Beowulf

Translated by Seamus Heaney

It is a great wonder how Almighty God in His magnificence favours our race with rank and scope and the gift of wisdom;

His sway is wide.

Sometimes He allows the mind of a man of distinguished birth to follow its bent, grants him fulfillment and felicity on earth and forts to command in his own country.

He permits him to lord it in many lands until the man in his unthinkingness forgets that it will ever end for him.

He indulges his desires; illness and old age mean nothing to him; his mind is untroubled by envy or malice or the thought of enemies with their hate-honed swords.

The whole world conforms to his will, he is kept from the worst until an element of overweening enters him and takes hold while the soul’s guard, its sentry, drowses, grown too distracted. A killer stalks him, an archer who draws a deadly bow.

And then the man is hit in the heart, the arrow flies beneath his defences, the devious promptings of the demon start.

His old possessions seem paltry to him now.

He covets and resents; dishonours custom and bestows no gold; and because of good things that the Heavenly Powers gave him in the past he ignores the shape of things to come.

Then finally the end arrives when the body he was lent collapses and falls prey to its death; ancestral possessions and the goods he hoarded are inherited by another who lets them go with a liberal hand.