Beowulf: A Verse Translation (First Folio Society Edition)

HEANEY, Seamus (trans. & intro.; illus. Becca Thorne). Beowulf: A Verse Translation. London: The Folio Society, 2010.

Large Quarto (279 × 189 mm). Quarter red-brown leather with red cloth boards blocked in gold with a design by Becca Thorne. Spine lettered in gilt. Top edge gilt. Dark red endleaves. xxviii, 218 pp. Original Old English text in parallel with Heaney's translation throughout. Decorative borders framing every page, printed in dark brown ink. Illustrated title page and 14 integrated footer illustrations by Becca Thorne. Printed by Memminger MedienCentrum; bound by Real Lachenmaier, Reutlingen, Germany. Gold slipcase with single Thorne illustration in dark brown to front. First Folio Society edition.

Beowulf survived by accident and by inches. Composed somewhere in England, the poem exists in a single manuscript, now held in the British Library, which was damaged by fire in 1731 while in the collection of Sir Robert Cotton. The pages at the edges of the burned sheets crumbled further as the decades passed, taking letters and words with them. That the poem survives at all is, as the Folio Society has observed, almost miraculous; that it survives in sufficient completeness to be read and translated is a piece of extraordinary luck.

What survives is the oldest substantial poem in the English language and one of the masterworks of European literature: 3,182 lines of alliterative Old English verse narrating the heroic career of Beowulf, warrior of the Geats, who sails to Denmark to rid the hall of King Hrothgar of the monster Grendel and then of Grendel's mother, returns home to rule his own people for fifty years, and dies fighting a dragon that threatens his kingdom. 

Heaney's achievement was to solve a problem that had defeated his predecessors: how to carry the alliterative music of Old English into a modern English that could still be felt as poetry rather than read as scholarly prose. He found the key, he has written, in the word thole — a word meaning to endure or suffer, used in his own County Derry and elsewhere in the north of Ireland and Scotland, a word descended directly from the Old English þolian that appears in the poem. The recognition that his own dialect carried living traces of the poem's language gave him a way in, and the translation he produced is among the most significant literary translations of the twentieth century.

The Folio Society edition presents Heaney's translation in parallel with the original Old English text, allowing readers to hear both languages simultaneously. The illustrations by Becca Thorne give the volume a visual character that enhances the text. The binding by Real Lachenmaier of Reutlingen, Germany, in quarter red-brown leather with blocked cloth boards, is of a quality commensurate with the production.

Near fine. Some mild foxing along edges; some small shelf markings to slipcase. Otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000586