New This Month - O'Donoghue on Beowulf

Out now from Bloomsbury Academic:

Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero

Heather O'Donoghue (Author)

Full details and ordering information at https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/beowulf-9781788312882/,

Product details

Published Jun 13 2024

Format Hardback

Edition 1st

Extent 192

ISBN 9781788312882

Imprint Bloomsbury Academic

Dimensions 9 x 6 inches

Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

Description

The Old English epic poem Beowulf has an established reputation as a canonical text. And yet the original poem has remained inaccessible to all but experienced scholars of Old English. This book aims to present the poem to readers who want to know what makes it such a remarkable work of art, and why it is of such cultural significance.

Most readers will only have encountered Beowulf through one of its many translations or adaptations; others have had to take on this unique survivor from a past era as a challenging translation exercise, part of their academic study of the poem. This book sidesteps scholarly debates about the poem's unknowns – its date, provenance or author – and focusses instead on its poetic artistry, its interleaving of heroic pasts and Christian present, and its poet's extraordinary breadth of reference, from biblical history to Old Norse myth. But the strange intricacies of Old English metre and poetic language are explained, and the poet's evocation of the ethics and material world of an imagined pre-Viking Scandinavia is explored.

Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero follows the story of the poem through its many interwoven voices from different times and places, and the poem emerges as a work of reflective beauty, its human characters full of touching pathos and wisdom, its notorious monsters still speaking to our own societies' abiding insecurities. The final section, on post-medieval responses to Beowulf, shows how the poem has been taken up as a European cultural icon. This book restores its status as a literary masterpiece.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One: The Storyworld

1. The Setting

2. The Human Characters

3. The Monsters

Part Two: Poet, Narrator and Scop

4. A Christian Poet

5. An Old Norse Scholar

6. The Narrator

7. The Scop

Part Three: Post-Medieval Meanings

8. Earliest Audiences

9. Early Modern Audiences

10. Translations

11. Contemporary Meanings

Further Reading

Index