Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, published in 1999, was his first full-length translation of a substantial medieval text since Sweeney Astray, and, like Sweeney Astray, it was a long time coming. The commission to translate the poem came in the early 1980s from the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and a portion of Heaney's early work on the translation appeared as ‘The Ship of Death’ in his 1987 collection, The Haw Lantern. By this time, however, the translation project had been put to one side – Heaney comments in a 1988 interview that ‘The Ship of Death’ ‘was born out of an opportunity, which I sadly didn't have the stamina to carry through, to translate Beowulf.’ In his introduction to the completed translation, published eleven years after this comment, Heaney indicated that although the difficulties inherent in the project caused him to set it aside, he had an instinct nonetheless that the translation should not be abandoned (pp. xxii–xxiii). in the acknowledgements that follow the published version, he says that he ‘got going in earnest four years ago’ (p. 105), in the mid nineties.

When the translation did appear, it appeared to wide acclaim, winning the Whitbread Book of the Year award for 1999, and becoming what Frank Kermode termed ‘a slightly surprising best-seller.’ Some Old English specialists expressed reservations: partly, it seems, on the grounds that Heaney, as a Nobel Prize-winner whose translation was to appear in the Norton Anthology, was to a certain extent likely to overshadow the poem that he was translating, to say nothing of all previous translations put together.