The significance of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf struck me when I saw it on sale at the airport, alongside works by Tom Clancy and Sue Grafton. Three hundred years after the sole copy of this early medieval classic was literally on fire, it is now ubiquitous.

Yet Heaney's Beowulf has achieved more than a mere appearance on newsstand shelves, for it has also earned recognition as a credible translation for Beowulfian scholarship. The inclusion of Old English on the facing pages in the North American edition makes the translation an academic tool, and the choice of this translation for the latest Norton Critical Edition of the poem suggests it is the best available lens through which to engage scholarly criticism of the work. Indeed, the editor of the Norton edition, Daniel Donoghue, says that Heaney's mode of making poetry through his translation of Beowulf has been a way “to breathe life back into the body of the language.” And, in fact, reading Heaney's Beowulf makes clear the greatness of this translation, much as Chapman's translation of the Odyssey led John Keats to a new awareness of the poem's immediacy and relevance.

That vivacity may explain why, despite the elimination of the Anglo-Saxon requirement at Oxford, and despite other recent evidence of resistance to studying Beowulf, general interest in the poem appears to have grown in the last several years, as exemplified in the appearance of the graphic-novel adaptation by Gareth Hinds and several films related to the story, including Beowulf and Grendel and a big-budget production featuring Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother.