Just don't take any course where they make you read Beowulf," Woody Allen advised Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1977). The throwaway line elicited laughs from Allen's core audience of college grads, especially the one-time English majors among them who had learned to dread--if not actually read--what they had heard was a grim Anglo-Saxon epic filled with odd names and a lot of gory hewing and hacking.
The joke, it turns out, was on the chucklers. In January, a British panel chose Beowulf for the Whitbread Award as the best book of 1999, with J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner...
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