The most recommended books on Beowulf

I literally guffawed as I read this—enough times that my kids begged me to read it to them (which I did). This retelling of Beowulf played with expectations, twisting and turning in unexpected ways. The characters were fully fleshed out, with plenty of faults and quirks. No one was who I thought they were. Intrigue, magic, and stubborn independence mixed to make this delightful tale. 

You don’t have to know Beowulf to enjoy this modern-day re-imagining – set in a gated community at the foot of a mined-out mountain with subterranean caves and lakes a plenty – but the novel serves up delicious layers for readers familiar with the Old English epic. Headley weaves a story that is horrific and beautiful in equal measure as she explores the gulf between the experiences of two very different mothers – Dana, an ex-soldier barely surviving in the wilderness with her son Gren; and Willa Herot, suburban royalty living a luxurious if socially pressurised existence, protected her wealthy husband’s power. With writing that oscillates between lyrical poetics and prose that is sparse, blunt, and direct, The Mere Wife is a darkly fabulous novel that I look forward to reading over and over again.

He loves this amazing story about a tall tree with holes in it that look like doors and indeed they are doors that open into a different magical world in each chapter.

He loves all the extraordinary characters he meets in the book, including tinman and moonman. He made his own model figure of the saucepan man as a project for school.

I could suggest any number of poems and poets of our everyday fate of being lost and found. But for me the modern poet who best integrates the eye seeing with the mind questioning is the great A.R. Ammons.

I have listed just Volume 1 of his collected poems, but I also recommend Volume 2. He writes out of a consciousness that poems are found and shaped out of a life of observation, effort, and passion.

Beowulf is fascinating because it was written in Angle-land, probably Suffolk, probably in the 900s AD, when the Angles (Southern Scandinavians) held sway, with the Danes in Northumbria and Mercia, before the Anglo Saxons began to create the first truly English dynasty in Alfred the Great. It tells of a hero from Geats (in modern Sweden, possibly in the 600s AD) who rids the king of the Danes of the monster Grendel. Of all the translations Seamus Heany is the most vigorous and beautiful, and I often return to it as a reference.

Grendel is the original monster from English literature who killed many warriors and did battle with Beowulf. 

This poignant book tells the story from his point of view. It’s never completely clear what Grendel is, only that he seems to exist somewhere between humans and beasts. He is frustrated by how emotionally drawn he is to the singing he hears in the humans’ mead hall but is equally frustrated by the stupidity of the animals he encounters. 

He knows from first-hand experience how cruel men can be but because he is so alone in the world, he can’t stop himself from seeking them out. Reading this book is a hard look at loneliness, a long walk at the side of a creature whose very existence is painful.  

Having never read the epic poem of "Beowulf," I didn’t quite know what to expect from this book, but I was truly amazed and enchanted by this skewed retelling.

Zach Weinersmith clearly shows his scholarship in the source material, peppering the plot with prickly pops of alliteration and silkily sliding along the songs of the original while making it totally, completely, marvelously its own creature.

Boulet’s black-and-white illustrations meld with the prose so that each page is a feast, a sumptuous serving of slightly silly strength that left me hungry for more. Yes, maybe it’s a kid’s book, but then again, maybe it’s not!

Winters in the World is among the best history books that I have ever read. Eleanor Parker is a fine scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature as well as a master storyteller.

In Winters, she explains the ingenious ways in which the once-pagan Anglo-Saxons adapted their legends and their perceptions of the year to their Christian faith, creating a calendar that is “at one and the same time firmly rooted in Anglo-Saxon culture and fully part of the wider international church”. To some extent, the result of this remarkable inculturation remains with us today.

After reading this book, you won’t look at the seasons the same way ever again.

This is the most important book people have never heard of. It was immensely popular in the Middle Ages – 300 manuscripts survive in nine languages (Beowulf, another monster tale, survives in one copy). The probably-fictional “John Mandeville, knight, though I am not worthy” sets out from England in 1332, travels the known world on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and continues all the way to India. He encounters wondrous places, people, and beasts. The book is fundamentally flawed, with rampant racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, sexism, and on, but this is why it matters. Mandeville was Columbus’s reading on his voyage to “the Indies,” and encouraged him to see indigenous populations as monstrous. It is terrible, and terribly important. Bale’s excellent introduction and translation are the best of many versions.

Alexandra Harris's non-fiction book is a story of how the weather has been observed, noted, illustrated, and written about through a thousand years of history.

It illustrates how the importance of weather and landscape changed through time, and how that influenced the way in which the land and weather was recorded and written about – or not written about, as was the case for hundreds of years. People, towns, events were important enough to be recorded, either in fact or fiction; the landscape and the weather, not so much.

It's utterly absorbing, and will make you look at classics from Beowulf to Wuthering Heights and beyond in a very different way.