Recommendations
Books Like Beowulf
Best books to read after Beowulf
Readers who love Beowulf are drawn to its combination of the oldest English poem, the three monster fights, the heroic warrior code of the Germanic north, and the elegiac meditation on transience and the passing of civilization. They want works that deal with the Old English tradition, the medieval heroic world, the figure of the monster and the hero who faces it, and the long tradition of writers for whom Beowulf is the essential ancestor.
- 1Buy
The Lord of the Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien's epic fantasy is the most direct descendant of Beowulf in modern literature — Tolkien was the leading Beowulf scholar of his generation, and Middle-earth's language, landscape, dwarves, and dragon Smaug are all direct inheritances from the Old English poem; his 1936 essay 'Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics' is the most important critical response to the poem in the 20th century.
- 2Buy
Grendel
by John Gardner
The most celebrated literary response to Beowulf — Gardner retells the poem from Grendel's perspective, giving the monster existentialist interiority and nihilistic philosophy; the novel asks what the hero-monster binary looks like from the inside of the monster's skull.
- 3Buy
The Song of Achilles
by Madeline Miller
The companion epic retelling in contemporary literary fiction — Miller does for the Iliad what Gardner does for Beowulf, centering the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus; shares Beowulf's interest in what the heroic code demands and what it costs.
- 4Buy
The Norse Myths
by Kevin Crossley-Holland
The mythological world Beowulf inhabits — Crossley-Holland's prose retellings of the Norse mythology underlying Beowulf's Scandinavian setting: Odin, Thor, the Norns, Ragnarök, and the warrior's afterlife in Valhalla that the poem's pagan/Christian tension circles.
- 5Buy
A Thousand Ships
by Natalie Haynes
The feminist retelling of the Trojan War that parallels Grendel in giving voice to those the heroic tradition silences — Haynes's novel retells the Iliad from the perspectives of the women; shares Beowulf's interest in who pays the price for the hero's glory.
- 6Buy
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
by Anonymous
The other great medieval English poem in the alliterative tradition — both Beowulf and Gawain are composed in alliterative verse and both examine what the warrior code actually requires of real human beings; Gawain is the natural companion read in the medieval English tradition.
- 7Buy
The Silmarillion
by J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien's mythological history of Middle-earth draws on the same Norse and Germanic tradition as Beowulf — the stories of Túrin Turambar, Beren and Lúthien, and the fall of Gondolin are directly modelled on the Old English and Norse sagas that Tolkien translated and taught.
- 8Buy
The Road to Middle-Earth
by Tom Shippey
The scholarly companion to Tolkien's debt to Beowulf and Old English literature — Shippey traces exactly how Tolkien transformed Old English and Norse sources into Middle-earth; essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what Tolkien took from Beowulf and what he made of it.
More Beowulf Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.