Read this if you…
- want the biggest influence on Lord of the Rings
- want a real super dark brooding epic w creepy monsters/dragons
- want to read a work that was lost for centuries, and rediscovered
- want the oldest big-deal work of English literature (you'll need a translation, it's Old English)
Skip this if you…
- aren't interested in early anglo saxon England
The 
Take
Heaney translation is excellent. Such a great dark evil vibe. More impressed than I thought. Quite short, did it in 1 setting. Very lofty like the classical epics but more foreboding and a distinctly Germanic/english/scandinavian vibe.
The lineage through Beowulf
- Genesis by Moses. Beowulf built on it. - *Beowulf*'s monsters are scriptural: Grendel is named a son of Cain, exiled kin of the man who slew Abel in Genesis 4 - The Flood reappears engraved on a sword-hilt — the *Beowulf* poet binds his pagan world to the Bible's earliest stories - Knowing Genesis first explains why these creatures are cursed, not just frightening — they carry Cain's punishment
Depicted in Art
Beowulf and his men hauling the severed head of Grendel back to Heorot, the giant head dragged by its hair across the floor.
J. R. Skelton, 1908
Wiglaf standing over the dying Beowulf as the slain dragon lies coiled in the background, the dragon's hoard scattered around them.
J. R. Skelton, 1908
Queen Wealhtheow offers a mead-cup to her husband King Hrothgar at the feast in Heorot.
J. R. Skelton, 1908
Beowulf in mail and helmet braced behind his shield as the dragon's fiery breath sweeps over him from above.
1914
Grendel as a brutish, wild-haired giant prowling at night, looming above human scale.
John Henry Frederick Bacon, 1910
Wiglaf kneeling beside the mortally wounded Beowulf after the dragon's fall, the old king's helmet at their feet.
J. R. Skelton, 1908
A page from the Kelmscott Press Beowulf with Morris's red rubricated summary at top, dense Troy-type black-letter body text, and ornamental woodcut borders along the margins.
William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, 1895
Recommended Editions
Seamus Heaney
W. W. Norton · 2001
Heaney's version is the one. His Northern Irish English lines up with Anglo-Saxon better than anything else in print, and the facing-page Old English lets you hear what the original is doing. The reason Beowulf became a bestseller in 1999.
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Notable Quotes
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
Screen & Stage
looseBeowulf
Film · 2007
Robert Zemeckis
looseThe 13th Warrior
Film · 1999
John McTiernan
Beowulf & Grendel
Film · 2005
Sturla Gunnarsson
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Seamus Heaney, Irish poet, Nobel laureate, 1939–2013: "The poem possesses a mythic potency."
- Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine writer, 1899–1986: Gave the last decades of his life to learning Old English, drawn back again and again to Beowulf.
- J.R.R. Tolkien, English philologist and novelist, 1892–1973: "Beowulf is in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite overshadows the historical content."
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