Volume 47, Number 12 · July 20, 2000
The Geat of Geats
By Frank Kermode
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 213 pp., $25.00
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
by R.M. Liuzza
Broadview, 242 pp., $7.95 (paper)
The Old English poem Beowulf tells, in a little over three thousand lines of verse, the story of a great hero of the Geat tribe, which long ago inhabited what is now part of Sweden. Beowulf hears of the protracted sufferings of the neighboring Danes at the hands of a monster called Grendel, a wildly destructive and cannibalistic ogre who bursts, night after night, into the great hall of Hrothgar, the Danish king, and tears both the place and its defenders apart. Beowulf, seeing an opportunity for heroism, resolves to go to the aid of Hrothgar and crosses the sea with the intention of taking on Grendel singlehanded. On arrival at the Danish court he does the required amount of boasting and feasting and when Grendel arrives that night Beowulf, scorning to use a weapon, wrestles with the intruder and tears off his arm.
Review, 3924 words
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