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

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СКАЧАТЬ both content and style, Tolkien’s is the equal of any previous prose translation (though this is in itself, sadly, not a particularly high standard). It is accurate and transmits some of the high formality and serious tone that Beowulf has in Old English. I doubt, however, that it will replace Seamus Heaney’s poetic translation of Beowulf as the text most introductory students encounter’ (p. 157).

      Like other reviewers, Drout finds Tolkien’s commentary on Beowulf ‘in many ways more interesting than the translation itself, especially because it is at times quite far from the consensus mainstream. Marked by great originality, the commentary regularly displays the signal quality of Tolkien’s scholarship: his ability to combine the rigor and knowledge of a hard-core philologist with the creativity and sensibility of a literary creator’ (p. 157). Scholars of Beowulf, he says,

      should read the commentary carefully, if for no other reason than for the pleasure of watching one of the greatest philologists of the 20th century plying his trade. Many of Tolkien’s suggestions for individual emendations are both innovative and convincing, with detailed philological arguments supporting insightful readings of the text. His general view of the artistic and aesthetic qualities of Beowulf in the commentaries is consistent with his large-scale interpretation of the poem in ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ and is therefore both familiar and well within the current critical consensus. [pp. 158–9]

      Tolkien’s ‘interpretation of the history, composition, and sources of the poem’, however, are ‘novel and idiosyncratic’ (p. 159). Drout notes in particular his ‘heretical’ view, ‘in today’s critical climate’ (p. 160), that Beowulf reflects the work of both its original author (a monk in Mercia, living long after paganism had disappeared from England) and a much later poet (perhaps Cynewulf), in a time of pagans, who wished to show that Christianity was the path to eternal life.

      See further, Mark Atherton, ‘“Seeing a Picture before Us”: Tolkien’s Commentary in His Translation of Beowulf’, Mallorn 55 (Winter 2014), pp. 21–2.

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. The Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture for 1936, delivered by Tolkien to the British Academy in London on 25 November 1936, and to a meeting of the Manchester Medieval Society on 9 December 1936. It was first published in July 1937 as a separate booklet by Humphrey Milford, London, and in December 1937 within the annual volume of the Proceedings of the British Academy. See further, Descriptive Bibliography A2. It has been reprinted often; citations here are to its appearance in *The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (1983), pp. 5–48.

      SYNOPSIS

      Tolkien argues that critics of Beowulf to 1936 had viewed it ‘as a quarry of fact and fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art’ (p. 5). It had not been considered as a poem, though it is ‘in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite overshadows the historical content’ (p. 7). Nor have critics appreciated the importance to the poem of the monsters that Beowulf defeats: Grendel and the dragon (Tolkien does not include Grendel’s mother). Quoting, inter alia, an influential statement by W.P. Ker that Beowulf has a ‘radical defect, a disproportion that puts the irrelevances [the monsters] in the centre and the serious things [allusions to history and other stories] on the outer edges’ (pp. 10–11), Tolkien remarks that while critics have praised the detail, tone, style, and total effect of Beowulf, they have felt that the talent of the Beowulf-poet ‘has all been squandered on an unprofitable theme: as if Milton had recounted the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in noble verse’ (p. 13). ‘The high tone, the sense of dignity, alone is evidence in Beowulf of the presence of a mind lofty and thoughtful’, he writes.

      It is, one would have said, improbable that such a man would write more than three thousand lines (wrought to a high finish) on matter that is really not worth serious attention. … Or that he should in the selection of his material, in the choice of what to put forward, what to keep subordinate ‘upon the outer edges’, have shown a puerile simplicity much below the level of the characters he himself draws in his own poem. [pp. 13–14]

      The great critics of Beowulf have thought otherwise partly because they have been more concerned with ‘research in comparative folk-lore, the objects of which are primarily historical or scientific’, and because the allusions contained in Beowulf ‘have attracted curiosity (antiquarian rather than critical) to their elucidation; and this needs so much study and research that attention has been diverted from the poem as a whole, and from the function of the allusions, as shaped and placed, in the poetic economy of Beowulf as it is’ (pp. 14–15). Also there is ‘a real question of taste … a judgement that the heroic or tragic story on a strictly human plane is by nature superior’ (p. 15); but one must consider the ancient taste of the audience of the poem as well as the modern taste of its critics.

      Beowulf, Tolkien claims, helps us to esteem ‘the old heroes: men caught in the chains of circumstance or of their own character, torn between duties equally sacred, dying with their backs to the wall’ (p. 17). Its poet has devoted his whole work to the theme of ‘defeat inevitable yet unacknowledged … and has drawn the struggle in different proportions, so that we may see man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time’ (p. 18). The monsters of the poem are essential to this, ‘fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem’ (p. 19). They are at a point of fusion between the Heroic Age and Christendom, ‘adversaries of God’ but still ‘mortal denizens of the material world, in it and of it’ (p. 20). They are also connected to the theory of courage, for which Tolkien turns to ‘the tradition of pagan imagination as it survived in Icelandic’, in which men are allied with the Northern gods, able to share in the resistance to Chaos and Unreason, though defeat is inevitable. ‘At least in this vision of the final defeat of the humane (and of the divine made in its image), and in the essential hostility of the gods and heroes on the one hand and the monsters on the other, we may suppose that pagan English and Norse imagination agreed’ (p. 21). In Beowulf both the specifically Christian and the old gods were suppressed, but ‘the heroic figures, the men of old … remained and still fought on until defeat. For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come. A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world. The monsters remained the enemies of mankind, the infantry of the old war, and became inevitably the enemies of the one God …’ (p. 22).

      Tolkien concludes that Beowulf is ‘a poem by a learned man writing of old times, who looking back on the heroism and sorrow feels in them something permanent and something symbolical’ (p. 26), a learned ‘Englishman of the seventh or eighth centuries’ (p. 27). ‘It is essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death’ (p. 28). Tolkien analyzes and praises its structure and the harmony of this with its elements, language, metre, and theme. ‘We have … in Beowulf a method and structure that within the limits of the verse-kind approaches rather to sculpture or painting. It is a composition not a tune’ (p. 30).

      HISTORY

      The Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture is given biennially. Endowed in 1924, it deals with ‘Old English or Early English Language and Literature, or a philological subject connected with the history of English, more particularly during the early periods of the language, or cognate subjects, or some textual study and interpretation’. The subject is left entirely to the chosen scholar, who is nominated by a specialist committee of fellows of the British Academy, and is sent an invitation to deliver the lecture at least two years in advance of the event. Tolkien therefore would have received an invitation from the British Academy c. 1934.

      He derived Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics from a longer work, originally entitled Beowulf СКАЧАТЬ