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Loading... Beowulf: abridged audioby Seamus Heaney
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Set in Scandinavia and composed by an anonymous poet between the 8th and 11th centuries, Beowulf tells of a great hero of the same name and is considered to be one of the great works of Anglo-Saxon literature. The epic opens with the lineage of Hrothgar, king of the Danes, and then focuses on a point during Hrothgar’s rule when his mead hall is being repeatedly attacked by a monster named Grendel. Hearing of the Danes’ woes, an exceptionally strong hero of the Geats named Beowulf sails to Hrothgar’s aid. The story that follows encompasses Beowulf’s three major battles, two in service to Hrothgar and the last back in his homeland. Heaney’s translation was, as I anticipated, quite wonderful. I loved hearing him read his own words. He read slowly, but I never felt bored or tempted to increase the playback speed. My full review is posted on my blog, Erin Reads. Beowulf is somewhat over rated-simply for its position in the history of English literature and its antiquity, though its versification does guarantee it a permanent place in world literature. This is a good translation by Seamus Heaney, the best translation of Beowulf available. This part of the review refers to the audiobook: it's unfortunate that one can only get "unabridged selections," which, at least, is a better choice than an abridgment, especially when the choices are made by Seamus Heaney. no reviews | add a review
Is an abridged version ofAwards
Fiction.
Poetry.
A New York Times Bestseller and Whitbread Book of the Year.Heaney's performance reminds us that Beowulf, written near the turn of another millennium, was intended to be heard not read.Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and lives to old age before dying in a vivid fight against a dragon.The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.While an abridgment of Heaney's full translation of Beowulf, Heaney prepared this abridgment himself to read for the BBC program from which this recording is taken. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)829.3Literature English Old English literature, ca. 450-1100 BeowulfLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Seamus Heaney is a delight to listen to. Now that I've listed to the audio version twice, I'm reading the unabridged translation. I wish that I'd read this years ago! ( )