Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. I love the Michael Alexander translation. Obviously like any poetic translation there are points of accuracy that some scholars disapprove of. But as I’m sure you are well aware this is not the point of a poetic translation. The difference it seems to me is what you might call a greater ‘lack of ego’ in the Alexander translation. Seamus Heaney is a Nobel prize winning poet not a scholar and the very thing that one might have thought to lend strength to his translation seems to me to be its weakness.

No I do not read Anglo-Saxon myself, although I have picked up quite a bit of vocabulary, as I am far more interested in writerly aspects of the modern language. I keep meaning to take up its study more seriously, you know, I have books, primers, even CD versions all sitting on the shelf gathering dust … I always seem to get sidetracked into other things like deciding to read another translation!

Sometimes it seems to me that, rather than struggling ‘scriptorium slow’, my time is better spent mulling over the poem itself which, thanks to these wonderful translations, I am able to read. I have a couple of word for word literal translations as well.