List of translations of Beowulf

This is a list of translations of Beowulf, one of the best-known Old English heroic epic poems.

Beowulf has been translated many times in verse and in prose.

By 2020, the Beowulf's Afterlives Bibliographic Database listed some 688 translations and other versions of the poem, from Thorkelin's 1787 transcription of the text, and in at least 38 languages.

[2] In the Preface to Ovid's Epistles (1680) Dryden proposed three different types of translation: metaphrase [...] or turning an author word for word, and line by line, from one language into another; paraphrase [...] or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense, and that, too, is admitted to be amplified but not altered; and imitation [...] where the translator – if he has not lost that name – assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion; and taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the ground-work, as he pleases.

There are hundreds of translations or near-translations of Beowulf, and more are added each year, so a complete list may well be unattainable.