“Those second looks have turned up several shared themes. One is a new skepticism regarding the relationship that has developed between the epic and prevailing ideas about male heroism. ‘A lot of toxic masculinity has been shaped by imperfect understandings of epic poetry,'” said Maria Dahvana Headley, translator of a new edition of Beowulf. “That result, she and [Aeneid translator Shadi] Bartsch agree, is a consequence of particular choices made in reading, not the substance of the epics themselves.” – The New York Times