The longest epic poem in Old English - 3182 lines - is preserved in a manuscript from around 1000 AD; its original date of composition is unknown. After a general introduction, it tells a series of stories in which the hero, Beowulf, fights and kills a terrorising monster, Grendel, then Grendel's revengeful mother; he returns to his homeland, and meets death while fighting a dragon. My recording follows the story from its opening until just after the killing of Grendel (line 863).
I have followed the text of the poem in Frederick Klaeber's third edition (with supplement, 1941), as this was the one I used when I first learned Old English from Professor A H Smith and his colleagues at University College London in 1959. (A fourth edition appeared in 2008.) I still have my notes and annotations to that book, and I have used these to inform my translation, though taking into account some later research. I have altered Klaeber's punctuation in several places, to better capture the dynamic of the reading. It will be noted that the famous opening word in the tale is not here read as a loud interjection, but as an emphatic adverb, following George Walkden's analysis in English Language and Linguistics (2013).