Full Description
The best-known literary achievement of Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf is a poem concerned with monsters and heroes, treasure and transience, feuds and fidelity. Composed sometime between 500 and 1000 C.E. and surviving in a single manuscript, it is at once immediately accessible and forever mysterious. And in Craig Williamson's splendid new version, this often translated work may well have found its most compelling modern English interpreter.
Williamson's Beowulf appears alongside his translations of many of the major works written by Anglo-Saxon poets, including the elegies "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer," the heroic "Battle of Maldon," the visionary "Dream of the Rood," the mysterious and heart-breaking "Wulf and Eadwacer," and a generous sampling of the Exeter Book riddles. Accompanied by a foreword by noted medievalist Tom Shippey on Anglo-Saxon history, culture, and archaeology, and Williamson's introductions to the individual poems as well as his essay on translating Old English, the texts transport us back to the medieval scriptorium or ancient mead hall to share an exile's lament or herdsman's recounting of the story of the world's creation. From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom, to the thrilling account of Beowulf's battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, the world becomes a place of rare wonder in Williamson's lines. Were his idiom not so modern, we might almost think the Anglo-Saxon poets had taken up the lyre again and begun to sing after a silence of a thousand years.
Contents
Foreword by Tom Shippey
Note on Editions
Guide to Pronouncing Old English
On Translating Old English Poetry
BEOWULF
Introduction
Beowulf
OTHER OLD ENGLISH POEMS
A Note on Genres
Heroic or Historical Poems
The Battle of Maldon
Deor
Elegies
The Wanderer
The Seafarer
The Wife's Lament
Wulf and Eadwacer
Selected Exeter Book Riddles
Riddles
Gnomic or Wisdom Poems
Maxims II (Cotton Maxims)
Charms
The Fortunes of Men
Religious Poems
Cædmon's Hymn
Physiologus: Panther and Whale
Vainglory
Two Advent Lyrics
The Dream of the Rood
Appendix A. "Digressions": Battles, Feuds, and Family Strife in Beowulf
Appendix B. Genealogies in Beowulf
Appendix C. Two Scandinavian Analogues of Beowulf
Appendix D. Possible Riddle Solutions
Glossary of Proper Names
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
