San Antonio College Library

Among the finest works of European vernacular literature from the Middle Ages, Beowulf is a fitting tide to head the Old English family of texts published in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. This volume sets Beowulf in a unique and unprecedented context, For the first time in the long history of Beowulf scholarship, the poem appears alongside the other four texts from its sole surviving manuscript: the prose of The Passion of Saint Christopher,...

"Dick Ringler's deceptively simple translation captures the rhythm, movement, and power of the original Old English poem while employing a fluid modern English style and a relatively spare vocabulary. A steady succession and alternation of various verse types and sub types together with recurring alliteration patterns give this translation a remarkable momentum, one that makes it ideal for experiencing either silently or aloud." "Typographically,...

"Beowulf is to English what the Odyssey and Iliad are to Greek literature - the oldest example of vernacular literature of any substance not only in England but the whole of western Europe." "Since its rediscovery and the appearance of the first printed editions in the middle of the nineteenth century, this moving and dramatic epic poem has attracted considerable scholarly attention, and Professor Swanton is able to draw on this wealth of scholarship...

Overview: 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....