Summary
A New York Times Bestseller and Whitbread Book of the Year.
Heaneye(tm)s performance reminds us that Beowulf , written near the turn of another millennium, was intended to be heard not read.
Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, 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 Grendele(tm)s mother. He then returns to his own country and lives to old age before dying 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 end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.
While an abridgment of Heaneye(tm)s full translation of Beowulf , Heaney prepared this abridgment himself to read for the BBC program from which this recording is taken.
Summary
This Anglo-Saxon poem dates between the 8th and 11th centuries. Beowulf, the kingdom's most fierce warrior, resolves to protect the kingdom from the vile and vicious Grendel monster. However, slaying Grendel could provoke the wrath of a more fearsome opponent, Grendel's mother.