Beowulf

I heard Benjamin Bagby sing and play his Beowulf live at Lincoln Center in the 90's, and it is a performance I'm very glad I didn't miss. After so many years, I remember the sound of it and my reactions to it much more vividly than many other things I heard in the past. Beowulf heard live, beautifully sung and dramatically performed, so that at some level, despite its strangeness, you understand it, or at least feel it, transforms the text from a difficult, foreign thing on the page into a vivid emotional experience. Try to hear him perform it live; if you can't, then be grateful that this DVD exists, and encounter Beowulf as you never have before.In addition, have a look at his website "Benjamin Bagby's Beowulf" for everything you want to know about this performance, past, present and future.

For some reason, when I ordered this, I overlooked the fact that this is performed in Old English rather than a translation. It didn't matter, as the subtitles are fine. What I didn't expect is just how gripping, how thrilling this would be. Benjamin Bagby is, to use a much overused word, awesome. I'd say his style borders on operatic, but this is far more communicative than most operas manage to be. I feel positively blessed by this experience, and I recommend this to anyone. I had read BEOWULF a couple of times over the years, most recently when the Seamus Heaney version was published, but I have to say reading doesn't compare with hearing it performed much as it might have been a thousand years ago.

I wish I could watch Benjamin Bagby performing live! Having recently developed an interest in Anglo-Saxon, I have yet to find a more inspiring example of the spoken language than this performance. It's very stripped down, just a guy on a stage with an Anglo-Saxon harp intoning the text of Beowulf, but pour yourself a goblet of mead and you can almost imagine you're listening to a skald in Heorot.

Extraordinarily good teaching tool and quite entertaining. The discussions about the music and particularly the musical instrument was a bonus. The scholars round table (I myself am a scholar) was bordering on boring, but brought up some good issues about the importance of Beowulf in the context of oral performance. The selections themselves are wonderfully spoken, acted, and sung by Bagby.

While I do, in fact, love it, there aren't any other people who can perform the poem without a script. It's "incomparable".

good book

Magnificent performance. I wish all poetry was this passionate and powerful.

The wonderful Beowolf story is brought to life by this terrific reading.

Benjamin Bagby provides us with a flamboyant recreation of what MIGHT have been heard in an Anglo-Saxon mead-hall. Who else could have achieved such convincing Early Medieval performance skills?