The oldest surviving long poem in English, yet it feels as strange as something discovered on another planet. A hero crosses the whale-road to fight a monster who cannot bear the sound of human joy; later, his mother, and later still, a dragon guarding cursed gold. The alliterative verse clangs like iron on iron. This is the root of English literature, written in a language so transformed that we need scholars to bring it back to us, and yet the themes of courage, mortality, and the doom that waits for all of us feel as immediate as this morning's news.