The best-known literary achievement of Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf is
a poem concerned with monsters and heroes, treasure and transience,
feuds and fidelity. Composed sometime between 500 and 1000 C.E. and
surviving in a single manuscript, it is at once immediately accessible
and forever mysterious. And in Craig Williamson's splendid new version,
this often translated work may well have found its most compelling
modern English interpreter.
Williamson's Beowulf appears alongside his translations of many of the
major works written by Anglo-Saxon poets, including the elegies The
Wanderer and The Seafarer, the heroic Battle of Maldon, the visionary
Dream of the Rood, the mysterious and heart-breaking Wulf and Eadwacer,
and a generous sampling of the Exeter Book riddles. Accompanied by a
foreword by noted medievalist Tom Shippey on Anglo-Saxon history,
culture, and archaeology, and Williamson's introductions to the
individual poems as well as his essay on translating Old English, the
texts transport us back to the medieval scriptorium or ancient mead hall
to share an exile's lament or herdsman's recounting of the story of the
world's creation. From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves
between kitchen and bedroom, to the thrilling account of Beowulf's
battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, the world becomes a place of
rare wonder in Williamson's lines. Were his idiom not so modern, we
might almost think the Anglo-Saxon poets had taken up the lyre again and
begun to sing after a silence of a thousand years.
