Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary Paperback – August 4, 2015

This is a ‘must have’ for the Beowulf reader, principally because of the 300+ pp. of textual commentary assembled by Tolkien’s son from Tolkien’s notes. It is a prose translation, however; if you want to read a verse translation, turn to Seamus Heaney’s, which is quite good.A number of things must be kept in mind. First, Old English (like Latin) is a heavily-inflected language, with the grammatical status of words formed by those words’ endings. Thus, when you read an OE text you play ‘hunt the verb’ because word order is not important in the way that it is in modern English. Second, this is an epic poem and it is a very sophisticated one. At first glance the original manuscript looks like a prose text. One of the first discoveries was that not only was it in verse, but in verse consisting of half lines, the second half of the line often being a kenning, i.e. a phrase in apposition to a previous noun. For example, the scop reciting the poem orally and/or to musical accompaniment might be discussing the sea and then follow it with a kenning for the sea, viz. the ‘swan road’ or ‘whale road’. There is lovely use of alliteration as well. Bottom line: this is a beautiful poem written in a more complex language than modern English. Hence, prose translations may always seem a little clunky.The compensation here is that Tolkien is one of the great masters of Old English as well as the author of the most significant article ever written on Beowulf. This translation may not sing but one can be assured of its accuracy.Another advantage of a prose translation is that there is no temptation to linger over particularly stunning lines. One just reads right through and the result is that you gain a greater sense of the architectonics of the poem. The encounters with Grendel and Grendel’s mother are only half of the poem and in some ways less important than the a priori perceptions of the poem (from popular culture) would suggest. The encounter with the dragon is far more important philosophically and the swimming match with Breca is given sufficient length to suggest its important role in the larger narrative.Bottom line: the serious student of Beowulf will always want to begin with Klaeber’s edition (1922, but now in its fourth edition) and supplement it with multiple other materials, of which Tolkien’s is an important one.

Had J.R.R. Tolkien never written The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, or The Silmarillion his fame today would rest on his long career at Oxford University as professor of Anglo-Saxon. There he did pioneering work in philology, but his greatest renown would come from his life long labor of love: studying the great poem Beowulf. Much of Tolkien's work on Beowulf, especially his revolutionary essay "The Monsters and the Critics," has been widely available for many years. Now Christopher Tolkien, serving as his father's literary executor, has give us another treasure: J.R.R. Tolkien's own prose translation of Beowulf.Christopher Tolkien states in his Preface that the translation was completed by 1926, when his father was 34 and still in the early years of his career. Over the next twenty years Tolkien continued to study and reflect on Beowulf, writing essays and giving lectures and classes. In preparing Tolkien's translation for publication his son had to choose between several different manuscripts and then deal with the truly arduous task of selecting from a vast body of work those notes and commentaries which would be most illuminating. The result is an amazing almost line by line analysis of the translation. As yet I've only had time to dip in here and there, but wherever I've looked I've found some fascinating insights and new information, such as that "Hwaet", the famous first word of Beowulf which Tolkien translated as "Lo!" is an anacrusis or "striking up" that derived from minstrels, or that Beowulf's "ice-bears" could not have been polar bears since that species was not known in Europe until much later.If this edition contained only Tolkien's translation with his son's notes and commentary that alone would make it worthwhile, but it also includes another gem, Tolkien's story "Sellic Spell" in both modern English and Old English. Tolkien recognized that there must have been an original Anglo-Saxon tale that was a source for the poem Beowulf. "Sellic Spell" is an attempt (or attempts, as in his customary fashion Tolkien wrote several versions) to reconstruct that tale. So we have a tale taht begins "Once upon a time . . ." that tells the tale of a foundling child called Beewolf, his adventures with his companions Handshoe and Ashwood, and the monsters Grinder and his dam. It's an intriguing and beautiful tale which I've not yet had time to savor in full, but I already know it's one to which I will return many times. Finally, the book concludes with two poems, or two versions of the same poem "The Lay of Beowulf," which Tolkien noted were intended to be sung. They are short but very vivid, and it isn't surprising that Christopher Tolkien notes that he remembers his father singing one to him when he was a small boy in the early 1930s.While this volume will never have the readership enjoyed by J.R.R. Tolkien's stories of Middle-earth, it makes a wonderful feast for those who,like me, were introduced to Beowulf and other treasures of Old English by him. Nor will those who pick up Beowulf seeking echoes of Middle-earth be disappointed, for there is much here to remind them of its denizens.