A superhuman (and amphibian) hero who slays a man-eating fiend and his avenging mother, as well as a 50-foot dragon, is obviously destined for immortality. Beowulf is standard fare on Old English university courses, but Seamus Heaney's new translation makes him accessible to a wider readership. Heaney's powerful early poetry in North - where he excavated fascinating connections between Irish and Viking mythology - is echoed in Beowulf, which is based on Nordic myth and, with its tales of feuds, warrior feats and supernatural foes parallels the stories from The Tain, where attaining a glorious reputation in battle is all. Heaney calls Beowulf's world "a society presided over by the laws of the blood-feud" which is all too reminiscent of the Northern Troubles, and Heaney's deliberate choice of Ulster dialect underscores this subtext. The Scandinavian names are hard to disentangle, but the monsters are superb.