To be fair though, Beowulf in its original form would be incomprehensible even to well read native English speakers. Old English and Modern English are so different that they're no longer mutually intelligible even. Same goes for a lot of languages if you compare them to themselves a millennium apart. Or if their common ancestor was milennia ago.
E.g Icelandic and Faroese aren't really mutually intelligible with Norwegian today, despite both being evolved directly from Old Norwegian, because both places were originally settled by Norwegian vikings.
Shakepeare is essentially just very old school, yet still Modern English. This still feels within the realm of understanding of current day native speakers equipped with a good dictionary.
I was raised with the KJV and Shakespeare. To me, that language is definitely "modern english"; it doesn't need translating, any more than Scouse needs translating.
I have a completely different relationship with Chaucer. But it's like reading a foreign language that I know, but not idiomatically; I can't be sure whether X is supposed to be sarcastic, or Y is meant to be as funny as it seems.
Beowulf is some thing else again. That definitely seems to me like a foreign language.
I suspect actual spoken Anglo-Saxon (as by the common people, not the nobility) would probably more easily understood by a modern Dutch, Frisian, or Low German speaker than by a modern English speaker.
Our language has been heavily heavily influenced in the interim first by Old Norse/Danish and then (a huge amount) by Norman French.
I actually have an easier time with Anglo-Saxon than Chaucer, personally. Middle English has bizarre inconsistent orthography, and is full of French loans. While written Anglo-Saxon is pretty consistent and some of the vocabulary and grammar makes sense to me as someone who studied German a bit. Old English is a really beautiful language.
But in general what we have in written records is what was written by the literate elites, not regular folk. So it's really hard to say what it would be like to be dropped into the villages of 15th century England.
E.g Icelandic and Faroese aren't really mutually intelligible with Norwegian today, despite both being evolved directly from Old Norwegian, because both places were originally settled by Norwegian vikings.
Shakepeare is essentially just very old school, yet still Modern English. This still feels within the realm of understanding of current day native speakers equipped with a good dictionary.