Beowulf

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the epic poem Beowulf, one of the masterpieces of Anglo-Saxon literature. Composed in the early Middle Ages by an anonymous poet, the work tells the story of a Scandinavian hero whose feats include battles with the fearsome monster Grendel and a fire-breathing dragon. It survives in a single manuscript dating from around 1000 AD, and was almost completely unknown until its rediscovery in the nineteenth century. Since then it has been translated into modern English by writers including William Morris, JRR Tolkien and Seamus Heaney, and inspired poems, novels and films.

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Guests

• Laura Ashe 11 episodes
  Associate Professor in English at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcester College
• Clare Lees 2 episodes
  Professor of Medieval English Literature and History of the Language at King's College London
• Andy Orchard 2 episodes
  Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford

Reading list

• The Beowulf Reader
  Peter S. Baker (ed.) (Routledge, 2000) Google Books →
• A Beowulf Handbook
  R. E. Bjork and J. D. Niles (Liverpool University Press, 1997) Google Books →
• Klaeber's Beowulf
  R. E. Bjork, R. D. Fulk and J. D. Niles (eds.) (University of Toronto Press, 2008) Google Books →
• The Beowulf Manuscript
  R. D. Fulk (ed.) (Harvard University Press, 2010) Google Books →
• Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Anthology
  R. D. Fulk (Indiana University Press, 1991) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature
  Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2013) Google Books →
• Beowulf
  Seamus Heaney (trans.) (Faber & Faber, 2000) Google Books →
• Rereading Beowulf
  E. B. Irving (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) Google Books →
• Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages
  Clare A. Lees (ed.) (University of Minnesota Press, 1994) Google Books →
• The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature
  Clare A. Lees (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2013) Google Books →
• Beowulf: Facing Page Translation
  R. M. Liuzza, (trans) (Broadview Press, 2012) Google Books →
• Beowulf
  Edwin Morgan (first published 1952; Carcanet, 2002) Google Books →
• Beowulf and Lejre
  J. D. Niles (Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007) Google Books →
• A Critical Companion to Beowulf
  Andy Orchard (Boydell and Brewer, 2003) Google Books →
• Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript
  Andy Orchard (University of Toronto Press, 2003) Google Books →
• Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary
  J. R. R. Tolkien and C. Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin, 2014) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b0542xt7

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0542xt7

Auto-category: 829.1 (Old English poetry)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, in Dark Age Scandinavia, a great hero travelled across the sea in order to fight a monstrous creature which had been terrorising the people of Denmark.