Why is Beowulf basically compulsory for undergrads?

Thanks! Maybe a bit hasty there, but thanks to the conduit of Tolkien and Kind Arthur stuff I think there's some merit to the argument.

Because it's the only surviving long work of Old English poetry that isn't a saint's life or a biblical paraphrase. Understandably the curriculum-makers want to ensure that a survey of English literature doesn't completely leave out the Anglo-Saxons, but there just isn't much of general interest besides Beowulf. Surviving Anglo-Saxon prose is mostly religious tracts of various sorts. The poetry is a bit more lively, but again the other long poems are mostly religious compositions that would be dull to most modern audiences. Some of the surviving O.E. short poems are more interesting, but they're hard to teach at the entry-level because the best of them (the Wanderer, the Seafarer, the Wife's Lament, Deor) are also famously cryptic--and some of them are just bizarre riddles.

Nobody even knew how to read it until the 19th century you idiot. Plus, 90% of classes for Beowulf don't even bother to teach the students basic Old English, so they're basically just advertisements for Seamus Heaney.

What does that have to do with anything? I literally cited contemporary culture.

Beowulf isn't important to contemporary culture at all, unless you're a Tolkien fan.

Because there's a movie based on it, of course. You can't introduce more than one work in an intro lit class that doesn't have at least one film adaption.

>unless you're a Tolkien fan
Fantasy is contemporary culture,
and Tolkien is fantasy

Across elementary school, high school and college, it was the only book I was assigned three times (AP english, survey on germanic literature, and epic poetry).

Honorable mentions for two assignments: the iliad, the odyssey, the great gatsby, romeo and juliet, a separate peace, lord of the flies, the grapes of wrath, huckleberry finn, to kill a mockingbird,

It's more synthetic mythology than fantasy.

Even though it's been part of standard literary studies for the better part of a century, at least.

Because all the fresh out of high school manlets need to man the fuck up, and all the spec-wearing pseudo-fems need to know what a real man is.

In other words, real fucking education, mate.

I'd hazard that there are a few things that all work in tandem to create this impression.
One issue is a matter of selection. In the kind of broad survey class that most undergraduate English majors take, you typically want at least one or two substantial texts from each historical period covered. For some periods, there is a huge variety of texts to choose from. Comparatively speaking, the options are much more restricted for the early medieval period that produced Beowulf.
However, there are options, although they are rarely done. There are several other long poems in Old English, especially Andreas and Genesis A and B. There are also a number of really important Latin texts, such as Bede's Ecclesiastical History (of which a scant couple of pages are usually included as pertains to Caedmon, but the rest is ignored), Asser's Life of King Alfred, the Life of St Edmund in Latin by Abbo of Fleury and in Old English by Aelfric, Felix of Croyland's Life of St Guthlac, Aldhelm's long poem on virgin saints On Virginity, collections of Old English homilies by Aelfric or Wulfstan, etc.
Why aren't most of these texts taught? One big reason is that many of them are in Latin, and English departments have often been very reluctant to recognize the multilingualism of England generally in their educational curriculum. A special exception is often made for Thomas More's Utopia, but it's rare that I've seen any substantive Latin work of the medieval period taught in an undergraduate English class. In recent years, works in Anglo-Norman (especially thanks to Marie de France), Welsh, Irish, and Norse have made some inroads, but I think Latin has had the reverse experience. As fewer people come to university with a background in Latin, it's place has been giving way increasingly.
Another big issue is religion. While Beowulf is narrated from the perspective of a Christian worldview looking back at the pagan past, its Christianity is not incredibly intrusive. By contrast, most of the literature listed above is explicitly religious in nature. Most of the other long Old English poetry is either about saints or biblical figures, and much of the Latin literature concerns the lives of saints. While there is all sorts of cool stuff going on, it can often come off at first as less interesting than hot gore and monsters. Beowulf is actually really different from most of the extant literature we have from the period. There aren't a bunch of long heroic poems about Germanic heroes. There's a short poem, Deor, and some fragments of a presumably longer work about Walter of Aquitaine, but not much else.

1/2

Another issue is access to good translations. Beowulf has been translated many different times in translations of varying quality and adherence to the original text. Other poems, not so much, although recently that situation has been improving a lot. For a long time, Latin texts weren't really available in translation at all, since it was often assumed that anyone who would want to read them would already know Latin. This situation has also been changing, but in many cases, if Penguin Classics hasn't published a translation, it may be that it is impossible for students to purchase affordable editions of these texts.
Another issue in this is also professorial ignorance. In many cases, general survey courses are taught by people who don't know anything about the early medieval period. Most universities don't have people who know the period well. This is true sometimes even at elite schools. If you take a survey course, you are far more likely to be taught by a Shakespearean or a Chaucerian than an Anglo-Saxonist, and most of their expertise is restricted to the handful of texts that they were exposed to as undergraduates and as part of their comps reading, typically Beowulf and a selection of short lyric poetry and riddles that are readily available in the big anthologies. Gaining expertise in the period is logistically difficult. In graduate school, courses on the period often require a prior semester spent just learning the language, and while a budding scholar of a later period might take the introductory Old English class for fun, they are unlikely to have the time or inclination to go much further than that, if their university even offers other courses. As a result, there is a large body of primarily oral material handed down from non-specialist to non-specialist in undergraduate courses that makes up the body of knowledge of a relatively small corpus of Old English texts that are actually taught.
That was probably way longer than you wanted. Apologies. I think about the place of early medieval material in the curriculum a lot.

2/2

If you read it in original, you'd know.

t. MA in Ænglisc

is Seamus Heaney's version the best out there?

I ask because I didn't really enjoy it so much but I loved the tale so I'm looking for a good translation

>Famous Seamus. lol

Rebsamen

seamus is indisputably the best translation for a modern reader

Heaney is the Fagles of Beowulf. That's a good thing.