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    Beowulf
    Beowulf
    Beowulf
    Audiobook2 hours

    Beowulf

    Written by Benedict Flynn

    Narrated by Crawford Logan

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The oldest long poem in Old English, written about 1000 A.D., Beowulf tells the story of a great warrior in Southern Scandinavia in both youth and maturity. The monster Grendel terrorises the Scyldings of Hrothgar’s Danish Kingdom until Beowulf defeats him. As a result he has to face her enraged mother. Beowulf dies after a battle against a fierce dragon. The tale is powerfully performed here by Crawford Logan in a lively modern translation from the original West Saxon dialect.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateSep 1, 2006
    ISBN9789629546359
    Beowulf

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    Reviews for Beowulf

    4/5

    4,754 ratings174 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Incredible, Epic. I would love to have a time machine and go back to the first time this was told in a mead hall with the outer dark and cold winds pushing on the back of the speaker.
    • 5/5
      Warrior Beowulf saves the Danes from the monster Grendel and then Grendel's mother and then many years later does battle against a dragon guarding a hoard of gold.I loved reading this. The poetry of the Heaney translation is very vivid and flowing, and creates a great atmosphere of fighting and carousing and boasting warriors and epic battle against mythical beasts. The story is dark and sometimes gruesome, and it is not at all hard to imagine the poem being recited around the fire by Anglo-Saxon warriors, passing round the cup of mead as the tale unfolds.I am definitely going to pick up a literal/glossed translation at some point and read it again, and try to make more sense of the original text.
    • 4/5
      pretty decent - I probably wouldn't have read it if I weren't in some college classes that went over it, but I like it
    • 5/5
      By far my favorite translation, although the least faithful to the original text. Heaney was particularly good at preserving the alliteration, rhythm, and feeling of a fast-paced oral poem. It's not a perfect translation. Sometimes he added more archaic words to the mix (like his translation "tarn-hag" for mere-wif, when water-witch would do just as well; or "keshes" for fen-gelad, when I think just saying fen paths gives all the meaning one needs), which on the one hand, adds to the feel of the poem, but on the other, rather obscures the meaning. But this translation also has a beautiful mastery of metaphorical language, and an ability to convey mood and emotion like no other translation I've come across. An excellent example of this is lines 3143-55:
      On a height they kindled the hugest of all
      funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke
      billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
      and drowned out their weeping, wind died down
      and flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
      burning it to the core. They were disconsolate
      and wailed aloud for their lord's decease.
      A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
      with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
      of her worst fears, a wild litany
      of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
      enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
      slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.
      A fitting end to Beowulf the hero and king, and a wonderful read for any fan of epic tales.
    • 5/5
      I was completely immersed. Incredible. Wonderfully read too, suspenseful and exciting.
    • 4/5
      It was much easier to understand in this Modern English translation. The reader was excellent. He had the perfect voice for this and inflection he did a great job.
    • 3/5
      Not a bad book, but it’s all over the place. I’ll know better once I read either ebook or physical copy.
    • 5/5
      50+ years ago, we had to read Beowulf in old English . We had to translate it into modern English. At the time, and even today I saw no point.
      I certainly enjoyed it more when read and interpreted by an old English scholars.
    • 5/5
      The Narrator is top notch. A great must read poem.
    • 5/5
      I have read Beowulf prior to this translation, and I've read Heaney prior to this. Coming into it I loved both story and translator. This is a very readable and poetic translation. It also contains the old English on the left, if you, like me, like to compare translations with the original.
    • 4/5
      This translated version has the Olde English verse written on the left page, and the modern English verse on the right page. As Heaney states in the introduction, he has tried with this translation to keep the language simple and as the original intended the meaning to be. He favoured meaning over rhyme, and as a consequence there is little rhyme. But the rhythm is certainly there and it reads very well. I was surprised at how accessible the story was, and how drawn in I was. There seemed to be some glaringly obvious similarities in storyline to The Hobbit...I am unsure as to whether this has been stated before I came to the conclusion, but is seemed so to me. The parts of the story that did get complicated were the family lineages and connections. But that didn't detract from the legend of Beowulf being as grand and fearsome as ever
    • 5/5
      This translation (by Seamus Heaney) of Beowulf has a plain-spoken elegance. The layout - original Anglo-Saxon on the left page, Heaney translation on the right -- makes it possible to read the original poem aloud for its gorgeous alliteration and rolling rhythm. Still, the world of the poem is dismal. Life is hard; death is fated. Men kill one another, or monsters kill them. Everyone is so poor (by modern standards) that an individual shirt of ring-mail is a family heirloom, handed down for generations, or given by a king to a follower as a major mark of favor. In such a world, listening to good poetry might be one of the few lasting pleasures. The story of Beowulf is tedious; the poetry, transcendent.
    • 5/5
      Warrior Beowulf saves the Danes from the monster Grendel and then Grendel's mother and then many years later does battle against a dragon guarding a hoard of gold.I loved reading this. The poetry of the Heaney translation is very vivid and flowing, and creates a great atmosphere of fighting and carousing and boasting warriors and epic battle against mythical beasts. The story is dark and sometimes gruesome, and it is not at all hard to imagine the poem being recited around the fire by Anglo-Saxon warriors, passing round the cup of mead as the tale unfolds.I am definitely going to pick up a literal/glossed translation at some point and read it again, and try to make more sense of the original text.
    • 4/5
      Good introduction. The text has a facing prose translation, which will be helpful for the way I'm planning to use it -- for practising my Anglo-Saxon translations.

