Beowulf (Barnes & Noble Classics) by John McNamara (PDF)

Description

Beowulf is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:New introductions commissioned from today’s top writers and scholarsBiographies of the authorsChronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural eventsFootnotes and endnotesSelective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the workComments by other famous authorsStudy questions to challenge the reader’s viewpoints and expectationsBibliographies for further readingIndices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader’s understanding of these enduring works.Widely regarded as the first true masterpiece of English literature, Beowulf describes the thrilling adventures of a great Scandinavian warrior of the sixth century. Its lyric intensity and imaginative vitality are unparalleled, and the poem has greatly influenced many important modern novelists and poets, most notably J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings.Part history and part mythology, Beowulf opens in the court of the Danish king where a horrible demon named Grendel devours men in their sleep every night. The hero Beowulf arrives and kills the monster, but joy turns to horror when Grendel’s mother attacks the hall to avenge the death of her son. Ultimately triumphant, Beowulf becomes king himself and rules peacefully for fifty years until, one dark day, a foe more powerful than any he has yet faced is aroused—an ancient dragon guarding a horde of treasure. Once again, Beowulf must summon all his strength and courage to face the beast, but this time victory exacts a terrible price.New translation by John McNamara. Features an original map and genealogy chart.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author John McNamara is Professor of English at the University of Houston, where he teaches the early languages and literatures of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with a special focus on their oral traditions. He is the co-editor of Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From John McNamara’s Introduction to BeowulfEven more perplexing is the question of values and beliefs in the poem. The world of Beowulf is the world of heroic epic, with its legendary fights among larger-than-life figures, both human and monstrous, its scenes of feasting in great beer halls presided over by kings, its accounts of bloody feuds trapping men and women alike in cycles of violence, its praise of giving riches to loyal followers rather than amassing wealth for oneself, its moments of magic in stories of powers gained or lost—and over all, a sense of some larger force that shapes their destinies, both individual and collective. Readers have often looked upon this long-gone heroic world for a glimpse of a pagan past in Northern Europe before Christianity was brought by foreign missionaries, yet the poem is filled with references to the new religion and the power of its God. This tension between the ancient past and what was, in the time of the poet, a new worldview disturbed many romantic and nationalistic critics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They sought in Beowulf the origins of Germanic, including Scandinavian, culture—or at least clues from which that culture could be reconstructed. Yet many were for the most part frustrated, for they saw the epic of Northern antiquity “marred” by the intrusions of foreign beliefs and values, such as the Christianity imposed by missionaries from the Mediterranean South, and equally “marred” by the fantastic fights with monsters in the center of the poem, while the historical materials that most interested them were placed on the outer edges. In this view, the poem simply was not the poem that it should have been. However, the great work of Friedrich Klaeber, and especially the influence of Tolkien, cited above, would change all that. In recent times, scholars have not only stressed the Christian element as integral to the poem as a whole, but they have spent enormous energy in ferreting out its sources and functions. All of which brings us back, not just to the question of the poet, but more importantly to the question of the audience. After all, the poet was composing the work for a community that already shared certain core values, though those values appear at times to emerge from a moment of cultural transition between the memory of the old and the power of the new. So, once again, we are faced with complexity, and attempts to reduce Beowulf to some single, or at least predominant, worldview cannot explain the creative tensions in this complexity.Yet there are further questions about audience. Did it consist, as some scholars have proposed, of people so well versed in Christian teachings, and even in learned theology, that it would have been a monastic community? The answer is by no means clear. We do have the famous letter from Alcuin to the monks of Lindisfarne (797) enjoining them not to include secular heroic narratives in their entertainments. But we also have the even more famous story of the poet Caedmon in Bede’s History of the English Church and People (731), which shows the members of the monastery at Whitby singing narrative lays, while accompanying themselves on the harp. Their lays must have been secular since it was only after the miracle of Caedmon’s poetic inspiration that Christian biblical narratives were set to traditional Anglo-Saxon poetic forms. Such a community would not only house scholars, as well as monks with considerably less education, but also the monastic familia was made up of all the lay people—men, women, and children—who occupied and generally worked the lands surrounding (and dependent on) the monastery. Our modern view of medieval monasteries has been shaped by later reforms, in which walled structures often shut reclusive monks in cloistered protection from the temptations of the larger world. But in Anglo-Saxon England, the monasteries were generally open to the social world, and the Rule of St. Benedict lays great stress on the need to extend hospitality to all who come to the community. We also have depictions in monastic works, such as lives of the saints, of storytelling events that included monks and laypeople alike. Thus, even if one were to claim that Beowulf was aimed at a monastic audience, it is clear that such an audience would most probably include many who were not monks. And, of course, one need not postulate a monastic audience at all in order to account for the Christian element in the poem. For the dominant ethos of the poem is a celebration of the values of heroic society, and while the poet-narrator’s comments often reflect a Christian point of view, the heroic values in the poem are in themselves primarily secular. Or do we have, once again, a complex creative tension between the two?

