Beowulf, Bèi’àowǔfǔ, and the Social Hero

The international presence of Beowulf as literature for younger audiences increased with the 2011 appearance of the Mandarin «贝奥武甫» (hereafter Bèi’àowǔfǔ),¹ an illustrated middle-grades retelling in twelve chapters which the book’s creator, the Tóngqù Publishing Company, states is the first version of the story for Chinese children.² The explicitly educational project is framed in terms of a cultural alterity that education allows one to negotiate. As the Publisher’s Preface explains, Bèi’àowǔfǔ belongs to Tóngqù’s series of ten classic Western texts adapted for youth in order to provide a foundation for understanding modern Western literature and