      Heaney's translation would still be my pick for casual reading, though.
    • 5/5
      This translation of Beowulf is excellent. It captures the spirit of the poetry without becoming too dense to read. I had read excerpts of the story for various classes and never enjoyed it. It is definitely something that you have to read the entire thing to find interesting.
    • 5/5
      Written between the 7th & 10th century in Old English, Heaney's translation brings this masterpiece to life! Beowulf is the story of a warrior who journeys from Sweden to rescue the Danes from the monster Grendel. This edition is beautifully illustrated with photos of ships, weapons, jewelry, and artwork.
    • 5/5
      It's a classic! Who wouldn't love having this in their library?
    • 5/5
      This review refers to the facsmile version of the Cotton manuscript of Beowulf.The text of Beowulf as we know it today is based on a single surviving manuscript, and that sole manuscript was damaged in a fire, to the extent that the last word or so of nearly every line of the poem was obliterated. This copy is a facsimile reproduction of that manuscript, with a facing-page transliteration by Norman Davis.This is, admittedly, not a version of the poem that will be useful to the majority of readers. For one thing, the text is transcribed but not translated, and the notes refer to the textual issues and not to the words of the poem itself. It's not even a particularly useful text for the purposes of translation, since, again, the notes do not refer to linguistic issues, but rather to issues of the text itself.But to a student of Old English who wishes to have a glimpse into the textual history of the most famous Old English poem, this is an invaluable work. The story of the Cotton manuscript is in itself an epic saga, and its narrow survival emphasizes the volumes of Old English literature that did not survive, and will always be lost to us.
    • 5/5
      Seamus Heaney's translation made me understand why this story has survived this long. He gives it vigor, something that translated works often lack, and this makes reading it a pleasure.
    • 5/5
      Another great translation and reading from this series. What a stark, dangerous, powerful world it conveys to we pampered moderns.
    • 5/5
      "Beowulf" is an old English poem written some time between the 8th and 11th centuries. It tells of Beowulf, a great hero among the Geats, who travels to assist the Danish king Hrothgar in defeating a monster that has been killing and eating his warriors. I won't discuss the poem's plot or content here, as plenty of summaries are available elsewhere. I will briefly comment that the plotline was solid and Beowulf was both moral and heroic, even by modern standards, which was contrary to my expectations. I anticipated a meandering plot and glorification of violence against humans, which were both features of the "Saga of the Volsungs," an Icelandic epic about the warrior Sigurd that dates from several hundred years after Beowulf.I picked the translation by Seamus Heaney after researching all of the in-print options, including one by J.R.R. Tolkien released in 2014. Heaney has translated the poem into verse, and he provides a lengthy introduction to the work that includes some details on choices he made in the course of translation. He has done a marvelous job: the text is exciting and flows smoothly and naturally. It is comfortable to read, and it goes quickly (maybe a few hours of reading), as the poem is not overly long.I can unhesitatingly recommend "Beowulf" to fans of old legends and myths, as well as to modern Fantasy readers and even gamers who like Norse-inspired settings. It is easy to see how Beowulf has influenced modern works such as "The Hobbit" (particularly as pertains to the dragon Smaug) and computer games such as the "Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" (which is set in a Norse-inspired fantasy world, complete with a king named Hrothgar in a Heorot-like mead hall).
    • 5/5
      In his preface, Seamus Heaney refers to the critical tradition of treating Beowulf less as a work of literature and more as a catalog of anthropological, historical and ethnic information. As the first long piece of Old English epic poetry, it carries with it a lot of intrinsic value as an historical artifact.

