And still the literary prizes and awards make their way like so many homing pigeons to the 1995 Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney. The latest is this year's Whitbread Prize for Poetry for his atmospheric translation of the mighty Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf.
The win is itself significant as it is the third time Heaney has achieved it, having previously been awarded the prize for The Haw Lantern in 1989, and three years ago for The Spirit Level, which also won the overall Book of the Year award.
Indeed, Heaney could well repeat that feat later this month, when the five category winners compete for it.
But even more important is that his reworking in a strongly flavoured, Ulster vernacular of Beowulf has not only introduced a vast readership to the first epic written in English, albeit in the earliest known form of the language, it has reclaimed, and also liberated, an outstanding literary work which has suffered from being approached at universities in the past more as a task of translation than as a poem. Such is Heaney's reputation that it may now be safely assumed that anything he writes - or translates - will be read.
Believed to have been written in England sometime between the middle of the seventh and the beginning of the 10th century, Beowulf is a heroic narrative, celebrating the deeds of the eponymous hero, a Scandinavian prince, who comes to free the Danes' land by slaying Grendel the monster and his mother, who comes to avenge his killing. Some 50 years later, Beowulf is again called upon to save his adopted people when a dragon appears. He kills the beast, but later dies of his wounds.
It is exciting stuff, all the more so because of its evocation of the early Middle Ages. It is also highly sophisticated, the work of a Christian poet looking back at a dark, enigmatic past. This is the world of mead halls, kinship and the power of wyrd or fate. It is also a poem within a poem, for the narrative includes somewhat complex historical digressions.
For Heaney, a poet shaped by Hopkins, the project represented the fulfilment of his "voiceright". Having first studied it as an undergraduate in Queen's University, Belfast, he had long had a feel for the rhythms of the poem. As a formal work of translation, however, it was not until he was approached by the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature for a new translation that he began working on it - and realising that word-for-word translation via a primer is slow work. His interest moved elsewhere.
Finally returning to it, he availed of the familiar local voice he had inherited from his father's people. For Heaney, the contemporary political implications of the poem reflect the crisis in Northern Ireland as well as the wider turmoil of the 20th century.
Prior to Heaney's poetic reworking, the only previous major acknowledgment of the Beowulf poet's achievement was when J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of Middle Earth and an Old and Middle English scholar, initiated a critical rethink of the poem in 1936 with Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics.
Should Heaney win, his achievement will not only match the Whitbread Book of the Year double won by his friend, the late Ted Hughes - and to whom he dedicated his Beowulf - it will also honour an ancient work which is the heart of the English literary tradition.