The Squashed edition of the Anglo-Saxon saga Béowulf. Abridged from the original text to read in an hour or so. Squashed editions are precise abridgements - the original ideas, in their own words, the full beam of the book, the quotable quotes and all the famous lines, but neatly honed down to the length of a readable short story. "Like reading the bible without all the begats" - Prof. Jim Curtis

This magnificent new edition, which includes relevant shorter texts and key illustrations, is designed specifically to help those who, while already enjoying some acquaintance with Old English, come to Beowulf for the first time.

This enthralling new prose edition of Beowulf combines the clearest, best elements of two different classic translations, so readers will get both a feel for the language and an appreciation of the action of the story.

The Anglo-Saxon poem recounting the story of Beowulf's battle with the monster, Grendel, is retold in the style of modern verse

Beowulf is the conventional title of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature. It survives in a single manuscript known as the Nowell Codex. Its composition by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet is dated between the 8th and the early 11th century. In 1731, the manuscript was badly damaged by a fire that swept through a building housing a collection of Medieval manuscripts assembled by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton. The poem's existence for its first seven centuries or so made no impression on writers and scholars, and besides a brief mention in a 1705 catalogue by Humfrey Wanley it was not studied until the end of the eighteenth century, and not published in its entirety until the 1815 edition prepared by the Icelandic-Danish scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin. In the poem, Beowulf, a hero of the Geats in Scandinavia, comes to the help of Hroðgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall (in Heorot) has been under attack by a monster known as Grendel. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother attacks the hall and is then also defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland in Sweden and later becomes king of the Geats. After a period of fifty years has passed, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is fatally wounded in the battle. After his death, his attendants bury him in a tumulus, a burial mound, in Geatland. The numerous different translations and interpretations of Beowulf turn this monumental work into a challenge for the reader.