Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary

As one who wrote the Tolkien Estate in the past requesting that they publish Tolkien's Beowulf translation, I was overjoyed when this book was announced a few months back. And I wasn't disappointed, either. As with many, it is largely due to Tolkien that I gained an interest in Anglo-Saxons, their language and their literature. I first read Seamus Heaney's translation, which I loved at first, but gradually came to appreciate considerably less over time. The more I learned about Anglo-Saxon, the more I realized that Heaney's "translation" was more of a retelling than an accurate representation of the original poem's content. It became funny to me that Heaney's edition contained side-by-side Anglo-Saxon text - a somewhat damning choice, if you ask me, because it's an in-book proof of Heaney's straying away from the meaning of the original poem. Tolkien's translation came to the rescue here. Although the translation is in prose, which has agitated some reviewers, I find that the translation still holds true to the original manuscript very well. Tolkien's prose is so good (as readers of LOTR and the Silmarillion can attest) that one ought to see past the abandonment of scop verse and be grateful that Tolkien translated Beowulf in the first place; the result is a beautiful piece of writing, and I have no complaints about the prose form. Some might wonder about some of Tolkien's word choices. Some are simply older versions of words we still use today (gripe instead of grip, corse instead of corpse), but there's nothing to distract us from actually understanding the poem. Another interesting word choice is his use of 'knight' when describing the warriors Beowulf and his ilk are associated with. Of course there weren't knights in the old Germanic tribes, but I think knight is still a good word to use in this situation. We don't really have another word equivalent to an elite warrior, so using the word 'knight' to indicate a member of a king's war band is legitimate and conveys their wealth and power better than simply saying 'soldier' or 'warrior'. Perhaps the most iffy aspect of Tolkien's translation is, to me, the way he calls Grendel and his mother trolls. This will probably bother few, if anyone, but I find it slightly irritating because the troll is Norse, and the Anglo-Saxons had no equivalent. The word troll is not in the Anglo-Saxon text, and I wish Tolkien would have just translated the words describing the monsters as they were in the Anglo-Saxon text, rather than making the all-too common mistake of projecting other Germanic cultures onto the Anglo-Saxon literature. Overall, the translation is beautiful and is currently my favorite (though I haven't read them all yet). The commentary is amazing, too, for anyone interesting in the Anglo-Saxon language. Tolkien was a genius, and it shows here. His retelling of Beowulf as a fairy tale in his "Sellic Spell" is really fun too. I highly recommend this to people who love Beowulf, Germanic legend in general, classic literature, and anyone else who enjoys Tolkien's prose. However, since lots of people have a hard time with Tolkien's prose and skip his books for Peter Jackson's [extremely terrible] movies, I don't recommend this book to everyone, as the translation is some of Tolkien's more difficult and archaic writing. Otherwise, enjoy!

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.

