Beowulf, Seamus Heaney
Beowulf, Seamus Heaney
2 Rating(s)
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Beowulf

Author: Seamus Heaney

Narrator: Seamus Heaney

Abridged: 2 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/04/2000


Synopsis

A New York Times Bestseller and Whitbread Book of the Year.

Heaney's performance reminds us that Beowulf, written near the turn of another millennium, was intended to be heard not read.

Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and lives to old age before dying in a vivid fight against a dragon.

The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.

While an abridgment of Heaney's full translation of Beowulf, Heaney prepared this abridgment himself to read for the BBC program from which this recording is taken.

Reviews

AudiobooksNow review by Evan on 2007-12-05 22:09:19

Remember -- primary criterion is how well it helps me stay awake during commute. This does a reasonable job. My only real complaint is that it's abridged, and doesn't say so. It's a reasonable cutting, though. If you're not familiar with the poem, you won't notice the omissions. It's a good story, and one better heard than read.

Goodreads review by Anne on November 26, 2024

I vaguely remembered reading this in 7th grade and thought it might be fun to grab the audio version of one of the most important works of Ye Olde English literature. I listened to this twice the other day and then realized a funny thing: Beowulf is basically every 80's action movie ever made. It's tr......more

Goodreads review by Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽ on April 16, 2021

As a college English major, I studied Beowulf without any great enthusiasm; my real love was for the Romantic poets. And Chaucer, but that might have been partly because I thought it was hilarious that we were studying such bawdy material at BYU. Plus you can still puzzle out The Canterbury Tales in......more

Goodreads review by Nicole on May 09, 2023

Those of you looking for a precise, age-old translation of Beowulf need to go back to Heaney. This is no timeless classic, this is no pretentious, literary snobbery made to bore high school sophomores. This is living, breathing poetry as it's meant to be, rooted in the language of then and the langu......more

Goodreads review by James on April 23, 2017

Beowulf is thought to have been written around the year 1000 AD, give or take a century. And the author is the extremely famous, very popular and world renowned writer... Unknown. Got you there, didn't I? LOL Probably not... if you're on Goodreads and studied American or English literature, you prob......more