Beowulf the king of the Danes, whose mead hall in Heorot has been under attack by a monster known as Grendel. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother attacks the hall and is then also defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland (Götaland in modern Sweden) and later becomes king of the Geats. After a period of fifty years has passed, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is mortally wounded in the battle. After his death, his attendants cremate his body and erect a tower on a headland in his memory. The full story survives in the manuscript known as the Nowell Codex.
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