Beowulf

I am sure there are moments in everybody's lives when they want to be Vikings. There seems to be some inbuilt love of Vikings that I have seen in many of the people I have known. Is it in the daring ocean exploration that their appeal lies? Is it in the way they discovered America 500 years before anyone else? Maybe it's just the legends about them, the monster slaying, the Epics, and the Norse religion which is so much more exciting than anything one might find in Greece. I'm hoping it's not the whole raping and pillaging aspect of their jobs and the looting of monasteries, because that frankly disgusts me. Just try not to think about it.

For me the appeal of Vikings lies in their favourite drink: mead! I am more than a little fond of this drink, for the warm, sweet taste, the way it dulls your sensibilities in mere minutes, the deep amber colour of the stuff, the way that it's not the most easy alcoholic drink to get hold of. But it's also the history of mead that I enjoy, that it harks back to a time before the Battle of Hastings, when Saxons and Danes squabbled over the lands. Mead belongs in a wooden hall by a roaring fire, with drunken barbarians who know that they're heroes, swearing drunken oaths to equally drunken chieftains and comrades, before finally settling down for a kip in the corner.

So anyway, onto Beowulf. In this Seamus Heaney translation we find much drinking of mead in said mead-halls, oaths of kinship, the battling of great and terrible monsters, hordes of sea-creatures, voyages over the sea in longboats, battles in the mists of time, great heroes of old, sagas within a saga (postmodernism?), and woeful sorrow. Aside from that it has a nice pace, some of Mister Heaney's choices of language are quite good, verging on the poetic, and I found the story rather involving and satisfying. I found the Christian spin on the story interesting; we're quite used to the Norse gods being involved in this sort of thing, yet we find multiple references devoted to a single God and certain Bible references. Not something I was quite expecting from a Viking saga.

If you have any love of Vikings in your soul (which no doubt you will), then there is some reason for you to read this millennium-old story. If you can read the old-English version then so much the better, but from what I've seen and heard of it you'd be better off finding one of the widely available translations; as I say, Heaney's is quite good. It only took me three reading-days to read the whole thing, and I was going slow, so it's not an impossible task like War and Peace, or the Bible.