Tolkien's Beowulf

[Earniel]

I have now read Tolkien's Beowulf and I have to say, for those with an interest in the poem, it's a real treat indeed.

Tolkien goes for a prose translation, rather than a poetic one, but I think this one will be much more excessible for laymen like me with an interest for, but not a great understanding of Anglo-Saxon literature.

But there is far more than just the translation. The commentary is what makes this book worth it, IMO. There were a lot of angles (heehee) Tolkien covers, and not just the linguistic ones. He delves into the historic relationships between peoples behind the poem that help picture the scene more clearly, customs are talked about and the way he highlights the significance of certain scenes (some of which totally escaped me on just reading the translation) is enlightening.

I did learn a lot. My understanding of Beowulf has grown. (Heck, I even learned the orgin of your username, Alcuin!)

Even the supposedly 'pedantically deprecative' part on the translation of 'whale road' is enlightening and Tolkien makes a great case for the way he translates the original anglo-saxon. And you can almost hear the man grumbling "If the Beowulf author had wanted to write whale-road, he would have used 'hwælwey'!"

Incidentally, the Haeney translation does use 'whale-road' but the Crossly-Holland translation prefers 'whale-way'. Philogists! (For those interested -and because I know the translation of Beowulf's first word 'Hwæt' has often been a sparring point for Beowulf-experts- even this is translated by all three differently. Tolkien uses, 'Lo!'. Crossly-Holland goes for 'So.' and Haeney uses the more traditional 'Listen!'.) Tsssk.

You can kind of hear Tolkien through the text. When he discusses the possibility of a christian rewriting of a specific scene, he himself a Christian, clearly shows his displeasure about the modern public being potentially robbed of an original part of the text to make place for the later christian homily. Of the suspected writer Tolkien even says:

Whatever we may think of his taste -I think it, as exhibited in his signed poems, bad at worst and poor at best-[...]

If his lectures were anything like this...

Sellic Spell is short and but it's interesting as it concentrates on a tiny apparent inaccuracy in the orginal text (was Beowulf the first to attack Grendel, or where there other warriors that fought the creature on the same night before and lost before Beowulf stepped up?). It is a little more reliant on fairytale tropes as we know it. (Magical gloves to move rocks, things in threes, etc...) Couldn't IMO have been published anywhere but in this book so it's understandable why it remained unpublished until now.

I did enjoy the added Lay of Beowulf, which is a shortened version of the Beowulf poem by Tolkien in the meter of The Lady of Shalot (it probably has a proper term, but alas, I'm a poetry-neandertal). I thought it packed a punch.