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Beowulf

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Beowulf

Written by: Seamus Heaney - translator
Narrated by: George Guidall
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New York Times bestseller and winner of the Costa Book Award.

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, 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 dies in old age 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 beginning of the twenty-first century, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface. Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary listener.

Public Domain (P)2004 Recorded Books Ancient, Classical & Medieval Literature Classics Poetry
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I chose to listen to this version over the Heaney version and I don’t have any regrets. Even unabridged, this book isn’t that long. The work is a classic of English literature for a reason and listening to the poem rather than reading it really enhances the experience.

Great unabridged reading

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