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

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СКАЧАТЬ on textual problems. As Christopher Tolkien comments in his preface to the 2014 volume, his father, as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, still had years of study of Beowulf ahead of him, and in the course of time made many changes to his translation, often in accord with discussion of textual problems in his lectures about the poem; but when he revised his opinion about a textual point, he did not always alter his translation.

      In the event, Tolkien never brought his translation into a final form. Its existence, however, was well-known; and in view of Tolkien’s ‘reputation and eminence in Old English literary and linguistic scholarship’, as Christopher Tolkien writes, its publication was a matter of importance. And yet there was ‘no obvious way’ to present the text: ‘To alter the translation in order to accommodate a later opinion was out of the question. It would of course have been possible to attach my own explanatory notes, but it seemed very much better to include in this book actual passages from the lectures in which [Tolkien] expounded his views on the textual problems in question’ (Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, p. viii).

      Tolkien’s lectures display, ‘amid the huge library of Beowulf criticism, a very evident individuality of conception and insight’ (p. viii), and the commentary Christopher Tolkien drew from them ‘is and can only be a personal selection from a much larger body of writing, in places disordered and very difficult, and strongly concentrated on the earlier part of the poem’ (p. xi). The lectures from which the commentary was largely derived are concerned with the portion of Beowulf that Oxford English students were required to learn (lines 1–1650). The later part of the commentary, however, was drawn from yet ‘another set of lectures, addressed to the “philologists”, clearly written and lengthy discussions of major problems in the interpretation of the text of Beowulf’ (p. 132). (See further, the subsection ‘Lectures on Beowulf’ in the article *Beowulf.)

      CRITICISM

      Michael Alexander (‘Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary Review: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Long-Lost Translation’, The Guardian, 29 May 2014), describes Tolkien’s effort as ‘prose that sticks as closely as possible to the meaning and clause-order of the original. It has great accuracy and a sense of rhythm. Its style is, like that of the original, archaic, and often has striking inversions of word-order. It has its own spell, though its movement is more crabbed than that of the equally accurate version made by G.N. Garmonsway in 1968.’ The commentary, for its part, ‘shows the depth of Tolkien’s knowledge of the languages and early literatures of north-west Europe’. Alexander praises Christopher Tolkien’s editing and salutes his ‘pietas’ in producing ‘a portrait of a mind’ which ‘possessed a linguistic scholarship and a literary imagination very rarely found together’, but is ‘more interested in Beowulf than in Tolkien’. Before the book appeared, he had heard of the existence of the translation, but had assumed it would be in verse, having been shown an extract of Tolkien’s verse translation by Christopher Tolkien in the early 1960s. Alexander himself translated Beowulf into verse (1973, rev. 2001), and in an introductory note to his 1966 collection The Earliest English Poems wrote (p. 22): ‘I have never seen the point of translating verse into anything but verse.’

      Marc Hudson, also a translator of Beowulf (1990), wrote in the Sewanee Review (‘Of Beowulf: A Commentary and a Few More Leaves of Tolkien’s Tree’, Winter 2016) was disappointed with Tolkien’s work. ‘In truth, Tolkien’s translation is a faithful and scholarly reading of the poem. It has dignity, if not grace, and passages of some beauty’ (p. 158). But he finds its prose rhythms often ‘ungainly, not at all resembling “the common and compact prose patterns in ordinary language”’ as Christopher Tolkien has described them, and he criticizes ‘Tolkien’s habitual use of an antiquated diction’ although this approach still had currency when Tolkien made his translation c. 1926. ‘Even a casual perusal of his scholarly writing reveals that he is quite capable of writing vigorous modern prose. So we may conjecture that Tolkien admired Beowulf too much and cared too keenly about his reading of individual passages to veer very far from a strict word-by-word translation. Tolkien’s translation is a principled effort: its limitations, even its aforesaid failures, were possibly intended’ (p. 159). Hudson finds Tolkien’s commentary on Beowulf to be a greater treasure, derived ‘from his tremendous erudition – his knowledge of medieval Germanic literatures and languages, as well as of the cultures that gave rise to them – and from his mythopoeic imagination’ (p. 163). Although it has its eccentricities, the commentary is ‘often illuminating’ and ‘essential reading for all serious students of the poem, whether they are just entering the anterooms of Anglo Saxon literature or are emeriti professors seeking fresh insights into the poem and its daunting darknesses’ (p. 163). Hudson praises Sellic Spell as ‘a strong creative effort to imagine the wonder tale, the myth which was the matrix, as Tolkien conceived it, to which the Beowulf poet added the historical matter of the poem’, but describes The Lay of Beowulf as ‘rather awkward rhythmic contraptions, occasionally redeemed by memorable imagery, and lurking in the homely borderlands of the literary ballad’ (p. 164).

      Jeremy Noel-Tod, writing in the Telegraph (‘Beowulf, Translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, Review’, 20 May 2014), was also disappointed, in the first instance because the translation is in prose rather than verse, ‘and long-winded prose at that. This literal rendering is faithful to the formulaic circumlocutions, inversions and amplifications of Old English poetry. … Moments of comparable potency flash out from Tolkien’s prose’, however, ‘especially during the grand guignol fights with three monsters that were at the heart of his enthusiasm for the poem’. Noel-Tod is by no means unique among reviewers of the book in preferring, or at least prominently mentioning, the popular 1999 verse translation by poet Seamus Heaney, which is seen as more contemporary (to the present day) and less academic.

      Kevin Kiernan, a retired professor of English at the University of Kentucky, argues on the website The Conversation that

      the lofty metre of Beowulf is lost even in admirable poetic versions like Seamus Heaney’s, which is recognised as a new poem. … Prose translations such as Tolkien’s claim to be more ‘faithful’, but this fidelity refers to the literal translation of poetry, which captures only the facts of the story in unavoidably stodgy prose, struggling to sort out the word order while losing the grandeur of the verse.

      Because Tolkien himself denigrated his translation (in his April 1926 letter to Kenneth Sisam, where he wrote that it was complete but not to his liking), Kiernan holds that it should not have been published. ‘Tolkien’s own creative legacy is secure. It will be a travesty if his Beowulf legacy turns out to be a translation he was the first to disparage’ (‘Publishing Tolkien’s Beowulf Translation Does Him a Disservice’, 29 May 2014).

      In the New Statesman (‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf: One Man’s Passion for the Threshold between Myth and Reality’, 29 May 2014) John Garth comments that Tolkien, ‘with too many projects to fit in one lifespan, would have needed a hard push, from a publisher and perhaps from a strong-armed friend such as C.S. Lewis, to finalise and publish his prose translation. The version that survives, though, is far from prosaic. He cannot conceal the strangeness of the underlying idiom but his cadence is commanding and his language evocative. …’ Garth feels, however, that although ‘students may prefer Tolkien for accuracy [of the text] and fans will snap his book up … it won’t convert admirers of Heaney’s poetic latitude’.

      To date the most substantial response to Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary is the review by Michael D.C. Drout published in Tolkien Studies 12 (2015). Another Anglo-Saxonist, Drout has made a study of Tolkien’s papers related to Beowulf, at one time preparatory to a planned edition of both the verse and prose translations. The ‘volume not only gives us important insights into Tolkien’s thought’, he writes, ‘but also a rather significant contribution to Beowulf studies despite being published nearly three-quarters of a century after it was written’ (p. 149); СКАЧАТЬ