# Beowulf

> The great Old English epic of a hero who battles a monster, its vengeful mother, and finally a dragon, in Francis Barton Gummere's stately verse translation. The foundational poem of English literature, full of courage and doom.

Price: 8.50 USD · in stock

## About
Out of the mead-halls and cold northern seas of the early Germanic world comes the oldest surviving epic in the English tongue, a poem of monsters, gold, kinship, and mortal courage. In Francis Barton Gummere's measured and dignified verse translation, its ancient alliterative music is carried across the centuries into a form that modern readers can follow, while still keeping much of the weight, gravity, and echoing sound of the heroic age that first sang it.What it's aboutThe warrior Beowulf, greatest of the Geats, comes across the sea to the aid of the Danish king Hrothgar, whose splendid hall Heorot has for years been ravaged nightly by the monster Grendel. Beowulf destroys Grendel in a fierce hand-to-hand struggle, and then pursues and kills the creature's vengeful mother in her lair beneath a dark and haunted mere, winning fame, treasure, and honour. The poem then leaps boldly across many years to Beowulf's old age, when, now himself a king who has long guarded his people, he faces a final and fatal contest with a dragon roused to burning fury by the theft of a single cup from its ancient hoard. Through these three great combats the poem traces the whole shining, shadowed arc of a hero's life from youth to death.ThemesCourage in the face of certain death, the sacred loyalty binding lord and warrior, the hunger for lasting fame and remembrance, and the ever-present shadow of fate and mortality run through every episode of the poem. Beneath the thrilling monster-slaying lies a sober and moving meditation on transience, on the passing of glory, and on the doom that waits for even the strongest of men.Why it still mattersAs the very wellspring of English poetry, Beowulf stands behind an immense amount of what came after it, and its haunting imagery of the great hall, the lonely monster, and the treasure-guarding dragon has shaped fantasy and heroic literature down to the present day. Its grave beauty and its unflinching reckoning with death remain genuinely and lastingly moving.Who it's forFor readers of epic and myth, for anyone curious about the deep roots of English literature and language, and for admirers of heroic tales who wish to meet, at last, the great ancestor of so many later dragon-slayers.

## Specifications
- author: Francis Barton Gummere (translator)
- publisher: DotBooks
- imprint: DotBooks
- language: en
- binding: Perfect Bound
- pages: 399
- format: paperback