The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, composed at the end of the first millennium, is considered one of the great Northern epics and a classic of European literature. In his new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work that is both faithful to the original text, line by line, and expresses something fundamental in his own creative gift for language and music. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then living on, physically and psychologically exposed, in its exhausted aftermath. It is not difficult to draw parallels between this story and twentieth-century history, and Heaney's Beowulf can also be read partly in light of his Northern Irish upbringing. But it also transcends such musings, because it tells us psychological and spiritual truths that are permanent and liberating.