Beowulf, Seamus Heaney
Beowulf, Seamus Heaney
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Beowulf

Author: Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney

Narrator: George Guidall

Unabridged: 4 hr 8 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 01/11/2013

Categories: Fiction, Romance, Classic


Synopsis

New York Times bestseller and winner of the Costa Book Award.

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface. Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Anne on November 26, 2024

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 tr......more

Goodreads review by Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽ on April 16, 2021

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......more

Goodreads review by Nicole on May 09, 2023

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 langu......more

Goodreads review by James on April 23, 2017

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 prob......more