Beowulf
Mary Clayton with Olivia O’Leary
Beowulf, the epic tale of a Danish hero and his struggle with the monster Grendel, is the greatest surviving work of literature in Old English, unmatched in grandeur and scope. The task of translating it into modern English was daunting, but Heaney undertook with relish, and his version was met with widespread acclaim. For this second event in our Heaney Translations series, Mary Clayton considers his retelling of one of the masterpieces of world literature.
