The most recommended books on Beowulf

One of the classic novels about monsters having internal lives. Grendel doesn’t even survive the first half of the Beowulf poem.

But what was his life like? This creature who went into rages over music and merriment? This outsider who clearly had no one to commune with? Where there could just be pathos, Gardner injects surprising dorkiness and humor that further round out Grendel’s existence. And there’s a huge bonus in the poem’s dragon also showing up as an utter weirdo neighbor.

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.

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.

Most people don't even know about this book. Written in 1946, it's just a little older than I am. I read it years ago and was delighted by Myers' world woven from existing fantasy and legend. I also use what has worked before to make my own books both familiar and new. How convenient when you have a perfectly fantastic cauldron of long-held material completely free for the taking. I, as did Myers, took full advantage of the vast pool of wonderful existing ideas. “Silverlock” certainly showed me I could freely dip from the pool and just twist it a bit to fit my own 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.

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!

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.

I am generally not a big fan of hardcore academic theory, but this collection of essays edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen gave me a steady stream of "aha!" moments when I first read it about twenty years ago.

I struggled a bit with some of the jargon here, not to mention the fact that it only deals with monsters in the Western tradition, but I know of no better book for helping readers understand why humans create (and need) monsters, what roles monsters play in affirming (and undermining) social norms, and what the study of monsters can reveal about the anxieties and fault-lines in the cultures that spawn them. “Monsters are our children,” Cohen writes at one point: that still blows my mind after two decades of chewing on it.

That I would love a poem written/translated by Seamus Heaney did not come as a surprise to me, but that it is Beowulf, a poem/story steeped in the Germanic warrior culture and soaked in blood that enthralled me, did surprise me.

I do not remember the occasion that prompted my reading, but even as I opened the book to its Introduction, and read “...And now this is ‘an inheritance’ --/Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked/ In the long ago, yet willable forward...Again and again and again,” I could not put it down.

In fact, you might say, it is not the story but the voice of the poet and how he brought this ancient language and people back to life that compelled me to read on. Of course, the voice is that of the poet of “Digging,” as he traces his roots back to these unlikely ancestors.

When I first read this book, not only was I struck by its central theme that ‘myths’ have meaning but also by the fact that it is our problem that we cannot today recognize myths for what they once were. All oral traditions evolve through time, sometimes over thousands of years and across hundreds of generations of retelling, but if their core is sufficiently memorable, then it can remain recognizable. It is up to us to unpack the stories we hear today, to learn how they changed through time, and try to see whether there is an empirical core in their hearts. This book is a must for anyone interested in learning more about the meaning of ‘myth’ rather than romanticizing it.