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Summary: read it to your kids
Review: Heaney's translation makes this undergrad lit classic readable for your kids. There is a significant character/morality tale underlying the dragon-killing action. I read the whole poem on an airplane from Guatemala City to Dallas and it held my attention. It takes a great writer to turn a college essay subject into an airplane read.
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Summary: Get out your dictionary!
Review: I met Heaney 10 years ago at Dartmouth College where I was fortunate enough to hear him read his poetry -- I was captivated then and I still am now by his command of English. I almost enjoyed his introduction more than the actual translation for its erudition, rich vocabulary and contextual explanations. It's been a long time since I've seen the words "revenant," "chthontic" and "oneiric" bandied around with alacrity. I'm not an Old English scholar either, but I still found the facing translation useful. I agree with the reviewer below who said it would be helpful to have glosses and textual notes. Even better in this regard is the Robert Pinsky facing page translation of Dante's Inferno. Anyway, this translation makes Beowolf fun and accessible -- sure, it's worth reading the "classic" translations as well, but Seaney should be congratulated for bringing a book many were forced to read, to a state where the book can be savored. Like Branaugh's revival of Shakespeare, who can lament the return of one of the most pivotal works in English. Read it!
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Summary: As wonderful as everyone says
Review: The numerous farvorable reviews of this book and its quick "sold out" status say it all. This was a wonderful read. If you enjoy it, you may also want to read "Grendel" by John Gardner - an existentialist telling of the Beowulf legend told from Grendel's point of view. It is quite amazing.
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Summary: Beowulf
Review: In my language arts class in eighth grade we were to choose a book of our choice and read it with a partner in the community and write letters back and forth to each other and my teacher thought that this book would be to hard for me so I decided to prove her wrong and what I actually found was that this book is really not all that hard to understand if you put some effort in to it and i think that you will like this book. If you liked Tolkien then you will like this book because Tolkien got a lot of ideas from here, he was a professon of medieval liturature at Oxford in England and he manily lectured on this particular book.
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Summary: A Window into the Dark Ages
Review: Sometimes our hopes are realized by that which exceeds our expectations. This is the case with Henry's translation of "Beowulf." As Dryden's "Aeneid" is not a translation, but the translation of Vergil, Henry's "Beowulf" should be the standard in our tongue. What struck me, forcibly, every time that I picked up this book, was the otherworldlieness of its' tone. The flavor and texture of the telling is not of our time. Compared to the standard English translation of my schooldays, this is a different story. The richness of the language makes this a superior translation, and opens a window into the mind of another era. The references to God and Christ throughout the book are reverent in a different way from the formalism of many religous expressions. It is as though the soul that brought forth this work spoke with the darkly-shaded moment born of centuries of war, plague, famine, and also of honor and fierce pride. No other translation of the early middle ages has so captivated me. The hint of dark foreboding throughout speaks for the tenor of the times, and makes the work truer to the original. By contrast, many of the classics in translation, especially those done in the 19th century, read as though the ancients were Victorians; the flavor of the times influenced the translation. Some of the same thing happened with Latin letters in the 1960s: I remember reading a free verse translation of Catullus that made him sound like a latin hippie. None of this with Henry. Perhaps his Irishness helps to give a familiar strangeness to his prose. At any event, this is a highly satisfying read - one that made me pause to think on it throughout. -Lloyd A. Conway
Rating: 
Summary: Three stars for effort
Review: When I first came to this text I was full of trepidation. I was concerned that the Norton Anthology (which now uses this version of Beowulf) had replaced a fine scholarly translation with one by a "name" writer. Although I still prefer the old translation to this one, I feel Heaney deserves credit for a good, if not earth-shattering, translation. Truly written from the heart of a poet, this is a better translation than most. I recommend it to those already familiar to Beowulf. It is an interesting counterpoint to more traditional translations.
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Summary: Beautiful, moving, and never boring!
Review: At last we have a translation of Beowulf that does justice to its poetry and power. Heaney's translation has all the gore and guts of a comic book adventure, with all the feeling and profundity of the finest romance.
Rating: 
Summary: good
Review: I had to read this for a class, and thought the dramatic arc and action were good. It impresses me to read something that is so old, and whom many generations in between also read. But I did get the feeling I was being assigned BEOWULF largely because it was "good for me" more than actually "good." It is tedious in spots. And I'm sure this edition of it will largely fit the category of "the unread bestseller." A lot of volumes will look great on a bookshelf, but won't have been read past page 20.
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Summary: Heaney was the right man for this job
Review: I don't have the academic background to compare Heaney's translation with the many that have come before; the only time I had read the poem previously was back in college, and all I remembered was Beowulf tearing Grendel's arm off. So, as someone coming to the poem blissfully ignorant, I'm happy to report that Heaney does a spectacular job. Someone smart once said that the only way to judge a translation is on the translation's own merits; that's lucky for me as I'm a dunce with Old English. I looked over the facing pages (the Old English pages, in my edition), and sometimes read them aloud to get a feel for their cadence and sound, but I trusted in Heaney to tell me the story, and what a story he tells. I've always admired the tough beauty of his poetry; his lines tend to stomp about, a brawl of consonants, irredeemably masucline. What better interpreter, than, for the hypermacho world of Beowulf, where the men gnaw on bones and gulp down their mead and stagger off to fight monsters and get eviscerated. I'm not mocking the saga-- it's awfully good fun, and I'm pleased to see it's selling so well. Heaney's favorite themes, violence and memory, lurk in the heart of Beowulf. Very nice to see a Nobel laureate refusing to rest on his laurels.
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Summary: A loss of wonder
Review: There are negatives in Beowulf and these are stessed in this translation to the point where it almost gloats on negativity. There is a mystical, albeit diabolic, quality in the original which is lost in this translation. The wonder of "gear-dagum" is reduced, leaving the Beowulf-text rather close to melodrama. Over and over, Heaney's translation has impressive passages but the overall effect is cold, not adding up to a world-view. Heaney's text is a good translation but it should not be hyped: it is, like most intelligent translations, good in that it gives an art-product related to but different from the original. It can be forgotten that Heaney is translating a Germanic text; the small parallel of the word "thole" in an Irish district should not be exaggerated to suggest Ireland as a Heorot location for Hrothgars, Geats, Grendels and indeed Beowulfs.
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