About the Author

Translator Burton Raffel has taught English, classics, and comparative literature at universities in the United States, Israel, and Canada. His books include translations of Beowulf, The Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar, From the Vietnamese, Ten Centuries of Poetry, The Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam (with Alla Burago), Poems from the Old English, and The Annotated Milton. Mr. Raffel practiced law on Wall Street and taught in the Ford Foundation's English Language Teacher Training Project in Indonesia.

Roberta Frank, Marie Borroff Professor of English and Linguistics at Yale University, works in all aspects-literary, historical, and archaeological-of early England and Scandinavia. She has written widely on Beowulf, including "A Scandal in Toronto- The Dating of Beowulf a Quarter-Century On" (2007).