I love Headley's language, its bombast and swagger and glint-in-the-eye. I can just picture someone clambering up onto a bar - "Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!" And the whole book is suffused with this life, but/and I also loved how the language subtly changes as Beowulf ages - we still get that same spirit, but it's tempered somewhat (and appropriately so) by Beowulf's and the narrator's increasing awareness of his mortality,

and then acceptance of death as something that comes at the end of everyone's story, no matter how great.

"Maybe a man's mighty,
maybe he's known to all as a warrior, but
Death has his number. No one knows
when it'll be called, when he'll have to walk backward
out of the beer-hall, exiled from life."

and

"They did all this grieving the way men do,
but, bro, no man knows, not me, not you,
how to get to goodbye. His guys tried."

Like excuse me, I did not expect this book to touch me?? Rude.

I also have definitely never read a book even remotely close to this old and understood everything so clearly. I'm sure there are some crusty old men offended by the contemporary idioms thrown in alongside the ancient language, but, well, they're wrong. Not only do Dahvana's word choices, phrasing, etc. make what's happening as clear as it would've been to the listeners in beer halls a thousand years ago, they make the story and its characters feel alive and immediate to now in a way that I'm not sure I've read before. In summary, CHEF'S KISS FIVE STARS READ IT BRO!