If the duels with Grendel, his mother, and the dragon gripped you, you’ll love how Grendel turns that world inside out. Gardner lets you live inside the monster’s head as he stalks Hrothgar’s hall, trades riddling words with a nihilistic dragon, and watches a young Geatish hero arrive on the shore. It’s the same hall, the same terror—but told with dark wit and philosophical bite that makes every scene in Heorot feel startlingly new.

If Beowulf’s voyage to Denmark and his later dragon-fated finale gave you that sweeping, legendary buzz, The Odyssey delivers it across wine-dark seas. You’ll follow Odysseus from the Cyclops’s cave to Circe’s island and past Scylla and Charybdis, with gods tipping the scales much as fate and glory do in Beowulf. It’s the same grand canvas of heroism, hospitality, and reputation—just stretched over ten perilous years.

If you loved Beowulf’s clear-cut charges—sailing to face Grendel, plunging into the mere after his mother, and standing fast against the dragon—The Saga of the Volsungs hits the same nerve. Sigurd’s slaying of Fafnir, the riddling wisdom from the dragon’s blood, and oaths that bind men to doom echo Beowulf’s world of treasure, boasts, and costly glory. It’s one relentless objective after another, each with iron consequences.

If Heaney’s rolling alliteration and sinewy lines made Beowulf feel like thunder in the blood, Armitage’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight will echo that music. A beheading game, a year-and-a-day vow, and a wintry ride to meet the Green Knight mirror Beowulf’s formal, honor-bound combats—rendered in crisp, musical verse that’s as tactile and gleaming as chain mail.

If the arm-ripping, mere-flooding brawls of Beowulf stuck with you, The Iliad (in Robert Fagles’s translation) matches that ferocity blow for blow. Limbs are pierced, helms split, and heroes—Hector, Achilles, Ajax—meet in brutal, fate-shadowed clashes, narrated with the same grave splendor that made Beowulf’s fights with Grendel and the dragon so unforgettable.