Beowulf

Name: Beowulf
Brand: Bloomsbury Publishing (AUS)
Price: 38.75 AUD
Availability: PreOrder

Poem, Poet and Hero

By: Heather O'Donoghue

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Paperback | 14 May 2026

At a Glance

Format
Paperback

Dimensions(cm)
23.4 x 15.6

Paperback

$38.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $9.69 with

Available: 14th May 2026

Preorder. Will ship when available.

The Old English epic poem Beowulf has an established reputation as a canonical text.

And yet the original poem has remained inaccessible to all but experienced scholars of Old English. This book aims to present the poem to readers who want to know what makes it such a remarkable work of art, and why it is of such cultural significance.

Most readers will only have encountered Beowulf through one of its many translations or adaptations; others have had to take on this unique survivor from a past era as a challenging translation exercise, part of their academic study of the poem. This book sidesteps scholarly debates about the poemâs unknowns â" its date, provenance or author â" and focusses instead on its poetic artistry, its interleaving of heroic pasts and Christian present, and its poetâs extraordinary breadth of reference, from biblical history to Old Norse myth. But the strange intricacies of Old English metre and poetic language are explained, and the poetâs evocation of the ethics and material world of an imagined pre-Viking Scandinavia is explored.

Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero follows the story of the poem through its many interwoven voices from different times and places, and the poem emerges as a work of reflective beauty, its human characters full of touching pathos and wisdom, its notorious monsters still speaking to our own societiesâ abiding insecurities. The final section, on post-medieval responses to Beowulf, shows how the poem has been taken up as a European cultural icon. This book restores its status as a literary masterpiece.

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