Beowulf: An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem

About the book

Beowulf travels from the Geats to help the Danish king Hrothgar, whose hall has been devastated by Grendel's attacks. The promise of combat belongs to a larger world of feasting, gift-giving, remembered conflicts, and obligations between rulers and followers. The poem later changes the scale of Beowulf's responsibility as time alters his position within that world. Its heroic action is repeatedly accompanied by reflections on mortality and the fragility of the security that victory appears to establish. Stories within the story keep other families and earlier disasters present, preventing a single encounter from exhausting the poem's sense of history. Hall's translation presents this Old English epic in English verse, inviting attention to the relation between an individual's exceptional strength and the vulnerable social arrangements that depend upon it.

• Heroism
• Loyalty and kingship
• Mortality

Why read it

For an epic in which monster encounters are inseparable from the responsibilities and precarious futures of human communities.

English verse translation by J. Lesslie Hall