I know what you’re thinking. It’s a question that’s some variant of: “Do we really need another Beowulf translation?”

And I get it. I do. There are literally thousands of them floating around in the world already. The most recent one I got excited about was renowned Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s 2001 New Verse Translation, which is… (pause for math)… actually 19 years old! Yikes. That’s much older than my brain thinks it is, but, as we’ve all learned in the last six months, time is extremely relative.

Also, in the life of a poem like Beowulf, which was originally conceived sometimes between 700 and 1000 CE (maybe, probably), a couple of decades isn’t much at all.

Anyway. To return to the question at hand: if the translation is Maria Dahvana Headley’s (The Mere Wife, Queen of Kings: A Novel of Cleopatra The Vampire), then yes. Yes, we do need another translation of Beowulf.

If you read Beowulf in high school, you probably read the Penguin or Oxford edition. One that formalizes and standardizes the poem into a sort of faux-Elizabethan run of “harks” and “thees” and “thous” and such. The rhyme scheme is rigid, the diction is sanitized, and getting through it is a chore.

The audacity. The audacity of making this poem a chore.

There are monsters. Kings and warriors. There is literal balls-out fighting. Everyone is drunk at least half the time. There is sex and blood, and there are dragons and treasure and magical swords. This is literally one of the best poems ever created. It’s gory and squishy and exciting and arrogant and joyful and tragic and ugly and beautiful. It moves and sings and bangs its tankard on the table. It hones its edges and lights shit on fire and tears the limbs from the sockets of invaders and nails them to the ceiling as a trophy and a warning. It says “I will” and it does so with no fear or regrets, and if you miss that in your translation, you’re doing it wrong.

Headley did it right.

Her introduction explains her deep understanding of what so many others miss: that stories are alive and even though there are no longer mead halls, there are cowboy bars and places where someone might walk in at the end of the day, slap his friend on the back and say, “Bro, you are never going to believe what happened to me today.”

There isn’t as clear a delineation between what was and what is and what will be as many people think, and if we let the rhythm and cadence wash over us, if we let the story take us instead of trying to force it to fit our mold, then we’ll understand the parallels on a visceral level that commentary and forced allegory will never reach.

We’ll understand that form is less important than function and Beowulf can rhyme here and not there and the story is, if anything, more powerful for its freedom – for its “wild yawp” and disarray.

I’m not even going to get into the stuff Headley discusses about language because I can’t do it justice and also, just… go read it, it’s revelatory.

I’m an introvert. I don’t like crowded spaces, and I usually only go to bars because other people I’m with want to go. Once I’m there, I usually find a corner and either sit quietly and people watch or pull out a book or a notebook and pen. I read Headley’s Beowulf in one sitting and the entire time, all I wanted to do was call my friends, head out to some little pub with my Kindle, order cider, and then climb up on the table and declaim this artistry to everyone around me.

I wanted my friends, most of whom are also story nerds. to take turns with me, trading back and forth into the wee hours, up on that table, stomping our feet, getting as drunk on the text as we were on beverage until, at last, we finished and went home to sleep so we could do it again the next night… maybe with some music.

Reading books in solitude is relatively new to the human experience, and I am not knocking it. I love books. I’ve already read close to 100 this year. I intend to read a lot more. I write books in the hopes other people will want to read them. But it’s… comforting? Heartening? To remember that every so often, that once upon a time, stories were a community event. Stories brought people together. They were participatory. They were loud and raucous and special.

Let Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf: A New Translation (MCD x FSG Originals) remind you of that. And of how powerful stories can be.