Beowulf: A New Verse Rendering

“Hear the song of spear-Danes from sunken years,
Kings had courage then, the kings of all tribes,
We have heard their heroics, we hold them in memory.”

So begins a dark, but sturdy epic full of warriors, dragons, monsters of the deep, mead halls, and mounds of treasure. Beowulf is the great Norse epic poem, and one of the great inspirations for J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings . In this bold and truly innovative translation, Douglas Wilson reproduces the alliteration and stresses of the original, though being more dynamic with particular wording. This is without question the most musical translation of Beowulf, one which many readers will return to again and again if they wish to get an idea of the feel of the original Anglo-Saxon.

152 pages.

View excerpt here.

“I’ve long been waiting for a rendering of Beowulf by someone sensitive to its muscular verse, its palette of irony that ranges from grim understatement to barely suppressed hilarity, its profound humanity and Christian faith. I’m waiting no longer — Douglas Wilson’s is the one, far more faithful to the original than Heaney’s or Raffel’s, and conceding absolutely nothing to theirs in sheer dramatic force. I will be ordering it for my students forthwith.” -Anthony Esolen, translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child , and professor of English at Providence College

“Douglas Wilson’s Beowulf conveys with admirable clarity the poem’s narrative and general character, and his commentary helps the studious reader to see how the poem reflects a time of cultural conflict and change.” -Richard Wilbur, United States Poet Laureate (1987), two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets

“It is obvious that Douglas Wilson enjoyed himself immensely in rendering this Old English epic into the alliterative verse form of the original, and as a reader I found that this enjoyment energized the text. Beowulf is a story par excellence, and the most salient trait of Wilson’s version is that it flows beautifully.” -Leland Ryken, professor of English at Wheaton College and author of The Christian Imagination and the Christian Guides to the Classics series