Top 10 Beowulf Books

1. Beowulf : A New Verse Translation

by Seamus Heaney. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. From the publisher: "Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon."

2. Beowulf

by Kevin Crossley-Holland, Charles Keeping (Illustrator). Oxford University Press. From the publisher: "Composed towards the end of the first millennium of our era, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is one of the great Northern epics and a classic of European literature."

3. Beowulf: A Verse Translation (A Norton Critical Edition)

by Seamus Heaney (Translator), Daniel (Ed.) Donoghue, Daniel Donoghue (Editor). W.W. Norton. From the publisher: "Winner of the Whitbread Prize, Seamus Heaney's poetic translation of the great epic poem Beowulf is the basis for this new Norton Critical Edition. The text is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations and an introduction to Old English language and prosody."

4. A Beowulf Handbook

by Rober E. Bjork (Editor), John D. Niles (Editor). University of Nebraska Press. From the publisher: "The individual chapters by eighteen scholars offer both a rapid survey of scholarly trends in the study of Beowulf and a more sustained exploration of selected problems. Each chapter begins with a brief summary of its contents followed by an annotated chronology..."

5. Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript

by Kevin S. Kiernan. University of Michigan Press. From the publisher: "When this book first appeared in 1981, most scholars agreed that Beowulf was an early eighth-century poem and few of them had shown any interest in the early eleventh-century manuscript that preserved it. Today they disagree widely, dating the poem anywhere between the eighth and the eleventh century."

6. Beowulf Reader: Basic Readings

by Peter S. Baker (Editor). Taylor & Francis, Inc. From the publisher: "Gathering some of the most important studies from the past 25 years of 'Beowulf' scholarship, 'The Beowulf Reader' offers essential insights both to scholars in the field and to readers coming to this Old English literary masterpiece for the first time."

7. Beowulf : A Dual-Language Edition

by Howell. D. Chickering (Translator). Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group. From the publisher: "This presentation of the translation and the Old English Text on facing pages allows the reader to approach the first major poem in English literature in a fresh and exciting new way. Includes a Guide to Reading Aloud, Introduction, Commentary and notes for translation from the original."

8. Beowulf

by Burton Raffel (Translator). Econo-Clad Books. From the publisher: "Beowulf is the earliest extant poem in a modern European language. It was composed in England four centuries before the Norman Conquest."

9. Beowulf: A New Telling

by Robert E. Nye. Bantam Doubleday Dell. From the publisher: "He comes out of the darkness, moving in on his victims in deadly silence. When he leaves, a trail of blood is all that remains. He is a monster, Grendel, and all who know of him live in fear."

10. Beowulf

by David Wright. Penguin Classics. From the publisher: "Probably written in the eighth century, this is the epic story of Beowulf, a Scandinavian warrior, and his struggles against monsters."