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.

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 ...

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.

The name "Beowulf" alone surely will inspire painful memories of high-school English class and pangs of dread. Never fear. This 3-D animated "Beowulf" is more like "300," only with more violence ...

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 ...

For too long the Old English poem has long been perceived as a "masculine text," says Maria Dahvana Headley. Her new adaptation is told from the perspective of Grendel's mother.

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 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, ...

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?