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If you've never read Beowulf, you should tear your clothes and go about in sack cloth until you have rendered the situation right again.
Seriously speaking, however, Beowulf is the idyllic missing link for all Western Christians between our Jewish spiritual heritage and our cultural present. Its tone and gravity mirror that of the Old Testament; needless to say the unknown Beowulf poet was greatly affected by the Old Testament. However, Beowulf is less ancient, less remote, and much more fantastic. Beowulf gets into your blood and rouses your desire for good ale and a good fight. Its struggle to find meaning in the juxtaposition of paganism and newfound Christianity presents endless intellectual and emotional insights for ourselves today. It is too bad that because this epic is studied for historical value in colleges around the nation, it is not more widely read and appreciated for simply what it is, over and over again.
For all of you Anglophiles out there who don't speak Old Saxon, thank St. Patrick for Seamus Heaney. This Irish poet found that his home tongue came in quite handy during his long work on translating Beowulf from its western Saxon dialect. Seamus' translation preserves the beautiful poetic form of alliterative verse, which combines a prescribed number of stressed syllables with the emphatic starting sound on words within the same line. Because of Seamus, the music of Old English alliterative verse once again has a voice, and this time, you don't have to be fluent in the oldest form of our modern language to apprehend it. Beowulf is like Shakespeare; only when read aloud can it be fully appreciated. This reader, though, prefers the alliterative verse of Old English to the silly rhymes introduced into our language by the French. Rhyming is catchy; alliterative verse is affecting.
Fortunately, Beowulf can be found at many half-price and discount stores [click book cover above], so you don't have to live like a king to enjoy kingly treasures. Make a date soon with
history's beloved braggart—but don't expect to ever come back to the way things were.
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