When I came to Queen's University in Belfast as an undergraduate in 1966 one of our lecturers in the first year was a Mr Seamus Heaney. 1966 was the year that Heaney published Death of a Naturalist, though I was not aware of that at the time. Mr Heaney was a young lecturer with thoughtful and interesting ideas about modern poetry. I particularly remember him giving lectures on Eliot and Frost.

After the first year I specialized as much as possible in medieval studies on my English degree and didn't come across Heaney much. The key teachers who guided me were two very different figures but they made an effective and complementary team. One was the no-nonsense Scot John Braidwood, an oldstyle philologist who seemed to have a detailed knowledge of the history of every word you could think of; as well as Old English, he had a special interest in the English language in Ulster. The other was one of Tipperary's finest, Éamonn Ó Carragáin, who was equally as inspirational as Braidwood, but in a different way. Ó Carragáin's enthusiasm for Beowulf was exceeded only by his enthusiasm for The Dream of the Rood. Both men were intellectually generous, and modest, and, despite all the other delights of English language and literature, they made Old English seem to me the most exciting part of the curriculum.

Heaney has written eloquently of the influence that John Braidwood had on him as a student, a few years before me, and of how that influence eventually fed into his 1999 translation of Beowulf, one of the major translations to be discussed in this book.