      But turn it over to a wordsmith like Heaney, who, in the tradition of Tolkien, looks to Beowulf as a window into our hardscrabble humanity and dedication to the communal values that kept the Geats and Danes alive on the marsh and the cliffs and the seas.

      You know that the translation here isn't going to be religiously accurate, as Heaney plays with the language to keep the alliterative and rhythmic force of the words. What you get is a sense of both the violence and the intense brotherhood of the mead-hall.
    • 4/5
      I don't think I have read Beowulf since high school so this was a real treat - I LOVED this translation. Bro, fuck this shit, #blessed, you had me at the start. Minus the few words I just said - it doesn't read too modern - it's certainly no longer in Old English, but it doesn't feel "too" modern - just a touch. I also loved the introduction, Maria Dahvana Headley seems like one cool motherf-er and I would love to hang out with her. I mean, hell, she named her kid Grimoire! I am not a scholar - but I appreciated learning more about the history behind different translations and it was nice to re-visit this classic.
    • 4/5
      Really good. Makes me want to learn the original language.
    • 5/5
      Okay, I had absolutely no prior experience with the Beowulf story somehow before this book. I knew there was a monster? That the original was Old English and it took place in the North? That was really somehow it. I'd always intended to read the Seamus Heaney translation someday, but when I heard there was a radical new (feminist?) translation out there, I impulsively bought a copy.I had a lot of fun with this. I loved the swagger and the Bro! of it. I have spent some serious tie thinking about whether I could censor out the incest on the fly and read this aloud for family story time. I think this would be so much fun to read out loud. There is so much alliteration and rhythm and other good fun stuff to sink my teeth into. I am sure this translation wouldn't be for everyone, but it did certainly work for me!
    • 4/5
      I actually explored several different translations and this was the final one I read. Interesting translation; very modern with lots of swearing. I enjoyed studying Beowulf and the varieties of thoughts on this Old English, probably the first English work. A clash of pagan and Christian. The time period is shortly after the fall of Rome. Involves the Anglo Saxon, the Danes. Battles with Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon, much of which brings to mind the Hobbit. Tolkien was one of the translators of Beowulf and it strongly influenced his own works.
    • 4/5
      A great epic fantasy tale.
    • 4/5
      An awakening for me, this book has opened up the classic and made it very accessible. My purist literature professor friend refers to it as an abomination since she can read it in its original. I, on the other hand, am most appreciative of this new translation and am loving it...[[in progress]]
    • 4/5
      Everyone raves about Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf and I have to wonder, is it just the translation or could the accompanying gorgeous illustrations and photography have something to do with it? Everyone knows the story of Beowulf the mighty warrior from an English lit class. As a poem, it is the courageous story of a man who learns of a King's annual nightmare. A monster named Grendel destroys fifteen knights a year without fail and has been doing so for the past twelve years. Beowulf, upon hearing this sad tale, takes it upon himself to vanquish Grendel only to face Grendel's vengeful mother. Yeah, he kills her, too. Then there's the fire-breathing dragon (think Bilbo Baggins) who tragically wins over Beowulf. In truth, I had forgotten the graphic violence of men being mauled by the monster Grendel. The clash is pretty dramatic. It would make a great movie. Wait. Knowing my knowledge of movies...it probably is.
    • 5/5
      Heaney is a poet I admire and enjoy in small doses rather than inhale, but his Beowulf is unputdownable. His feel for the texture, tenor and tempo of the Anglo Saxon is just spot-on, and reading this I noticed the correspondences with his own poetry, like that weighty, measured pacing, and the way his images unfold gradually. As a bonus he throws in a handful of Ulster dialect words like "bawn" (castle/fort/hall) and "graith" (gear, equipment) which feel totally apt and give a sense of the original's otherness. Overall the impression is of a great poet in his element.As for Beowulf itself, it's a simple tale, isn't it? Boy meets monster, boy grapples monster, boy meet's monster's mom... I'd forgotten that Grendel, along with all trolls and their ilk, is asserted by the poet to be the offspring of Cain. I'd also forgotten all about the climactic battle with the dragon, which is described much more clearly than are Grendel or his mother, and conforms (unsurprisingly given the intermediation of Tolkien) near-identically with the traditional fantasy image of the fire-breathing, treasure-hoarding, poison-breathing, winged serpent.