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Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero
The Old English epic poem Beowulf has an established reputation as a canonical text. And yet the original poem has remained inaccessible to all but experienced scholars of Old English. This book aims to present the poem to readers who want to know what makes it such a remarkable work of art, and why it is of such cultural significance.
Most readers will only have encountered Beowulf through one of its many translations or adaptations; others have had to take on this unique survivor from a past era as a challenging translation exercise, part of their academic study of the poem. This book sidesteps scholarly debates about the poem's unknowns – its date, provenance or author – and focusses instead on its poetic artistry, its interleaving of heroic pasts and Christian present, and its poet's extraordinary breadth of reference, from biblical history to Old Norse myth. But the strange intricacies of Old English metre and poetic language are explained, and the poet's evocation of the ethics and material world of an imagined pre-Viking Scandinavia is explored.
Poem, Poet and Hero follows the story of the poem through its many interwoven voices from different times and places, and the poem emerges as a work of reflective beauty, its human characters full of touching pathos and wisdom, its notorious monsters still speaking to our own societies' abiding insecurities. The final section, on post-medieval responses to Beowulf , shows how the poem has been taken up as a European cultural icon. This book restores its status as a literary masterpiece.
Most readers will only have encountered Beowulf through one of its many translations or adaptations; others have had to take on this unique survivor from a past era as a challenging translation exercise, part of their academic study of the poem. This book sidesteps scholarly debates about the poem's unknowns – its date, provenance or author – and focusses instead on its poetic artistry, its interleaving of heroic pasts and Christian present, and its poet's extraordinary breadth of reference, from biblical history to Old Norse myth. But the strange intricacies of Old English metre and poetic language are explained, and the poet's evocation of the ethics and material world of an imagined pre-Viking Scandinavia is explored.
Poem, Poet and Hero follows the story of the poem through its many interwoven voices from different times and places, and the poem emerges as a work of reflective beauty, its human characters full of touching pathos and wisdom, its notorious monsters still speaking to our own societies' abiding insecurities. The final section, on post-medieval responses to Beowulf , shows how the poem has been taken up as a European cultural icon. This book restores its status as a literary masterpiece.
- GenresNonfiction
192 pages, Hardcover
Published June 13, 2024
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39 people want to read
About the author
Heather O'Donoghue
17 books4 followersHeather O'Donoghue is a British academic. She is Professor of Old Norse and Vigfusson Rausing Reader in Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities at the University of Oxford. She is a Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford.
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December 16, 2025
So each year since 2021 I’ve been reading a different adaptation of Beowulf. It’s been really fun to do the history of the text and different interpretations and the things people focus on in the extra info has been fun to learn. It’s such a great story that every year feels fresh and new even when I know for the most part what will happen. This is more about the text itself and what we know from it and how it tells its story. I’m excited to get into more books like this on my Beowulf journey. I also want to see if you can get a copy that’s like a print of the og text I can’t read it or understand it but it has so much history to it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review