[DC-3]

I'm also a huge fan of Heaney's Beowulf. While Headley chooses to vernacularise the language in the extreme, Heaney took a more sensitive approach, preserving kennings and searching for Ulster dialect cognates to Old English words to use in their stead, and always being careful to shun the aloof Latinate for the earthy Germanic. The consequence of his success is that the text seems to have sprung forth from the bloodied earth, the capricious sea, and the smoke-clogged longhouses of the tale.

So while I am always happy to see new editions of Beowulf, I can't help but feel that Headley's will feel a little trivial by way of its own unselfconcious anachronism. A wergeld seems an absurd concept when cast in the language of the iPhone, but when depicted in language that is sympathetic to its context it feels deeply natural - of the earth, even - a rightful price to pay as atonement for the shedding of blood, in an age when the sword was as fair and just as the High Court is today.