Church’s 1904 prose translation, which is sufficiently antique-sounding that it can pass for basic Olden-speak, the lingua franca of so many fantasy novels these days.

He has the V-shaped torso, the lats, the delts, the bulging thigh muscles of, say, Captain America or Green Arrow. Beowulf when we first see him looks long-faced and sleepy, but when he doffs his robe on the night when he is to fight with Grendel, and girds himself in a belted, Depends-like garment, we see that this guy is ripped. Grendel here bears a passing relationship to the monster in the “Alien” movies: he has the same elongated snout, the same dripping, needlelike teeth. There have also been a couple of comic-book versions, and working from this tradition, the graphic novelist Gareth Hinds has reimagined “Beowulf” as a kind of superhero tale. The story is so powerful and so elemental that it has inspired countless retellings - in movies, cartoons, even an opera. There are not one but three monsters: Grendel, a man-eating ogre who snacks nightly on sleeping Danes until Beowulf, the story’s hero, sails over from what is now Sweden and rips his arm off Grendel’s mother, a fearsome swamp creature, hell-bent on avenging her creepy son and a treasure-hoarding dragon, who was the inspiration for some of Tolkien’s winged worm-things. But what recommends “Beowulf” to children - and to older readers who haven’t lost a child’s delight in stories that are both scary and gory - is that it’s also a first-rate horror yarn, featuring slaughter, dismemberment and underwater sword fights. What interests scholars about the story is its place in our linguistic development, and also the way it blends both Christian and pagan details.

Beowulf,” a 3,000-line epic poem composed early in the eighth century, is the first significant text written in English, or in what eventually became English.

Beowulf by Michael Morpurgo