Leaving aside the quality of this translation, Beowulf is an incredible piece of literature, fully deserving its canonical status. Strangely, these are often the sections that Heaney omits in the audio version.

There's more sadness in Beowulf than I realised, more awareness of life's passing and of the grief that accompanies the death and the departure of loved ones. I'm unable to read the original Old English so I can't say what Heaney's translation captures or does not capture of it but, more than the other versions I've read, it communicates menace, foreboding and melancholy more effectively especially the latter. Heaney's delivery is slow, measured and sure and sometimes, only adding to its richness and character, his voice breaks (in a way reminiscent of Johnny Cash’s voice in his late ‘American’ recordings).

The audio version makes cuts, which I had to pause for, but it's worth listening along to. Remembering his deep, dulcet tones, I listened along to the audio version of Beowulf, read by Heaney himself, as I read the verses. The late Seamus Heaney's 1999 verse translation is the fourth version of Beowulf that I've read over the years (the others being Kevin Crossley-Holland's somewhat turgid 1968 OUP edition Michael Morpurgo's simple and excellent 2006 prose retelling and, when my son was studying Beowulf at school this year, Gareth Hinds' gloomy but scary 2007 graphic novel), and it's easily the best.Īs a teenager studying Heaney's wonderful poems at school, I was fortunate enough to go and see him read some of them aloud, in London.

Beowulf by unknown