SOURCE: Murphy, Bruce. “Seamus Heaney's Beowulf.” Poetry 177 (December 2000): 211-16.

In the following review, Murphy evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Heaney's translation of Beowulf.

The Anglo-Saxon scholar Jess Bessinger used to refer to the poem we call Beowulf as the libretto of a lost musical composition. He wanted to draw attention to the fact that the Anglo-Saxon scop, in whom the roles of singer and poet were not yet divided, probably recited this alliterative and mesmerizing poem while accompanying himself on a harp. It is, therefore, an event when the poet of the English language with the best ear of any now living tackles the task of translating this enormously important work. The poem was composed in the West Saxon dialect probably in the seventh century; the unique manuscript copy that survives was made around the end of the tenth. Where it spent the centuries between the turn...