Reddit reviews Beowulf: A New Verse Translation

If you find this interesting, I would recommend that might find Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf a fun read. It's interesting because it's widely viewed as the first extant English poem, and also because Heaney does an amazing job of putting the original side-by-side with the English, both artistically as a poem and as a demonstration of the language.

I don't speak German or Frisian, but I studied a bit of linguistics in university and am broadly familiar with the changes that English went through as well as the basic characteristics of more conventional Germanic languages and I found this translation to be quite accessible if you're patient and willing to do a bit of homework. By the time I was done reading it, I'd begun to be able to more or less anticipate the modern English line after reading the original line without too much misunderstanding. I think a German/Dutch/Frisian speaker who knew English would find it even easier simply because the vocabulary wouldn't require switching between Germanic and French terms for the same things and also that the grammatical inflection would seem more natural than to a native English speaker.

In any case, it's a great way of seeing how English clearly is a fully West Germanic language even though our vocabulary is so strongly influenced by Old Norman and French.