Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf was published in 1999 to a reception that was mostly very enthusiastic indeed. Attracting a level of interest unprecedented in recent times for a verse publication, the translation caught the imagination of modern readers, even having lengthy stints at the top of the best-seller lists in Britain and Ireland and in the United States. It was praised by poetry critics for its freshness and vigour, and, for the most part, Anglo-Saxon scholars approved of the translation too. They hailed it as a sensitive and generally accurate rendering of the great Old English poem, based on good scholarship, and as a production which brought welcome public attention to Beowulf and to Old English literature more generally. Among dissenting voices have been those of Tom Shippey, who disapproves of what he refers to as Heaney's ‘fashionable gestures towards post-colonialism and other anachronisms’, and Loren C. Gruber, who objects that Heaney's Irish diction politicizes Beowulf, that his grammatical renderings sometimes lose the subtlety of the original and that his English diction ‘is sometimes off’. Michael Alexander, on the other hand, is full of praise for Heaney's translation. Sympathetically reviewing it in The Observer, he refers to Heaney as ‘a generous poet [who] has brought back our own, in his own words’ (I will need to come back to that quotation, however).