"Mr. Bagby comes as close to holding hundreds of people in a spell as ever a man has...When he has finished, you leave with the overwhelming impression that you know the anonymous poet who created "Beowulf" more than a dozen centuries ago, that you have felt the man's personality touch you. That is much too rare an experience in theater."
-- The New York Times

"Bagby is an uninhibited interpreter and actor. His baritone is strong and expressive, his gestures simple and vivid. He's superb at creating characters....Like Tolkien, Bagby revels in the blood and gore of the story; he conveys both its earthy humor and its mixture of majesty, mystery and faith. The performance is an extraordinary feat of scholarship, imagination, memory, musicianship and, most of all, story-telling....He has a communicative power that transcends language."
-- The Boston Globe

"He used every facet of his voice, from a harsh whisper to a full-bellied shout in greeting, to touching on sea rhythms while creating accompanying wavelets on the lyre, to singing in a straight .roar or a honey of a baritone....performing in a language not one in the audience could understand, Bagby held the audience spellbound."
-- Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"...a vivid demonstration of what has been lost in the process of becoming modern....Bagby, using a brilliant array of dramatic and rhetorical techniques, made it a dazzling experience. His performances should be recorded and made required listening..."
-- The Washington Post

"Bagby's lusty performance was a revelation. The crowd...became totally engrossed in the vivid narrative. Bagby used silence and pause with telling theatrical effect, and he bit into the chewy Anglo-Saxon words as they were an elocutionist's feast....a personal interpretation of depth, spontaneity and conviction."
-- The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"...he recounts his tale with a shaman's authority....the ring of authenticity is unmistakable."
-- The Vancouver Sun

"...chillingly graphic..."
-- The Milwaukee Sentinel

"It is an eerie thing to hear this ancient Anglo-Saxon poem that sounds so foreign and yet familiar....a fluid mingling of vividly rendered direct speech and narration heightened by plain-song chant and haunting melodies."
-- The Sydney Morning Herald

"So vivid, so explicit in its dramatic gesture and power of representation, that the whole story could be easily understood."
-- The Jerusalem Post

"The performance was riveting -- so powerfully yet subtly drawn that it ought to be captured on video and be made required viewing for all students of English."
-- Historical Performance (NYC)

"What was incontrovertible about Bagby's performance was its ring of truth....Old English has rarely seemed so alive....in Beowulf,one could hardly doubt the numinous presence of Orpheus himself."
-- The Times (London)

"...a thrilling event of an almost shamanistic power."
-- NRC Handelsblad (Rotterdam)