Winner of the Whitbread Prize, Seamus Heaney’s translation "accomplishes what before now had seemed impossible: a faithful rendering that is simultaneously an original and gripping poem in its own right" (New York Times Book Review). The translation that "rides boldly through the reefs of scholarship" (The Observer) is combined with first-rate annotation. No reading knowledge of Old English is assumed.Heaney’s clear and insightful introduction to Beowulf provides students with an understanding of both the poem’s history in the canon and Heaney’s own translation process.
Listen to Seamus Heaney reading 600 lines from his translation of Beowulf at the Norton Online Archive.
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Old English Language and Poetics
Translator's Introduction
The Text of Beowulf
Contexts
Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson·The Beowulf Manuscript
Genesis 4.1-16 Cain and Abel
Hall-Feasts and the Queen
Grettir the Strong and the Trollwoman
The Frisian Slaughter: Episode and Fragment
Mcuin·"What has Ingeld to do with Christ?"
Gregory of Tours·History of the Franks
[Hygelac's Raid into Frisia]
William of Malmesbury·[Genealogy of the Royal Family of Wessex]
On the Wars between the Swedes and the Geats
Genealogies of the Royal Families in Beowulf
The Kingdoms and Tribes of Beowulf
MAP: The Scandinavian Setting of Beowulf
R. D. Fulk and Joseph Harris·Beowulf's Name
Criticism
J. R. R. Tolkien·Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics
John Leyerle·The Interlace Structure of Beowulf
Jane Chance·The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel's Mother
Roberta Frank·The Beowulf Poet's Sense of History
Fred C. Robinson·The Tomb of Beowulf