title: Beowulf (Legends from the Ancient North)
author:  Anonymous 
description: <b>Michael Alexander </b>(translator) is Berry Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews. He has translated <i>The Earliest English Poems</i>, <i>The Canterbury Tales: The First Fragment</i>, and <i>Beowulf </i>for Penguin.
zlib_text: > ![](Images/image00185.jpeg)
  
  > **THE GARGOYLE KING**
  
  > … made a slight but mocking bow. _So deep emotions still stir within you.
  > Fret not, for soon you will be reunited with your precious master. It is the
  > least I can do for one who has served me so excellently_.
  
  > Idaria struggled to move, but again to no avail. Her fury at herself surged;
  > she had unwittingly helped manipulate Golgren for that beast. If not for
  > her—
  
  >  _If not for you, there would have been other ways, my Idaria. You were
  > simply the most desired tool, and your manipulation was merely the
  > culmination of a lifetime—his lifetime! You still do not understand it, do
  > you?_
  
  > More and more of the ghastly, living corpses collected around the shrouded
  > figure. They clearly hung on his every word, as if those words were what
  > gave them their mockery of existence.
  
  > He gestured at the vision, which revealed only the empty mountainside.
  > _There is nothing about the half-breed that is not the result of my
  >