Beowulf – The Tragedy of a Hero
A Reading
by Keld Zeruneith, translated by Paul Russell Garrett
Beowulf may be the most important work in Old English literature, but the poem takes place in Denmark and southern Sweden. And it is Denmark where the poem was first published, and where some of the earliest literary criticism of the work saw the light of day.
Keld Zeruneith (1941-), Emeritus Reader at the University of Copenhagen and member of the Royal Danish Society of Sciences and Letters. Zeruneith is a poet, literary critic, historian, and prolific author, well known in Old Norse studies for his work on the sagas and in modern literary studies for his biographies of three famous Danish poets; he is equally well known in Classical studies for ^GThe Wooden Horse: The Liberation of the Western Mind, from Odysseus to Socrates^g (2007; original Danish 2002), for which he won Denmark’s most prestigious literary award, the Sen Gyldendal Prize, in 2004. Zeruneith brings his considerable breadth of scholarly and linguistic expertise and depth of poetic and psychological insight and knowledge to bear upon Old English studies in ^GDe sidste tider: Hedenskab heroisme kristendom: en angelsaksisk overgangshistorie^g (The Last Times: Paganism Heroism Christianity: An Anglo-Saxon Transitional History, 2017). Written in Danish, Keld Zeruneith’s ^GBeowulf: The Tragedy of a Hero: A Reading^g (^GBeowulf. En helts tragedie. En lAesning^g) was first published in the English translation of Paul Russell Garrett (2023).
- By (author) Keld Zeruneith
- Translated by Paul Russell Garrett
"All in all, Zeruneith's study is a stimulating apology for Old English poetry in the modern world A great strength of Zeruneith's study is its contextualizing Beowulf within three literary traditions, one a primary source and the other two, secondary: OE with references to a wide range of texts such as 'The Wife's Lament,' the Guthlac poems, 'The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulstan,' and Bede; Old Norse with references to a number of Eddic poems, Icelandic sagas, Snorri Sturluson, and Saxo Grammaticus; and classical with references to authors such as Aeschylus, Euripides, and Eumenides and texts such as the Odyssey. Zeruneith also refers to works by Tacitus, Boethius, St. Augustine, and Erich Neumann to help deepen our understanding of his compelling new reading of the poem." Robert E. Bjork, Professor of English at Arizona State University
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