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

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СКАЧАТЬ and annotated by Michael D.C. Drout in Beowulf and the Critics, first published in 2002. Drout dates the two texts, on various grounds, to between August 1932 and 23 October 1935; the first of these dates refers to the composition of a poem by *C.S. Lewis which Tolkien quotes in full. Internal evidence and general prose style clearly mark the work as a series of lectures; and given its subject and presumed terminus post quem, its first text seems likely to have been prepared for the lecture series ‘Beowulf: General Criticism’ which Tolkien was scheduled to give at *Oxford beginning in Michaelmas Term 1933. (At that time he also gave a series entitled ‘The Historical and Legendary Traditions in Beowulf and Other Old English Poems’, concerned, however, with the background of those works rather than their criticism. The manuscript of these lectures, the first page of which is dated at the time of writing ‘October 1933’, is preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives).)

      Tolkien produced the second, expanded manuscript of Beowulf and the Critics presumably for a later iteration of ‘Beowulf: General Criticism’, scheduled for Michaelmas Term 1934 and 1936. For delivery to the British Academy in November 1936, he revised the second manuscript into a more concise and polished form; see comments in Drout, introduction to Beowulf and the Critics as published, and Drout’s ‘Rhetorical Evolution of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ in The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (2006).

      In late 1936 or early 1937 Tolkien sent the text of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, with an appendix and notes, to his friend and fellow Beowulf scholar *R.W. Chambers. On 2 February 1937 Chambers advised him to make no cuts, and to include the appendix (concerning Grendel’s titles, Christian and pagan ideas of praise and judgement as expressed in Beowulf, and particular difficulties arising from lines 175–88 of the poem). On 6 February, apparently in reply to a nervous message by Tolkien, Chambers wrote to reassure him that his lecture held together well, and again that it should be printed in its entirety. After its first publication in July 1937, Tolkien received numerous letters of congratulations from his academic colleagues.

      It may be a measure (if unscientific) of the attention paid to Tolkien’s lecture that in the copy of the 1936 Proceedings of the British Academy shelved in the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library, Oxford – at least, as it was when we wrote the first edition of this book – Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics was read to the point of soiled exhaustion, with marks in pencil and blots of ink, while the rest of the volume was comparatively clean.

      In 2011 Drout published a revised edition of Beowulf and the Critics, in which he not only corrected errors but made changes to take account of developments in Beowulf and Tolkien studies. New additions to the text include a nearly complete identification of the scholars to whom Tolkien alludes in the lecture as ‘the Babel of Voices’, and the notes Tolkien made in preparing the second, longer text.

      CRITICISM

      Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics changed the course of Beowulf studies. *Kenneth Sisam wrote in his study The Structure of Beowulf (1965; corrected 1966) that Tolkien’s lecture ‘brought fresh ideas and has influenced all later writers’ on the poem. ‘Knowing well the detailed problems that occupy critics, he has withdrawn from them to give a general view of Beowulf as poetry, with a fineness of perception and elegance of expression that are rare in this field’ (p. 20). T.A. Shippey has said that ‘two of the qualities that made [the lecture] so influential are its aggression and its humour. In one allegory after another, Tolkien presents the poem as Cinderella taken over by a series of domineering fairy godmothers, as a victim of “the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research,” and as a tower looking out on the sea. … The major achievement of Tolkien’s essay was to insist on the poem’s autonomy and its author’s right to create freely, regardless of critical canons’ (‘Structure and Unity’, in A Beowulf Handbook (1997), pp. 162–3).

      Reviews of the published lecture had little to say against it. R.W. Chambers, for instance, wrote in Modern Language Review 33, no. 2 (April 1938) that ‘towards the study of Beowulf as a work of art, Professor Tolkien has made a contribution of the utmost importance.’ However, ‘instead of weaving them into his discourse’ Tolkien ‘has hidden away all too many of his good things in appendices and notes’ (pp. 272, 273). T.A. Shippey, in a useful brief overview of the critical response to Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, notes that Tolkien’s ‘defence of the poem as something existing in its own right … was seized on eagerly, even gratefully, by generations of critics’ (‘Structure and Unity’, p. 163).

      One of these was his former B.Litt. student Joan Blomfield (*Joan Elizabeth Turville-Petre), who built on his remarks on the structure of Beowulf in an essay for the Review of English Studies (‘The Style and Structure of Beowulf’, 1938). Another was the Swiss scholar Adrien Bonjour, who in his monograph The Digressions in Beowulf (1950) stated unequivocally that he followed Tolkien concerning the general structure of the poem:

      Professor Tolkien’s interpretation seems to us indeed by far the most satisfactory dramatically as well as artistically. It is, at the same time, perfectly objective: it considerably heightens our appreciation of the poem by showing the grand simplicity of its original design, its real perspective, its structural force and permanent human element – and all this on a quite solid basis, all the more solid that it is devoid of the speculative element inherent in so many other tentative explanations. [p. 70]

      The first major criticism of Tolkien’s lecture did not appear until 1952. T.M. Gang, in his ‘Approaches to Beowulf’, Review of English Studies n.s. 3 (1952), disputed Tolkien’s view that

      the dragon-fight symbolizes the tragedy of the human struggle against the forces of evil. … That Grendel, who is maddened by the sound of harps, should represent the outer darkness in all its active malevolence is plausible; but dragons were, after all, the natural guardians of treasures … unpleasant though they were, they were not accomplices of hell. Nor, for that matter, were they “things made by the imagination” for any purpose whatsoever; they were solid enough fact for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle [pp. 7–8]

      Gang argued that Tolkien ‘never exactly claims that the poet’s original audience would have interpreted it as he does’, and that his ‘reconstruction of the Anglo-Saxon view of the world, leaning heavily as it does on the extremely doubtful evidence of Norse poetry (of a later date than Beowulf and suggestive of a very different outlook on life) can hardly be accepted as objective, unbiased, or altogether convincing’ (p. 11). This was answered by Adrien Bonjour, in defence of Tolkien, in ‘Monsters Crouching and Critics Rampant: or The Beowulf Dragon Debated’, PMLA 68 (March 1953). But Gang’s views were echoed by J.C. van Meurs in ‘Beowulf and Literary Criticism’, Neophilologus 39 (1955): he found it ‘difficult to believe that the poem contains as much implicit symbolism as Tolkien ascribes to it’ (p. 118), and worried that Tolkien’s theory was so attractive ‘that it is in danger of being taken as dogmatic truth by present-day Beowulf scholars’ (p. 115).

      A more concerted disagreement was put forth by Kenneth Sisam in The Structure of Beowulf. He took issue with Tolkien’s ‘explanation of the architecture of Beowulf as an artistic balance between the first two-thirds … and the last part’ of the poem, and with ‘his view that the central theme is the battle, hopeless in this world, of man against evil’ (p. 21). According to Sisam,

      if the two parts of the poem are to be solidly bound together by the opposition of youth and age, it is not enough that the hero should be young in the one part and old in the other. The change in his age must be shown to change his ability to fight monsters, since these fights make the main plot. Instead, Beowulf is represented from beginning to end as the scourge of monsters, always seeking them out and destroying them by the shortest СКАЧАТЬ