholar and a very talented poet in his own right. He will be forever missed.

Loved it in print. Does not work and this is the third Android phone I tried it on. Does not load like all the other books. Was never able to get my money back.

This book is truely captivating.... Though uninterrupted focus is needed in reading. Loved it!

About the author

Seamus Heaney (1939—2013) was an Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born at Mossbawn farmhouse between Castledawson and Toomebridge, County Derry, he resided in Dublin until his death.