Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero

(Hardback)

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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 poems unknowns its date, provenance or author and focusses instead on its poetic artistry, its interleaving of heroic pasts and Christian present, and its poets 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 poets evocation of the ethics and material world of an imagined pre-Viking Scandinavia is explored. Beowulf: 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.

Author Bio

Heather ODonoghue is Professor Emeritus of Old Norse at University of Oxford, UK. Her publications include Old Norse Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction (2004), English Poetry and Old Norse (2014), Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths (2nd Edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). She has also broadcast with the BBC on the topic of the Norse Gods.