The monsters and the critics

But Tolkien was sceptical of converting this Old English poem into modern English. In a 1940 essay, On Translating Beowulf, he wrote that turning Beowulf into “plain prose” could be an “abuse”.

He did it anyway. Tolkien completed a prose translation in 1926, while declaring it was “hardly to my liking”. Given his reputation as a perfectionist and his ideas about Beowulf and translation, his dissatisfaction is not surprising. Tolkien, then 34, filed his Beowulf away.

Now, 88 years after its making, this abandoned translation is being published this week as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary. From its first word —“Lo!” — to the death of the dragon and Beowulf and the lighting of the funeral pyre, described as “a roaring flame ringed with weeping”, Tolkien’s translation of the poem comprises some 90 pages of the book. Selections from his notes about Beowulf, and a Beowulf-inspired story and poem, take up 320 pages more.

Advance buzz and some grumbling have been building since March, when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Tolkien’s American publisher, announced that this Beowulf was coming. In a statement, Tolkien’s son Christopher, 89, the editor of the translation, said, “He returned to it later to make hasty corrections, but seems never to have considered its publication.”

Since Tolkien’s death in 1973, Christopher Tolkien has edited and published many of his father’s unfinished works. Why the long delay for Beowulf? Wayne G Hammond, an author of the The J R R Tolkien Companion and Guide, said that Christopher Tolkien “naturally concentrated” on first publishing long-promised books, like The Silmarillion and that “Tolkien’s own writings, especially his fiction, presumably took priority”.

Not all Tolkien scholars know Beowulf, but all Beowulf scholars know of Tolkien, whose influential 1936 paper Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics has been credited with restoring the poem’s value as a work of art.

For this edition, Christopher Tolkien combined and edited three manuscripts of his father’s translation. Selections from Tolkien’s 1930s classroom lectures on Beowulf become the poem’s commentary. Notes by Christopher show the discrepancies between the versions. He recalls in the notes that his father sang The Lay of Beowulf, a poem included in the new book, to him when he was young.

That Beowulf influenced Tolkien is not news. From King Hrothgar’s mead-hall Heorot to a thief who steals a golden cup from a dragon, elements of Beowulf are echoed throughout Tolkien’s work. “Knowledge of his interest in and love for Beowulf is essential to understanding The Lord of the Rings,” said Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, a professor at the University of Maryland.

For Tolkien fans, the new volume’s biggest reward may be the previously unpublished story, Sellic Spell.

Still, some say that Tolkien would have protested his translation being published at all. “If Tolkien knew that was going to happen, he would have invented the shredder,” said the Beowulf authority Kevin Kiernan, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Kentucky.

By publishing this Beowulf, his heirs and publisher may be seeking to further secure his literary and scholarly reputation. As for Tolkien, displeased with his Beowulf, he would have surely wanted more time to edit, more time to revise. But he had other things to do.

“It’s like Gandalf says, ‘All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us’,” Kiernan said. “He decided he didn’t want to waste it on a translation. He worked on The Hobbit and The Lord the Rings instead.”
NYT