Beowulf Audio cassette - 2000

Name: Beowulf
Price: 10.26 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Seamus Heaney
ISBN: 9781565114265

by Heaney, Seamus

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About this book

Beowulf, composed between the seventh and tenth centuries, 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 returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid battle against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and living on in the exhausted aftermath. Heaney's celebrated translation honours what is remote and intuits what is uncannily familiar, at the end of the twentieth century, in this founding masterpiece of English poetry. Now, for the first time, the Old English text - which survived only in a single scorched manuscript, now held in the British Museum - can be read in conjunction with the translation on facing pages. Includes bibliographical references (p. 251-255).

From the publisher

A "New York Times" Bestseller and Whitbread Book of the Year.
Heaney's performance reminds us that "Beowulf," written near the turn of another millennium, was intended to be heard not read. Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, "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 lives to old age before dying 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 end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface. While an abridgment of Heaney's full translation of "Beowulf," Heaney prepared this abridgment himself to read for the BBC program from which this recording is taken.