xiv + 146 pp. Verse translation is preceded by translator's note (ix-xii), introducer's note by Mitchell (xiii), map, and Mitchell's critical introduction (1-29), and is followed by appendices (121-42) containing a translation of The Fight at Finnsburh, a formal analysis of two passages, an index of names, genealogical tables, and "Notes on Episodes and Digressions," then a bibliography (143-46). Crossley-Holland explains, "my staple diet has been a non-syllabic four-stress line, controlled by light alliteration," without absolute observance of this form; "my diction inclines towards the formal" but "eschew[s] the use of archaisms, inverted word orders, and all 'poetic' language" (xi). "I believe this translation should be read out loud—an epic in the oral tradition is never going to sit very easily on the printed page" (xii).

Crossley-Holland's translation has been widely circulated in various forms and media. It was also published by Macmillan with a small number of illustrations in the same year as this unillustrated edition. It was republished in Crossley-Holland, ed. and trans., The Anglo-Saxon World (1982 etc.), in a deluxe format with lithographs by Virgil Burnett (1973), and in the Oxford World's Classics series with a new introduction by Heather O'Donoghue (1999); portions were used for narrative voiceover and dialogue in Donald Fairservice, dir., Beowulf (1976); portions were recorded by Crossley-Holland and others (1970); and the last 44 lines were excerpted in the anthology The School Bag, ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.

The translation begins:

Listen!
          The fame of Danish kings
in days gone by, the daring feats
worked by those heroes are well known to us.

Scyld Scefing often deprived his enemies,
many tribes of men, of their mead-benches.
He terrified his foes; yet he, as a boy,
had been found a waif; fate made amends for that.
He prospered under heaven, won praise and honour
until the men of every neighbouring tribe,
across the whale's way, were obliged to obey him
and pay him tribute. He was a noble king! (32)

And ends:

Then twelve brave warriors, sons of heroes,
rode round the barrow, sorrowing;
they mourned their king, chanted
an elegy, spoke about that great man:
they exalted his heroic life, lauded
his daring deeds; it is fitting for a man,
when his lord and friend must leave this life,
to mouth words in his praise
and to cherish his memory.
Thus the Geats, his hearth-companions,
grieved over the death of their lord;
they said that of all kings on earth
he was the kindest, the most gentle,
the most just to his people, the most eager for fame. (119)

• Hugh Magennis, Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 192-94.

MO2 represents the descriptor "a new translation" as part of the book's title.

BAM.