This will be very rewarding for any who wish to indulge a prepubescent penchant for silly wordplay, hyperbolic violence, or impolite bodily functions and effluvia. The book (which actually brings together five separate novels) is 600-something pages long, so the occasional fart joke stands out as a clever approach to maintaining the reader’s interest. Not that that was necessarily the intent. I’m only beginning the second book just now, but at this point, I can’t recommend it enough.

And if you ever had to read Beowulf in high school, then you’re probably familiar already with the brilliant work of translator Burton Raffel.