SOURCE: Howe, Nicholas. “Scullionspeak.” New Republic 222, no. 9 (28 February 2000): 32-7.

In the following review, Howe singles out the humanity and energy of the narrative speeches in Heaney's translation of Beowulf, but concedes that Heaney's use of Ulster idiom is inappropriate since he does not fully re-invent the tale in terms of Anglo-Irish relations.

I.

For all that it seems to begin English literature, Beowulf is a relative newcomer to the canon. First edited by a Danish scholar in 1815, the year of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo and Jane Austen's Emma, the poem as a whole was not translated into Modern English until 1837. In subsequent years, Beowulf has found numerous translators, many of them scholars and few of them possessing any poetic gift. Of the sixty or so translators who have done the complete poem into English, only two have had any larger literary reputation. William Morris published a version in...