Beowulf Resources

This recent film is a great thing to rent if you're looking for a sexy action-adventure flick, but it's terrible as a study aid. Pluses: an incredible cast and terrific special effects. Minuses: too different from the poem to help you learn about the original.

Filmed in Iceland, this is award-winning director Sturla Gunnarson's vision of the Anglo-Saxon epic. Although it also deviates from the original in some places, it's probably more useful as a review or study aid than the 2007 film.

This adaptation of Beowulf, starring Christopher Lambert, includes some science-fiction elements that might seem odd in a medieval epic.

Based on a Michael Crichton novel, this film uses many elements from Beowulf, but combines them with the travel narrative of an Arab courtier, played by Antonio Banderas. You might have fun trying to disentangle the two plots – but it also might be confusing if you're just trying to learn about Beowulf.

This website provides sample audio files of readings of Beowulf in the original Old English or Anglo-Saxon. Even if you don't understand Old English, it's interesting to hear what the poem would have sounded like to its original audience.

At this site, you can download an audio reading of the entire text of Beowulf in a contemporary English translation for free.

This scan of the first page of the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf shows what the work of Anglo-Saxon scribes actually looked like.

This 1939 lithograph is only one of the many fascinating illustrations for Beowulf created by American artist Lynd Ward.

This 1968 illustration of Beowulf by Virgil Burnett depicts him as a stereotypical medieval hero.

This site offers a 1910 translation of Beowulf that you can read online or download to your computer for free. Not as up-to-date or readable as contemporary translations, but convenient for online work.

In this online preview, you can read several chapters from the most famous – and most useful – anthology of scholarly articles about Beowulf.

This Danish website provides a new translation of Beowulf and plenty of background materials for students and teachers alike. As you read the translation of the poem, you can click on the hyperlinked proper names, vocabulary terms, and historical footnotes to learn more, or you can click on links to audio readings of the poem in Old English.

This website provides an overview of the poem, the complete text in both Old English and contemporary English, summaries of each section, and information about the characters and history of Beowulf.

This mega-site provides an exhaustive bibliography of links to information about Beowulf, the Old English language, and Anglo-Saxon culture.