Beowulf

Beowulf is Seamus Heaney's verse translation of the Old English epic, published in 2000 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The poem survives in one manuscript, the Nowell Codex, and nobody knows who wrote it; scholars call the author the Beowulf poet, and the work has been turned into modern English more often than almost anything else written in Old English.

Its setting is pagan Scandinavia, some time in the fifth and sixth centuries. Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, crosses to Denmark to help Hrothgar, the Danish king, whose mead hall has been attacked by a monster called Grendel for twelve years. Beowulf kills him, and when Grendel's mother comes for revenge she is defeated in her turn. The poem then follows its hero home to Geatland, where he becomes king of his own people.

What it dwells on is not the winning so much as what comes after it. This is an elegiac story about meeting the monstrous, overcoming it, and having to live with what is left when the fighting stops, and Heaney, a Nobel laureate, made a poem in its own right rather than a crib, working from the four-squareness of utterance he found in the original.