Beowulf

Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Translation (Faber and Faber, 1999)

I read Beowulf at school almost 30 years ago and remember being slightly disappointed.  I liked the dungeons and dragons violence, but found the story somewhat convoluted and the language impenetrable, even in translation.  Having read about Beowulf again in Peck and Coyle’s A Brief History of English Literature, I decided to give it another go, this time reading the Seamus Heaney translation from 1999.  The language is compelling and certainly creates an atmosphere of Scandinavian warrior society.  The story of Beowulf’s three battles against dragons, starting with Grendel, then his mother and then another dragon at the very end of his life is perhaps slightly less compelling.  Despite all the action, nothing much seems to happen.  That’s probably unfair, and with more time and study the characters would probably come to life and the various subplots make more sense.  But even a fairly superficial reading reveals that this is an important work of literature, and perhaps another example of English literature’s close connection to the rest of Europe.  I’m sure environmental humanities scholars have written extensively about the natural imagery and the sense of humans against the forces of Nature, personified, in a sense by the dragons.