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

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СКАЧАТЬ view ‘the monsters Beowulf kills are inevitably evil and hostile because a reputation for heroism is not made by killing creatures that are believed to be harmless or beneficent – sheep for instance.’ The idea ‘that Beowulf was defeated, that “within Time the monsters would win”’ must be read into the text. ‘There is no word of his defeat in the poem … according to the poet, the Dragon Fight was “his last victory” (2710). On the other hand, all the monsters are utterly defeated’ (p. 25).

      George Clark in his Beowulf (1990), while agreeing with certain aspects of Tolkien’s lecture and acknowledging its significance in the history of Beowulf studies, found fault with it for having marginalized Grendel’s mother and trivialized the dragon ‘into an emblem of malice, blaming the monster for being too symbolic, for not being “dragon enough,” then graciously relenting with the comment “But for Beowulf, the poem, that is as it should be.” But it is not so’ (p. 10). He also rejected Tolkien’s view of the Beowulf-poet, in part because ‘the membrane separating Tolkien’s critical and creative faculties was permeable in both directions’ (p. 12) – that is, in Clark’s opinion, Tolkien the writer of fiction influenced Tolkien the scholar: ‘we have no evidence for an Anglo-Saxon poet like Tolkien’s, indeed like Tolkien himself, a nostalgic re-creator of lost worlds, of pastiche’ (p. 16). In response, one could argue that a scholar who is also a storyteller may have an advantage in understanding the work of a ‘mighty predecessor and kindred spirit’, to quote T.A. Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth (2nd edn. 1992). No one, Shippey wrote, ‘had understood Beowulf but Tolkien. The work had always been something personal, even freakish, and it took someone with the same instincts to explain it. Sympathy furthermore depended on being a descendant, on living in the same country and beneath the same sky, on speaking the same language …’ (p. 44).

      Although Clark would place ‘Tolkien’s critical paradigm’ firmly among ‘the literary, moral, and political convictions’ of the period following the First World War (p. 9), the influence of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics is still to be felt in Beowulf studies. Its lively prose remains effective despite the passage of decades – untouched by the obfuscation that infects so much writing on literary subjects today. Its advanced age, however, seems to have led R.D. Fulk, editor of the anthology Interpretations of Beowulf (1991), to apologize for including Tolkien’s lecture in that book. ‘Any editor worth his salt’, he says in a preface,

      and with an adequate understanding of the changing critical winds in the profession, would no doubt remark … that Tolkien’s lecture … has become the object of mindless veneration, is over-anthologized, hopelessly retrograde, and much too long, and so can safely be set aside now to make way for more important matters. … No one denies the historical importance of this lecture as the first sustained effort at viewing the poem on its own terms, according to aesthetic guidelines discoverable in the work itself, thus opening the way to the formalist principles that played such a vital role in the subsequent development of Beowulf scholarship. But Tolkien’s study is not just a pilgrims’ stop on the road to holier shrines: his explanation of the poem’s larger structure, though frequently disputed, has never been bettered, and the methodology inherent in his practice of basing claims about the macrostructural level on patterns everyone discerns in the microstructure remains a model for emulation. His view of the poet as an artist of an antiquarian bent remains enormously influential (and a major obstacle to dating the poem); and although the issue of the appropriateness of the monsters is not as pressing as it was in 1936, it is not superfluous in the context of some subsequent criticism. … [pp. xi–xii]

      Peter S. Baker, editor of Beowulf: Basic Readings (1995), more directly counts Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics among those works ‘that have long been part of the standard reading list for a Beowulf course’ which ‘continue to be influential and are still worth the student’s attention’ (p. xi).

      Significant comment on the lecture has also been made in the ‘Scholars Forum’ of The Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza by Michael D.C. Drout (‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics: The Brilliant Essay that Broke Beowulf Studies’, 25 April 2010) and Tom Shippey (‘Tolkien’s Two Views of Beowulf: One Hailed, One Ignored. But Did We Get This Right?’ 25 July 2010). Shippey repeats the usual praise of Tolkien’s lecture as one which ‘altered the current of Beowulf scholarship, which is only slowly starting to look for new channels’. Tolkien’s success, he argues, was partly due to his rhetorical skill: ‘he could make a shaky case look rock-solid, and several times did, and the results have not always been totally fortunate. … He wanted people to see the poem as a whole, as an integrated and purposeful work by a single poet who had a very good idea of what he was doing. … Along with that, he wanted to argue for the right to write fantasy, and in that mode to create something valuable and autonomous. And in order to make that case, he was obliged to argue down the powerfully-expressed opinions’ of critics such as R.W. Chambers and W.P. Ker. After the Second World War ‘a whole industry grew up of books and essays which demonstrated that Beowulf was a work of great “organic unity” … and that all the many bits which had been taken as “digressions” or insertions actually played an important part in the poet’s conception. … Seeing the poem as a fantasy perhaps did not catch on quite so much.’

      Drout on his part observed that Tolkien attacked the view ‘that Beowulf is most valuable not as literature, but as documentation about the history and culture of the pre-literate Germanic world’, a view which gave study of the work validity despite ‘the establishment view that Beowulf was ill-shaped and inferior’. Instead, Tolkien argued that ‘critics could justify their studying Beowulf on aesthetic grounds alone and that they did not need the additional buttressing of historical interest’. He himself did not say or think ‘that the historical and quasi-historical thoughts mentioned in Beowulf were unimportant. Nevertheless subsequent critics, seeing that they were free to discuss the poem as literature only, began to abandon historical scholarship that had figured so significantly in Beowulf studies.’ Shippey agrees, stating that ‘something got lost, which I think Tolkien would have regretted. … The effect of what Tolkien wrote has been to terminate interest in Beowulf as a guide to history.’ Yet Beowulf also contains allusions to ‘lost tales’, hints of unexplained actions, elements Tolkien introduced into his own writings. More significantly, his *Finn and Hengest (1982) makes it clear that Tolkien thought that the Old English Finnsburg Fragment and the account in Beowulf of ‘the fight at Finnsburg’ refer to an actual event. Both Drout and Shippey point out that more recent archaeological discoveries of a series of great halls in the area which best fits the site for Heorot indicated in the poem suggest that Beowulf does preserve some true historical memories.

      Tolkien had written in his lecture that he accepted ‘without argument throughout the attribution of Beowulf to the “age of Bede” – one of the firmer conclusions of a department of research most clearly serviceable to criticism: inquiry into the probable date of the effective composition of the poem as we have it’ (The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 20). But this, Shippey comments, came to be rejected, ‘often savagely … by a majority of Anglo-Saxonists, their view entrenched in a thoroughly one-sided “conference” (it was really more of a party rally)’, the conference on the dating of Beowulf held in Toronto in 1980, and expressed in The Dating of Beowulf, edited by Colin Chase (1981). From that point scholars began to write of a later date for Beowulf (with its poet imitating an earlier style, an idea enabled by Tolkien’s portrayal of him as an antiquarian), or that the poem was in effect undateable. Shippey notes, however, that ‘the balance is now beginning to turn again’ to the earlier date championed by Tolkien, ‘on grounds of metrical linguistics, palaeography, and onomastics’.

      The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment, edited by Leonard Neidorf (2014), revisits this issue with numerous references to Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (but not entered in the index). Its essays by Tom Shippey, ‘Names in Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon England’, and by Michael D.C. СКАЧАТЬ