A New Verse Rendering of Beowulf

“I’ve long been waiting for a rendering of Beowulf by someone sensitive to its muscular verse, its palette of irony that ranges from grim understatement to barely suppressed hilarity, its profound humanity and Christian faith.

I’m waiting no longer—Douglas Wilson’s is the one, far more faithful to the original than Heaney’s or Raffel’s, and conceding absolutely nothing to theirs in sheer dramatic force.

I will be ordering it for my students forthwith.”

—Anthony Esolen, translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, and professor of English at Providence College