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Like many, I have not touched this work since my class on British Literature in high school. I have learned a lot since then, and my capacity for processing great literature has only increased. This book, perhaps the first great work in the English language (Old English, that is), has remained the same. Today, I read it in one afternoon and loved every minute of it. Raffel’s translation brings out the drama of the tale while maintaining the simple, Old-English style.The setting portrays a far different world than modern life. We are taken back to the world of kingdoms – of a mythical people known as the Geats. These ancients, presumably living sometime in the early middle ages, approach life in fear of the unknown, symbolized by monsters. They are motivated by riches and social standing. They are governed by kings. Indeed, according to the storyteller, good kings take care of their people, and good soldiers act in courage. (Some things never change.)The plot is simple enough. An ancient knight ends up preserving civilized kingdoms from attacks by three great monsters. He is rewarded with riches, fame, and power. Interestingly, the country of England was not once mentioned in the telling; The Danes, the Fracks, and the Swedes, however, are. The protagonist Beowulf ends up becoming a king and dying nobly.This lively tale helps readers get in touch with an earlier culture yet preserves an element of humanity that should not be forgotten. Indeed, this poem portrays human nature in an elegant and noble light. No matter our era or station, we all want to be celebrated, and we all want to be known as courageous. In this tale, perhaps unlike most of medieval and modern life, good overcomes evil. In showing the effects of Christianity, reverence towards the Deity is displayed. We do not yet have the nuance of Reformation theology nor of Shakespeare’s (or even Chaucer’s) England.This story helped me get in touch with my inner boy who likes adventure. If Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn does that for American youth, perhaps Beowulf does that in the English (or even European) setting. The afterword makes this book sound utterly foreign to contemporary life. I did not find that to be the case. Perhaps the afterword should have been written by someone who has once been a young male child. Reading it as an adult decades after high school, I can easily see why it achieved the status of a classic. I can only hope my poetry reflects a tinge of the liveliness of this anonymous tale.

⭐This is such a great story! Students love it and it is cross-curricular with the study of Western Civilization and British Literature. This is a standard version of the story but Ian Serraillier has a version that is a little easier to understand if you want to adapt the reading level.

⭐My son. Ended this for school. It was shipped quickly and came exactly as advertised

⭐The main purpose of this review is to compare the four free versions of Beowulf available for kindle.This version is a translation by Lesslie Hall. It’s a very good re-telling of the poem–but the formatting is…a challenge. It’s not formatted properly for a poem; line breaks were removed so it looks like prose. This makes it hard to find the rhythm–and what’s an epic poem without rhythm? Then the side-notes and end-notes were left in the text, so you get a paragraph of text with line-numbers interrupting it, and when you reach the end of the paragraph you get a bunch of parentheses and notes and non-poem bits. I found this very distracting and was very disappointed because the parts of this translation that I bothered picking out were actually really good, and I enjoyed the glossary and discussions that came before the poem…I just couldn’t handle the wonky formatting. EDIT: I went back and read this version anyway, so it’s not entirely unreadable, you just have to either love the notes or read around them…So I went and found another free version to read! The next one actually comes in two nearly-identical forms:

⭐and

⭐. It’s the Gummere translation, which isn’t nearly as good, but it IS formatted properly (looks like a poem; notes properly linked and end-noted).The last version, which I found today in preparing for this comparison review-a-thon is a translation by William Morris and A.J. Wyatt:

⭐. It has slightly less extensive informative bits at the beginning and end (glossary, discussion of translations, ect), is formatted properly as a poem (though it seems to lack any in-text notes) and um… I haven’t really tried to read it yet, so I can’t say how good or bad the translation is.Anyway, I hope this has all been helpful and informative and that you find the version of Beowulf that is right for you.

