A hall goes up on the Danish coast, the finest building anyone has seen, and the noise of men enjoying themselves carries out over the moor. Out there something is listening that has been alone a long time. It comes in at night, thirty men at a time, and it keeps coming back for twelve years, and no weapon in Denmark will touch it. Nobody sleeps in the hall any more.
Then a ship crosses from Geatland with fourteen men on it and one at the front who says he will wait for the thing bare handed, because it fights bare handed, and it would be no fair boast otherwise.
That is the first third of the poem. What follows is the part people forget: the mother who comes for her son, out of a mere with fire on the water, and fifty years later an old king with a kingdom behind him and one dragon left to kill, going out with eleven picked men, all of whom run.
This is the oldest long poem in English and it does not read like a museum. It is a poem about young men who are sure of themselves, old men who have run out of time, gold that carries a curse, feuds that outlive everyone who started them, and one man who goes into the dark alone because that is what he told a room full of people he would do.
Francis Gummere's translation is the one printed in the Harvard Classics and the one most readers have met. He keeps the thing that matters, which is the shape of the line itself: four beats, hammered together with matching sounds, the way it was made to be spoken. Read a page of it out loud and you will hear what the modern prose versions quietly throw away.
The poem entire, the Prelude and all forty one fitts, unabridged, with the translator's own notes at the foot of the page where they belong, so that the whale path, the ring giver and the kin of Cain are explained where you meet them and not in the back of the book.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 142 pages, set in EB Garamond and printed on 60# cream stock. Complete and unabridged, set as verse.
Hardcover: casewrap edition, built for the shelf and the long haul.
Paperback: perfect bound, the same interior, meant to be carried and read to pieces.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
