Beowulf: Translation and Commentary (Expanded Edition)

• Introduction
• The Editor on the Translator 
• Translator's Preface
• Note on the Beowulf Text
• Text and Translation 
• Commentary 
• Appendix I: Tolkien and Beowulf
• Appendix II: Finnsburg, Waldere, Hildebrandslied
• Bibliography

• Beowulf, composed around 700 A.D., is the first great epic poem in the English language. It tells the timeless story of a hero’s fight against monsters and sets it against a complex background of political intrigue and tribal warfare. Situated in sixth-century Scandinavia, the poem brings to life a magnificent world that fuses history with fantasy. Tom Shippey’s new translation of Beowulf, reflecting a lifetime of engagement with the poem, makes its story clearer and more compelling than it has ever been. The original Old English text of Beowulf is included along with an extensive and innovative commentary, which guides the reader passage-by-passage through the poem and its criticism. 

• In addition to the text, translation, and commentary, this volume contains an extensive bibliography, a translator’s preface, and an appended essay by Tom Shippey on “Tolkien and Beowulf—A Lifelong Involvement.” The 2nd edition (revised and expanded) adds new texts and translations (by Tom Shippey) of Waldere, the Hildebrandslied, and the Fight at Finnsburg. 

• "This extraordinary volume is both the perfect book for the first-time reader of Beowulf and essential reading for all scholars." - Francis Leneghan, University of Oxford

• "Anyone working with Beowulf will want to read this book, especially the rich, extensive, and up-to-date commentary." - Marijane Osborn, University of California, Davis

• "The translation is cogent, and the commentary is illuminating. Anyone interested in Beowulf needs this book." - Joseph Harris, Harvard University

Beowulf, Old English, Old Norse, Tolkien, Germanic Mythology

• TOM SHIPPEY received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. In an academic teaching career lasting 43 years (1965-2008), he taught at six universities, including Oxford and Harvard. His first published article, more than fifty years ago, was “The Fairy-Tale Structure of Beowulf” (1969), while his first published book was Old English Verse (1972). Since then, he has published well over a hundred academic articles, and more than twenty monographs and edited collections, notably (with Andreas Haarder) The Critical Heritage: Beowulf (1998), and most recently, Beowulf and the North before the Vikings (2022). He also written more than 200 reviews on fantasy and science fiction for The Wall Street Journal, as well as many contributions, often on archaeology, to The London Review of Books. He is well known for books that have reached a wider community of readers outside academia, such as Laughing Shall I Die (2018) and his much-reprinted and often-translated books on Tolkien, The Road to Middle-earth (1981) and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000). 

• LEONARD NEIDORF received his PhD from Harvard University. He has been Professor of English at Nanjing University since 2016. He is the author of two monographs on Beowulf: The Transmission of Beowulf (2017) and The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet (2022), both of which were published by Cornell University Press. He is the editor of The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment (2014), which was named an Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE, and the co-editor (with Rafael J. Pascual and Tom Shippey) of Old English Philology: Studies in Honour of R.D. Fulk (2016). Neidorf has published more than 90 papers, which have appeared in a wide range of prominent journals, including ELH, Folklore, Traditio, Nature Human Behaviour, and Journal of Germanic Linguistics. For his research on Beowulf, Neidorf was awarded the Beatrice White Prize from the English Association in 2020.