The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull

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      the translation presents few surprises to the reader who already knows Beowulf in Old English. Tolkien does not incorporate much of his own interpretation but instead presents what would be the consensus view of the 1920s through 1940s on most of the cruces and ambiguities. That the translation contains little that most scholars (both contemporary and of Tolkien’s day) would find unusual is, to me, further evidence that the text was intended to give students a basic understanding of the poem, as an ‘aid to study’ that would not put them very far out of the mainstream of Beowulf criticism. [pp. 156–7]

      Drout finds Tolkien’s translation the equal of any previous translation of Beowulf into prose (‘not a particularly high standard’), accurate, and with ‘some of the high formality and serious tone that Beowulf has in Old English’. But he doubts that it will replace the verse translation by Seamus Heaney ‘as the text most introductory students encounter’ (p. 157).

      See also the subsection ‘Criticism’ in the article *Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell.

      INFLUENCE ON TOLKIEN’S WORKS

      Beowulf was an important influence on Tolkien’s own poetry and prose fiction. Probably at the end of 1922 he wrote the poem Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden, later revised as *The Hoard, which was inspired by line 3052 in Beowulf, ‘the gold of men long ago enmeshed in enchantment’. His poem *The Fall of Arthur is in the Beowulf metre. In *The Hobbit Bilbo’s theft of a cup from Smaug’s hoard in Chapter 12 is indebted to a similar episode in the final part of Beowulf, which likewise provokes a dragon’s rampage. In February 1938, in reply to a query about his sources for The Hobbit, Tolkien wrote that Beowulf was among the most valued, ‘though it was not consciously present to the mind in the process of writing, in which the episode of the theft [of a cup] arose naturally (and almost inevitably) from the circumstances. It is difficult to think of any other way of conducting the story at that point. I fancy the author of Beowulf would say much the same’ (letter to The Observer, published 20 February 1938, Letters, p. 31). Critics such as Jane Chance (Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England, 1979; 2nd edn. 2001) have suggested other parallels between The Hobbit and Beowulf, but the major work in this respect is Beowulf and The Hobbit: Elegy into Fantasy in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creative Technique by Bonniejean Christensen (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 1969; later reductions in article form).

      Beowulf is also often seen as an influence on *The Lord of the Rings, especially in regard to the men and culture of Rohan and in the heroism of the hobbits. For example, Tolkien acknowledged that there was probably a connection between the wasting away of Beowulf’s sword, with which he cut off Grendel’s head and killed Grendel’s mother, and both the melting of the Witchking’s knife in Book I, Chapter 12 of The Lord of the Rings and the withering of Merry’s sword in Book V, Chapter 6; and Christopher Tolkien has noted the distinct echo of the passages in Beowulf in which Beowulf and his men are accosted by the watchman on the coast of Denmark, and the challenge made to Aragorn and his companions by the doorward of Edoras in Book III, Chapter 6 (a text written in draft in Old English). On The Lord of the Rings and Beowulf, see further, Reader’s Companion, and on the subject of Beowulf and Rohan, see Clive Tolley, ‘And the Word Was Made Flesh’, Mallorn 32 (September 1995). Tolley also comments on Tolkien and Beowulf in ‘Tolkien and the Unfinished’, in Scholarship and Fantasy: Proceedings of The Tolkien Phenomenon, May 1992, Turku, Finland, ed. K.J. Battarbee (1993), noting, for example, that Unferth in Beowulf has a counterpart in Edoras, in the person of Gríma Wormtongue.

      Beowulf was also an acknowledged source for the episode concerning King Sheave (Scyld Scefing) in *The Lost Road. ‘I have been getting a lot of new ideas about Prehistory lately (via Beowulf and other sources of which I may have written)’, Tolkien wrote to Christopher, ‘and want to work them into the long shelved time-travel story I began’ (18 December 1944, Letters, p. 105).

      In September 1927 Tolkien painted in The Book of Ishness (*Art) a coiled dragon, inscribed ‘hrinȝboȝa heorte ȝefysed’ (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 48). These words are derived from a passage in Beowulf, ‘ða wæs hrinȝboȝan heorte ȝefysed / saecce tó séceanne’ (‘now was the heart of the coiling beast stirred to come out to fight’). In May 1928, also in The Book of Ishness, Tolkien drew an untitled watercolour sketch of a warrior with spear and shield facing a fire-breathing dragon (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 49); on 1 January 1938 he used this picture in a slide lecture at the University Museum, Oxford to illustrate how the king and his attendant fought the dragon at the end of Beowulf. In July 1928 Tolkien drew two pictures of Grendel’s mere, each inscribed ‘wudu wyrtum fæst’ (‘wood clinging by its roots’; Artist and Illustrator, figs. 50, 51).

      By the early 1930s Tolkien composed two short poems, or two versions of the same poem, concerned with Beowulf and Grendel, or with Beowulf, Grendel, and Grendel’s mother. These were published in 2014 as *The Lay of Beowulf in Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell.

      In the early 1940s Tolkien wrote a story, *Sellic Spell, as an attempt to reconstruct the Anglo-Saxon tale that lies behind the folk- or fairy-tale element in Beowulf (here ‘Beewolf’). In 1945 Tolkien’s friend *Gwyn Jones, Professor of English at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, read Sellic Spell and remarked that it should be prescribed for all university students of Beowulf.

      Books and essays about Beowulf are legion. Among these, the present authors have found the following particularly helpful: *R.W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn (3rd edn. with a supplement by C.L. Wrenn, 1959); Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment, ed. C.L. Wrenn, rev. W.F. Bolton (1973); Beowulf by T.A. Shippey (1978); Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Anthology, ed. R.D. Fulk (1991); A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (1997); A Critical Companion to Beowulf by Andy Orchard (2003); and The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment, ed. Leonard Neidorf (2014). Wrenn’s preface to his Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment credits Tolkien, together with R.W. Chambers, with ‘what is valuable in my approach to Beowulf’ (p. 5). See also references cited in the entry *Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

      Michael D.C. Drout describes the manuscripts of Tolkien’s translations of and commentaries on Beowulf in the Bodleian Library in Tolkien Studies 12 (2015), pp. 150–1.

Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell. Translation by J.R.R. Tolkien of *Beowulf and related material, edited with notes and commentary by *Christopher Tolkien, first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins, London, and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, in May 2014.

      The volume contains Tolkien’s Modern English prose translation of Beowulf, with commentary drawn from his *Oxford lectures on Beowulf; *Sellic Spell, an adaptation of Beowulf in the form of a folk-tale; and two versions of a short poem, *The Lay of Beowulf. Three illustrations by Tolkien related to Beowulf are reproduced on the dust-jacket, and a fourth on the half-title.

      The page breaks and line numbering in the American edition from p. 21 to p. 105 differ from those in the British edition, and thus are out of sync with references in the notes and commentary.

      HISTORY

      Tolkien had translated the entirety of Beowulf into Modern English prose by ?26 April 1926, when he wrote of it to *Kenneth Sisam of Oxford University Press (*Publishers). (See further, the subsection ‘Translations by Tolkien’ in the article *Beowulf.) But it was СКАЧАТЬ