PREFACE This translation of Beowulf was made in the last years of the 1940s and was published in hardback by the Hand and Flower Press (Aldington, Kent) in 1952. The University of California Press republished it in paperback in 1962, and it sold over 50,000 copies before being discontinued in 1999. In the present Carcanet edition, poem and introduction have been kept as they were in 1952, despite temptations to tinker here and there. The translation, which was begun shortly after I came out of the army at the end of the Second World War, was in a sense my unwritten war poem, and I would not want to alter the expression I gave to its themes of conflict and danger, voyaging and displacement, loyalty and loss. Inter arma musae tacent, but they are not sleeping. E.M. (2001) ix