However, once in that forest, instead of conjuring images of strange men fighting in the mist, the book makes you swat scribal midges, pull your shoes from the caesuraean muck, and fight your way through endless swathes of etymologically-stymied willows. As it was, reading this book straight through felt like entering a dark forest in northern Germany in 500 a.d. I think it should have been structured with the Reconstruction at the beginning, perhaps followed by the translations. Then, a reconstruction of how the actual story might have gone, with some rather obscure appendices to top the whole thing off. This was followed by a ‘Glossary of Names’ which took up a third of the book, followed with some brief commentary, before the fragments presented in the first section were finally translated at around 95% through the book. There was a preface, an introduction, and then the two texts which the book was to be based on, presented in their original Old English (one a stand-alone fragment, and the other a few hundred lines from Beowulf). Unfortunately, the drama of the cover was more moving than the text, such as it was. I was sold immediately (as was the book). Finn and Hengest had a sweet cover of two men, one seemingly crying into the wind and driving rain, and another looking cunningly askance, while behind them some Heorot sat on the throne of a hill above the raging sea.
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