Oh, Grendel has fewer scenes and less onpage time than I remembered from my first read ages ago! And I'm a tad sad for that, because this little monster is what stuck with me from this epic poem, of which I'm not a fan (nor a hater, for that reason; it's always been just mildly interesting and mostly a school chore for me). On the other hand, a more mature me can see the themes and nuances much better than schoolgirl me, hence the current rating I'm giving it. I don't think it'll ever have the s...

“The gap of danger where the demon waits is still unknown to you. Seek it if you dare.” Written by an Unknown author, Beowulf is the most famous work of Old English literature - a mythical epic that influenced J.R.R. Tolkien and the whole fantasy genre. Beowulf is a heroic epic about a Germanic hero, a Christian vision of a pagan heroic life - in which epic hyperbole exaggerates stories of individuals and creates a cult of warrior heroism. In a lot of ways, Beowulf is an ultimate monomyth as ...

I vaguely remembered reading this in 7th grade and thought it might be fun to grab the audio version of one of the most important works of Ye Olde English literature.I listened to this twice the other day and then realized a funny thing:Beowulf is basically every 80's action movie ever made. It's true. Hear me out before you start shaking your head no.The entire story centers around one guy wanking around the known world and loudly bragging about himself at every opportunity. He's the ultimate H...

Never has there been a translation whose tone and argument are encapsulated so completely by the very first word of the text: translating the Old English Hwæt as ‘Bro!’ tells you more or less everything you need to know about what Maria Dahvana Headley is up to here. She's unlocked her word-hoard and used every nook and cranny of it in service of a very specific reading of the text.I really love Old English as a language, and have read Beowulf in the original more than once. But despite generall...

Those of you looking for a precise, age-old translation of Beowulf need to go back to Heaney. This is no timeless classic, this is no pretentious, literary snobbery made to bore high school sophomores. This is living, breathing poetry as it's meant to be, rooted in the language of then and the language of now, full of drama and heroes and monsters and oh so much swag. Will this be hilariously dated in fifteen years when the slang has all changed and swole joins the ranks of rad and groovy? Yes. ...

Beowulf is thought to have been written around the year 1000 AD, give or take a century. And the author is the extremely famous, very popular and world renowned writer... Unknown. Got you there, didn't I? LOL Probably not... if you're on Goodreads and studied American or English literature, you probably already knew this is one of the most famous works without an author.It was first really published in the 1800s, using the Old English version where many have translated it, but there are still so...

As a college English major, I studied Beowulf without any great enthusiasm; my real love was for the Romantic poets. And Chaucer, but that might have been partly because I thought it was hilarious that we were studying such bawdy material at BYU. Plus you can still puzzle out The Canterbury Tales in its original Middle English, with the help of a few handy annotations, while Beowulf in the original Old English--other than the immortal (at least in my mind) line "Bēowulf is mīn nama"--is beyond a...

”One of these things, as far as anyone ever can discern, looks like a woman; the other, warped in the shape of a man, moves beyond the pale bigger than any man, an unnatural birth called Grendel by country people in former days. They are fatherless creatures, and their whole ancestry is hidden in a past of demons and ghosts. They dwell apart among wolves on the hills, on windswept crags and treacherous keshes, where cold streams pour down the mountain and disappear under mist and moorland.” I...

*bum bum* IN A WORLD . . . *bum bum* . . . FULL OF NASTY MONSTERS . . . *bum bum* . . . WHO EAT PEOPLE AND BREAK INTO CASTLES . . . *bum bum* . . . THE BEASTLY GRENDEL LURKED LONG OVER THE MOORES . . . *bum bum* . . . BUT NOW . . . *Cut to scene of monster ripping someone's face off with his teeth* (silence. black screen.)*Unknown warriors approaching*"Who are ye, then, ye armed men,mailed folk, that yon mighty vesselhave urged thus over the ocean ways,here o'er the waters?"*bum bum* . . . ONE M...

If I wrote a list of things I don't give a shit about, I'm pretty sure "some big fucking monster whose name sounds like a word for the area between my balls and my ass that attacks alcoholics and is eventually slain by some asshole, told entirely in some ancient form of English that I don't understand" would be near the top (for the record, run-on sentences would not. Judge not).This was one of the first books I was ever assigned to read in high school, and I'm pretty sure it was the catalyst to...