How long does it take to read Beowulf?
Beowulf by Seamus Heaney takes about 4 hours 42 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 42 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2000. 256 pages, about 70,400 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 49 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 42 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 56 minutes |
The page count is the median across 11 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface. Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.
Subjects: Long Now Manual for Civilization, Epic poetry, Heroism, Anglo-Saxons, Geats, Monsters
