Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics give it a powerful effect. He rebuts suggestions that the poem is an epic or exciting narrative, likening it instead to a strong masonry structure built of blocks that fit together. He points out that the poem's theme is a serious one, mortality, and that the poem is in two parts: the first on Beowulf as a young man, defeating Grendel and his mother; the second on Beowulf in old age, going to his death fighting the dragon. The work has been praised by critics including the poet and "Beowulf" translator Seamus Heaney. Michael D. C. Drout called it the
Old English literature Paul Muldoon's "Caedmona's Hymn" in his "Moy Sand and Gravel" (2002) and U. A. Fanthorpe's "Caedmon's Song" in her "Queuing for the Sun" (2003). These translations differ greatly from one another, just as Seamus Heaney's "Beowulf" (1999) deviates from earlier, similar projects. Heaney uses Irish diction across "Beowulf" to bring what he calls a "special body and force" to the poem, foregrounding his own Ulster heritage, "in order to render (the poem) ever more 'willable forward/again and again and again.'" Old English literature Old English literature or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses literature written in Old English, in Anglo-Saxon England from the