Seamus Heaney's responses to medieval literature take place in the context of an ongoing engagement with medieval material by twentieth-century predecessors and contemporary writers. Several of the texts discussed above have been a rich source of literary inspiration for previous twentieth-century writers. Certainly Buile Suibhne has been a source of inspiration for a long list of twentieth-century Irish writers, both before and after Heaney, although Heaney's is the first full-length English translation for generations. Dante has exerted a substantial influence on English-language poetry from Chaucer to the present; Heaney's own essay ‘Envies and Identifications’ mentions Yeats, Eliot, and Kinsella as English-language predecessors in their responses to Dante, and another twentieth-century Irish disciple of Dante, James Joyce, is a significant presence in Station Island. As discussed in Chapter 2, the literary history of Lough Derg itself begins in the twelfth century and extends to the twentieth, with Heaney acknowledging both in ‘Envies and Identifications’ and in ‘Station Island’ itself that many previous writers have traipsed ahead of him on the pilgrimage. There have also been many previous translations of Beowulf, albeit mostly for pedagogical purposes, and none by major poets such as Heaney. Finally, Heaney's translation of Henryson can be read as part of an ongoing series of responses to Trojan texts by contemporary irish writers.