The best-known literary achievement of Anglo-Saxon
England, Beowulf is a poem concerned with monsters and
heroes, treasure and transience, feuds and fidelity.
Composed sometime between 500 and 1000 C.E. and
surviving in a single manuscript, it is at once
immediately accessible and forever mysterious. And in
Craig Williamson's splendid new version, this often
translated work may well have found its most compelling
modern English interpreter. Williamson's Beowulf appears
alongside his translations of many of the major works
written by Anglo-Saxon poets, including the elegies "The
Wanderer" and "The Seafarer," the heroic "Battle of
Maldon," the visionary "Dream of the Rood," the
mysterious and heart-breaking "Wulf and Eadwacer," and a
generous sampling of the Exeter Book riddles.
Accompanied by a foreword by noted medievalist Tom
Shippey on Anglo-Saxon history, culture, and
archaeology, and Williamson's introductions to the
individual poems as well as his essay on translating Old
English, the texts transport us back to the medieval
scriptorium or ancient mead hall to share an exile's
lament or herdsman's recounting of the story of the
world's creation. From the riddling song of a bawdy
onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom, to the
thrilling account of Beowulf's battle with a
treasure-hoarding dragon, the world becomes a place of
rare wonder in Williamson's lines. Were his idiom not so
modern, we might almost think the Anglo-Saxon poets had
taken up the lyre again and begun to sing after a
silence of a thousand years.
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