⭐Having been and underachieving, rebellious young punk in high school, I read Beowulf for the first time at age 68 to prove to myself that I could have the discipline and mental Clarity to do so. I was rewarded with a wonderful glimpse into the Dark Ages world of Warriors and feudal loyalty. We are blessed to still have this poem with us. Read it for its blend of ancient literature and history, if you haven’t yet done so or even if you have before. You’re in for a treat!

⭐I had always liked Michael Alexander’s 1973 translation and hated Seamus Heaney’s when it was published.But recently I realised that Alexander’s 1973 introduction is old-fashioned beyond hope of salvation, and I have a couple of bilingual texts, so I ditched him.This edition has anglo-saxon text on one page and a glossary facing it. I like it, as academic editions of Beowulf, e.g. Klaeber, can be too bulky for reading for pleasure or taking on holiday, and Penguin have to be admired for publishing it at all. But the text unconvincingly ignores some of Klaeber’s amendments; the glossary is a bit too sparse – it gives a single meaning for each word – I’d prefer a choice, as there is sometimes room for doubt – it doesn’t provide any accidental or syntactical information, which is a pity; and it is frankly rubbish in places – e.g. 1381, gestreon is glossed as “terror” when it means “treasure”! And of course it’s a paperback, and mine is already falling apart, so I have a second and third copy for backup.Nearly forgot – the introduction is better than the 1973 one!There is still room in the world for an Old English monolingual reader’s text, hardback, sewn spine: that would be doing this poem justice.

⭐I bought this as I wanted to inspect the text of Beowulf and see what it says about the creature Grendel. I believe that all these kind of old poems and legends have roots in reality and I’m convinced that Grendel was some sort of bipedal creature – most possibly a T-Rex. It fits the description perfectly.This is a fascinating read but can be quite difficult to understand parts of it due to how language has changed over the years. Regardless, it’s still an extremely interesting and intriguing piece of history that is worth investigation.

⭐The Amazon product details for this are not too helpful are they? This is Francis Gummere’s translation of Beowulf first published around 1909. It is a verse translation that retains the form of the original Old English poem. This is not a translation into modern English. If that’s what you want then you need to look at something like Seamus Heaney’s translation which is in copyright so you pay accordingly. This translation wasn’t vernacular English even in 1909; that isn’t what Gummere was trying to produce. It translates the poem into relatively modern vocabulary so you can follow the story but it retains the character of the original so it is formal and rhetorical, even declamatory, as the original was meant to be recited. It reproduces the alliterative form of the original which leads often to the use of poetic or archaic words, although many can be found in Kindle’s inbuilt dictionary.What you get is the text plus substantial explanatory footnotes which can be accessed easily from the text. What you don’t get is any introduction or other ‘briefing’ material. I would have liked a glossary. a list of who’s who and a prose summary of the plot to make things easier to follow. Some of these are available in other editions, including, for the brave, the Old English original text, which are available free from Project Gutenberg.I must say that like one of the earlier reviewers I found this a super read. You just have to accept the strangeness and let yourself go into the world of chieftains, their halls and marauding monsters. This is over a thousand years old but one of the great poems of the British poetic tradition.

⭐What can I say? I’m not thrilled with the quality. If something is described as in good quality but used and it’s a book, you half expect/hope that the previous owner has taken okay care of the product. I’m a bit disappointed with receiving a kinda beaten-up copy, this book has clearly seen better days. However it functions and does the job. The price definitely reflects the quality and it did arrive quite well-packaged. The inside isn’t bashed about much aside from the bottoms of pages being folded so it’ll do what I need it to. All-in-all, it’s ok. Cheap and easy option but not in a particularly good condition

⭐There are plenty of reviews of Michael Alexander’s 1973 translation of Beowolf, so I will limit this to my usual rantings about sloppy Kindle formatting.Again, we have a terribly formatted Kindle book from Penguin – a mainstream publisher – who, quite frankly, should know better. I now have a number of Penguin books on my Kindle; very very few of them have satisfactory formatting that replicates the print edition, which makes the issues even more infuriating. When you take their excellent editions of the

⭐The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights: Volume 1 (Penguin Classics)

⭐, it makes you wonder why the same level of care and attention hasn’t been paid to all books published by Penguin.I shall be keeping this book because this is the translation I want. But I’ve decided to write a direct email to Penguin about their formatting issues as the methods of providing feedback via Amazon seem to be futile; nothing has ever come of a feedback submission or live chat.If you want to see how this epic poem should be formatted, check the “Look Inside” on the paperback version. Unfortunately, you can’t get as far as the actual text of the poem on the Kindle sample.

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