That's nothing to what Beowulf did to me, about 20 years ago. He forced me to memorize the full beon and wesan forms of the Anglo-Saxon verb "to be," even in the preterite subjunctive.

Beowulf is a poem about power and battle and gold and kingship and monsters, about words and metaphors and alliteration and storytelling. It’s English’s oldest poem, ...

The poem is set in Scandinavia and Beowulf, from Geatland (now southern Sweden), pledges to Danish king Hrothgar that he will fight the monster Grendel who has been preying on local inhabitants.

But this is the story of Beowulf, a poem once told in timber-framed barns in Anglo-Saxon England, to the raucous noise of the mead-swilling crowd.

Beowulf, of precarious provenance—the single surviving, crumbling manuscript bears the scorch marks of an 18th-century library fire—has traveled across a thousand years to lodge in our ...

A manuscript of the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf believed to date from the 10th century. This, the only surviving ancient copy of the story is kept in the British Museum. ( Hulton Archive/Getty ...

What have they done to Beowulf, everyone's least favorite Old English epic about a hero's battles with a monster, the monster's mother and an annoying dragon who turns up 50 years later?

NPR's new kids' fiction column — by Juanita Giles, founder of the Virginia Children's Book Festival — kicks off with an explanation of why the epic poem Beowulf is the perfect bathtime read.

We’ll never know what a performance of “Beowulf” might have sounded like at the time the 3,182-line Anglo-Saxon epic poem was created. In fact, scholars are still debating over the ...