The Whitbread jury made the right call. Harry’s adventures make great reading, no matter how old you are, but “Beowulf,” the longest Anglo-Saxon poem in existence, simply outclasses the boy. And as rendered by Heaney, the bardic saga of a Danish prince’s epic battles with the monster Grendel, Grendel’s mother and a 50-foot dragon is as vivid as a tabloid headline and as visceral as a nightmare.
Heaney’s own poetic vernacular–muscular language so rich with the tones and smell of earth that you almost expect to find a few crumbs of dirt clinging to his lines–is the perfect match for the Beowulf poet’s Anglo-Saxon. Heaney uses this idiom not to modernize the epic but to showcase its surprisingly contemporary feel. As he points out, the poem’s closing lines describing the mourning at Beowulf’s funeral could “come straight from a late-twentieth-century news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo”: beside Beowulf’s funeral pyre, “A Geat woman too sang out in grief;/with hair bound up, she unburdened herself/of her worst fears, a wild litany/of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,/enemies on the rampage; bodies in piles,/slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.” As retooled by Heaney, “Beowulf” should easily be good for another millennium.
