"Beowulf for me has always been a favorite story of mine. It's a story I actually encountered as a really young boy, and I encountered a children's version of Beowulf. I was fascinated by the idea of a monster lurking out in the hall. What's funny for me is that actually I always thought Beowulf was the monster; and I encountered it again as an adult, and there was a lot of hoopla that came out when Seamus Haney, who is a noted Nobel laureate who was teaching at Harvard, did a new translation of Beowulf that supposedly sort of modernized it into more streamlined English prose.
There's so many touchstones in Beowulf that we see in so many other stories, including things like Tolkein's work and other modern fantasy genre work. So most people probably don't know that the names of the dwarves in The Hobbit are all taken from Beowulf.
The story of Beowulf is a classic adventure, and it's really great because it's the first story or epic written in old English, written around the year 1000; and it follows the story of a hero, Beowulf, who essentially has three great encounters, and that's really what Beowulf is about. The first is he sort of arrives as a professional monster killer. There's this creature Grendel that is terrorizing the hall of a king, King Hrothgar, and Beowulf comes and takes on Grendel. It turns out Grendel has a mother, and that's the second encounter that Beowulf has. Then having defeated these two, Beowulf is made king in his own country; and later in his life he encounters a dragon, which he manages to kill but which also kills him in turn.
The Seamus Haney translation of Beowulf I think is an accessible translation for anybody probably in high school and older. Maybe a younger advanced reader could get into it. I'd give it sort of five stars as a scholarly work, probably four stars as just a standalone, entertaining read."
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