Beyond Beowulf
June 3rd, 2006 Caroline
Yes, it’s time now for something completely different, a brief break from the boys, the baking, and the book. I’ve got alliteration on my mind because I’ve just finished Beyond Beowulf, the sequel to Beowulf. What? You didn’t know it had a sequel? Well, it didn’t, not until recently, and it is a roaring good read. Honestly, I picked it up the other night, hoping to be lulled quickly to sleep by the gentle rhythms of the iambic pentameter; two hours later, I was still wide awake, racing to the poem’s end.
Now, I’ve always loved a good epic. I learned Latin in high school and happily read all twelve books of The Aeneid in the original. Eventually I took lessons in Greek, too, though I never did well enough with it to get more out of Homer’s poetry than I had in translation. Still, despite undergraduate and graduate degrees in literature, I’d never read Beowulf. I still haven’t, but now I not only want to read that, but then I want to reread Beyond Beowulf. Truly — it’s a lovely story of a people trying to find a new place to live, plus it has trolls that dissolve into inky stains when they’re touched with fire. What more do you want from a book?
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