Books like Beowulf: A New Translation
Seamus Heaney's muscular, luminous translation of the oldest great English epic, in which the hero Beowulf fights Grendel, Grendel's mother and, in old age, a dragon.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Beowulf: A New Translation
The Iliad
The rage of Achilles drives the climax of the Trojan War, and the grief that follows reshapes what heroism means.
The Aeneid
Aeneas flees burning Troy and journeys across the Mediterranean to Italy to found the people who will build Rome, in Virgil's epic of duty, loss and destiny.
The Odyssey
After the Trojan War, Odysseus spends ten years trying to get home to Ithaca, through monsters, gods and temptations, while his wife holds off the suitors who have taken over his house.
The Buried Giant
An elderly British couple leave their village in post-Arthurian England to find a son they barely remember, crossing a land where a dragon's breath has made everyone forget.
The Divine Comedy
A poet journeys through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise guided by Virgil and Beatrice, mapping the entire moral architecture of the medieval Christian universe.
Canto General
Neruda's epic of the Americas, from their geology and first peoples through conquest and liberation to his own exile, including the sequence The Heights of Macchu Picchu.
The Mahabharata
The epic war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, contains within it countless stories, including the Bhagavad Gita, and every moral question imaginable.
Anabasis
A long poem of a nameless conqueror's expedition across the deserts of Asia and the founding of a city, in T. S. Eliot's translation.
The Knights of the Cross
Around 1400, the young Polish knight Zbyszko of Bogdaniec vows to win three peacock plumes from the helmets of the Teutonic Knights for Danusia, and his oath draws him into the long war with the Order.
Paradise Lost
Satan, cast out of Heaven after his rebellion, makes his way to Eden and tempts Adam and Eve, in an epic poem that makes the Devil its most compelling character.
The Axion Esti
A long poem in the form of an Orthodox liturgy, moving from the creation of the world through the Greek war of the 1940s to a hymn of praise for the things of this world.
Metamorphoses
Gods, nymphs, and mortals transform into trees, rivers, animals, and stars in a sweeping poem that contains virtually every myth the Western world inherited.