“A beautifully researched, visceral sizzle of a performance. The harp soundscape carries the audience across monster-crawling waves into the darkly ironic celebration of the mead hall. Here is a critical, compelling, and often farcical performance that captures the tension, danger, and absurdity of Beowulf.” Daisy Black, Medievalist Storyteller
“You made Beowulf vivid and alive even for those who had hated reading it. You are a superb storyteller, and you made everyone in the audience feel that Beowulf, Grendel, and Hrothgar were with us—in the room, and in our time.” Rosemary DePaolo, President (emerita), University of North Carolina, Wilmington
“If the recent success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy tells us anything, it is that the mentality of Anglo-Saxon culture speaks deeply to us. In the compelling performance of her new translation of Beowulf, Chris Vinsonhaler captures the radical poetics of this powerful text. She gives us Beowulf, not as a stuffy philological exercise, but as a vivid experience that is by turns heroic, ironic, and darkly comic: an experience that shakes us and leaves us pondering.” Christopher McDonough, University of the South, Board member, Sewanee Medieval Colloquium.
“I highly commend Chris Vinsonhaler’s performance of Beowulf. This dramatic translation captures the tone and energy of the original poem, while reflecting the intricacies of current scholarly debate about its content, meaning, and mode of delivery. The specialists in our audience were moved to an animated discussion of the poem, the generalists were illuminated on issues of greatest current concern, and the students were energized to delve yet deeper into the complexities and beauty of the earliest period of our literature. And we were all hugely entertained.” Robert Bjork, Foundation Professor of English, Arizona State University, Editor, Klaeber’s Beowulf and A Beowulf Handbook