Volume 17, Number 11 · December 30, 1971
Grendel and Beowulf Were Two Pretty Boys
By F.W. Bateson
Beowulf
translated with an Introduction and Afterword by Burton Raffel, Drawings by Leonard Baskin
University of Massachusetts Press, 126, 7 illustrations pp., $10.00
Grendel
by John Gardner, illustrated by Emil Antonucci
Knopf, 174 pp., $5.95
What is Beowulf? Or rather—a more problematical problem this—why is Beowulf? What ought our attitude be to it today? In all this I am referring, of course, to the long eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poem only recently accorded the title Beowulf (the single extant manuscript in the British Museum is without one) and not to its phenomenally muscular monster-killing hero.
Review, 2359 words
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