Beowulf

Edwin Morgan was Glasgow's first Poet Laureate in 1999. Winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2000, and the 2001 Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

This translation of Beowulf was made in the last years of the 1940s and was published in hardback by the Hand and Flower Press in 1952. In the present Carcanet edition, poem and introduction have been kept the same.This reprint of Morgan's popular and well-respected 1952 modern English translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic captures a taut expression of the poem's themes of danger, voyaging, displacement, loyalty, and loss. Morgan provides a fluid, modern voice from this medieval masterwork while retaining a clear authenticity, making it highly accessible to the contemporary reader.