Customer Reviews

Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
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This edition is widely accepted as closer to the original than Heaney's, even by people who prefer the Heaney edition.

I am not one of those people. I have read Beowulf in several translations as well as in the original Old English, and this is the version I would recommend. I find it to be faithful, clear, and elegant.

The Heaney Beowulf is a great book for fans of Heaney (I enjoyed it myself in that capacity). The Chickering Beowulf is a great book for fans of Old English literature.

Chickering's translation is the most responsible and accurate translation of Beowulf available. It's also the closest to the energetic poetic line of the original verse. Also, Chickering provides a remarkable sets of notes and comments about culture, history, and criticism at the back of the book. All in all, this is the text for anyone seriously interested in this poem. It beats the Seamus Heaney translation hands down.

For someone like me who's fascinated by language, this is a great scholar's edition of Beowulf. The translation is easy to read and well synchronized with the original text. The preface and supplemental material are copious and thorough. This will be on my bookshelf for a long time.

A professional and scholarly translation. Having the Old English on one side and the modern English translation on the other is great. The notes about the style of ancient Germanic poetry, as well as notes about Old English are fascinating. The book is clear enough for beginners, but the extensive commentary (after the poem, and nearly half of the book) means that it is also a great read for experts as well. Altogether, an excellent book.

This is the essential version of Beowulf for anyone interested in really understanding the story and its setting. There are other dual-language translations but none that provide the same depth of background in introduction, commentary, and critical notes.

-- Christopher L. Webber, author of "Beyond Beowulf"

For those who wish to experience a faithful modern translation that retains all the beauty and poetic quality of the Old English text, this is the one. This updated version of Chickering's translation of Beowulf is even better than the original, which still remains vastly superior to all the rest. Seamus Heaney and Burton Raffel's versions aren't even close.

In Beowulf, an incredible epic poem by an unknown author, a Geatish hero named Beowulf travels across the sea to vanquish a beast that has been eating the Danes in their sleep. Beowulf is about Beowulf's conquest of Grendel and his kin. The book also explains Beowulf's death at the hands of a dragon, and his cowardly troops retreating from the fight. The book is not all about Beowulf's battles, as Beowulf is a guest in Hrothgar's mead-hall, and is highly celebrated among the Danes. He receives many gifts in his stay, for vanquishing Grendel and his mother.

Over 3000 lines long, this is a very large poem. Beowulf is a great book but being in poem form, is is only for people who can really pay attention for long periods of time. The writing style is great, but some words are confusing unless you read the introduction, like battle-flame (sword). It is a great book; I would say a seven out of ten overall, because of the incredibly rich storyline but also is hard to understand.

I recommend this book to all advanced readers or anyone who has liked other epic poems. Beowulf is engrossing, entertaining and informative for those studying the old-English time period.

This translation has been much-praised as faithful to the original Old English. I think this is taking it a bit far: Chickering does typically use four-beat lines, which is how Old English poetry is arranged, although OE poetry has specific alliteration patterns and stress patterns (however, there are so many of the latter one wonders if such patterns are actually a modern invention). For a four-beat plus alliterative (although not a mimic of OE poetry) translation, take a look at Kennedy's Beowulf.

Chickering does tend to reproduce the choppiness (to our ears) of the original text, including appositives. These are jarring at first but quickly become easy to scan. This is useful for seeing how the poem is actually laid out, although one can never say how jarring the original was to those who spoke OE.

As a study aid, Chickering's translation is generally good (that is, literal-esque), but sometimes he does take liberties, so the student should beware. As a small example, lines 753b-754a: "He on mode wearð forht on ferhðe". This is literally translated "He in (his) heart became afraid in (his) spirit." Or something like that: mode and ferhðe mean the same thing, and can variously be translated as heart, mind, spirit, soul, etc. Chickering translates this as "at heart he feared for his wretched life." This is a fine translation, but is not literal.

This may seem like small nitpicking, but if you are planning on using this text for studying Beowulf, you should at least have supplemental material. Of course you want Klaeber's Beowulf, but also handy is Alexander's Glossed Beowulf.

It is, of course, small nitpicking, and so I unreservedly recommend this translation. As I stated, the translation is generally quite faithful to the text, and is a good read. The commentary is wonderful, as is the introductory material. As a bonus, glosses to a few passages are included. Please don't take the small points I make above as any sort of complaint about this translation; it's more a warning to prospective OE students. If you want to read Beowulf, you really can't do a whole lot better than this, unless you want to learn Old English. Fully literal translations are pretty pointless, anyway: for a ridiculous example, search Google Books for "Tale of Beowulf: sometime king of the folk of the Weder Geats" by William Morris.

i/m going thru klaeber/s 4th edition, translating. since retirement, i/ve been reading in the originals the books i touched upon in my old language classes (greek, latin, and old english to me). i/m using the klaeber 4th, the clark hall & merrit, the quirk & wrenn grammar, & (formerly) this chickering to try to get a sense when everything runs, well, foul. i have read praises of its loyalty to the text and all, but it ain/t necessarily so.

there are times the klaeber text & the one used by chickering disagree, which is fine (i have the zupitza reprint from 1967, so i can make my own decisions). but there are too many times where the chickering 'translation' makes little or no sense. it becomes neither literal (which would be too confusing, no doubt) nor metaphorical. there are parts of poetry that can *not* be translated (as in homer, for example). i think this effort valiant, but ultimately confusing. i dropped the translation after grendel. it is more a hinderance than a guide, which is probably the worst thing you can say about a translation.

Although Seamus Heaney's translation is the one getting all the attention, and is very readable, this one is both readable and is a more word-for-word translation. The accompanying chapters on analysis of the poem are also fascinating.