Beowulf Reimagined.

Bones and Keeps by Dena Bain Taylor is a tour de force of narrative control, compelling storytelling and imaginative vitality and power. It is intertextually based on the anonymous Old English epic poem, Beowulf, of which the eponymous royal hero is the main protagonist. It is beautifully, evocatively and engagingly read by the author herself.

She dramatically and convincingly brings to life the early medieval world of Scandia (Scandinavia) - while also historically contextualising it on the margins of the late Roman Empire in the West - with considerable literary skill, comprehensive descriptive detail, and a sensory, even cinematic, immediacy which endows her work with a felt verisimilitude. While she renders Bones and Keeps very listenable for 21st century readers, she still succeeds in preserving the (unsurprising) strangeness of the world it so imaginatively resurrects and reinvigorates.

This is a world and realm of gods and goddesses, of transfusing spirits, of magic, of witches, of the shades of the dead, and significantly of the Anglo-Saxon concept of Wyrd, which approximates to fate or destiny. It is also a macho, patriarchal world of frequent violence and war, of courage and heroism, of internecine strife, and of vengeance in pursuit of justice and the vindication of personal and familial honour, where enforceable state laws are nonexistent.

James Hanley.

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