At the start of this thousand-year-old Old English epic poem, Beowulf is a young unproven warrior, physically strong and determined to prove his merits. He crosses the sea, defeats ungodly beasts in bloody combat, wins a foreign ally for his king and earns respect from his native people. Eventually he becomes king himself, rules in relative peace and wisdom, and then is killed in a fight with a dragon, but not until after he slays the beast.

It's a strange story, about a world with foreign names, an early Christian warrior code of ethics that is hard to imagine, and monsters that have not survived into 21st century mythology. Along the way, there are historical asides and philosophical meanderings that make "Beowulf" a deeper, better story than it would otherwise be.

It's hard to judge the story on its own merits, because I don't know how much of its beauty is inherent and how much is the work Nobel-prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, who spent 15 years on the translation, in frequent consultation with editors and medievalists. The result is a spare, poetic, Saxon-sounding verse with the strange loping of pre-meter rhythmic writing, and assonance and alliteration on every line. I read most of "Beowulf" at a whisper, because it almost commands to be heard out loud.

These are words about a long-gone kingdom, ancient even in Beowulf's time, and the death of a civilization:

The hard helmet, hasped with hold
will be stripped of its hoops; and the helmet-shiner
who should polish the metal of the war-mask sleeps;
the coat of mail that came through all fights
through shield-collapse and cut of sword,
decays with the warrior. Nor may webbed mail
range far and wide on the warlord's back
beside his mustered troops. No trembling harp,
no tuned timber, no tumbling hack
swerving through the hall, no swift horse
pawing the courtyard. Pillage and slaughter
have emptied the earth of entire peoples.

This backwards-looking scenario is evoked at the end of the book, as Beowulf's survivors imagine what will happen to their own kingdom without their warrior leader to protect them and keep peace with their longtime enemies.

Two or three times Heaney inserted a Latinate word that startled me or didn't seem quite right for the language, even though its meaning was clearly best for the line, its consonants and vowels fit with those that surrounded it. I was amused to read in his acknowledgments at the end that the Saxon-Latin diction conflict was one Heaney spent some time pondering in academic circles as he worked on his translation.