Francis B. Gummere's 1910 translation of "Beowulf," published in Volume 49 of "The Harvard Classics" reflects that of the Edwardian era. It's accurate but turgid. In contrast, Tolkien's 1926 prose translation is accurate--and accessible--nearly ninety years later. To place Tolkien's translation within the tradition of 20th and 21st translations, consider Burton Raffel's (1963) and the much heralded Seamus Heaney's (2000). Tolkien follows the Anglo-Saxon diction more closely than Burton Raffel’s looser (and easily read) translation that reflects his theory of "syntactic tracking," To that end, Raffel's poetic translation contains the identical number of lines in Frederick Klaeber's edition of “Beowulf, which many graduate English students first translate. And Tolkien's translation is more faithful to the text than Seamus Heaney's otherwise highly accessible bilingual rendering of "Beowulf" (2000). Tolkien adheres to the original text, unlike Seamus Heaney who admits his Irish heritage informs his translation. Heaney writes that he "learned the Irish language ['at a Northern Irish Catholic school'] and lived within a cultural and ideological frame that regarded it as the language which I should by rights have been speaking but which I had been robbed of" ("Introduction," xxiv). So he informs his translation with Celticisms such as "bothy" and "bawn" to celebrate his own heritage. While Beowulf awaited Grendel's arrival, Hrothgar retreated with his queen to an outbuilding, the women's quarters, that Heaney calls a "bothy." The Irish bothy is a shed or building where bachelor "farm hands" slept. Similarly, Hrothgar's Heorot, the best of halls, is described as a "bawn," a cattle enclosure that protected British cattle from the Irish (see Heaney's "Introduction," particularly page xxx. In it,) In my opinion, I think that while such diction, which reflects Heaney's anti-British feelings, detracts from the intent of the epic. The extant manuscript found in England is not an English-qua-English tale, but rather an older tale originating with the Germanic tribes of what is now Denmark and northern Germany. As a side note, a more accurate dual text edition of "Beowulf" than Heaney's can be found in Howell D. Chickering's "Beowulf" (1977). Returning to Tolkien's "Beowulf," which I say again is highly readable, is all the more valuable portions to scholars and general readers alike because his "Notes" and "Commentary" provide insights into Tolkien's considered reasoning that informed his translation. Interestingly, Tolkien's comment that it was Hrothgar (not Grendel as my translators have assumed) who could not approach "the throne of grace" (186) was an argument that the late Raymond P. Tripp, Jr. argued not only during my "Beowulf" seminar but also in subsequent scholarship. Tripp arrived at that conclusion independently, and I wish that he could have lived to see his argument vindicated. To conclude, there is much to enjoy and to contemplate in Tolkien's "Beowulf," “Notes," and "Commentary." But there is a bonus: Tolkien's own imaginative creations reveal the whole man. The "Sellic Spell," writes Tolkien, "is only to limited extent an attempt to reconstruct the Anglo-Saxon tale that lies behind the folk-tale element in 'Beowulf.'" Likewise, “The Lay of Beowulf" is the wonderfully wrought epic-in-miniature. Tolkien's "Beowulf" offers much to both the scholar and the general reader, and I, for one, am fortunate to have entered the world of Tolkien once more.

Like most Americans of a certain age, I first met "Beowulf" in an English class in high school. I know exactly where I met him – in a classroom on the second floor of the school, in a textbook entitled "England in Literature." It was an all-boys high school, so the story of Beowulf, Grendel and Grendl’s mother held our attention more than more works – we couldn’t resist lots of blood and gore, ogres eating knights for snacks, and arms getting whacked off? I ran across "Beowulf" again in college, in an English literature class my sophomore year. Being a mixed-gender class and something more serious than high school students thinking of graduation, we focused on the epic poem itself, its structure and narrative, its history and the various literary theories about it. (Am I something of a cretin to say the blood and gore approach was more engaging?) In the 1980s, I was reading John Gardner’s fiction, and discovered his short novel "Grendl," telling the Beowulf story from Grendl’s point-of-view. Years passed. Decades, actually. And then, in a New Orleans bookstore, while I was perusing the poetry section, I found a new translation of "Beowulf" by the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney. Interest in Heaney and nostalgia for high school and college compelled me to buy it. It’s a fine translation, true to the form of epic poetry, and stirring to the heart, especially when read aloud. The story is well known: the ogre Grendl is terrorizing the Danes, showing up most nights at the hall of the king and munching on a knight or two, and helping himself to various treasures before lumbering back to his lair. He seems unstoppable, until Beowulf arrives from over the sea. The hero defeats both Grendl and his mother, who’s every bit a nasty piece of work as her son (no word on who the father was). It’s been no secret that J.R.R. Tolkien had translated "Beowulf." What has been rather secret is the translation itself. Tolkien scholars knew it was part of author’s literary estate; Christopher Tolkien, son and literary executor, had discussed it. And now, more than 40 years after Tolkien’s death, the translation has been published. And what a volume it is: a prose translation by J.R.R. Tolkien; notes and an extensive commentary by his son; a version of the Beowulf story by Tolkien, entitled “Sellic Spell;” and two poems written by Tolkien under the title of “The Lay of Beowulf.” The best way to experience the translation, as poetic a prose as I’ve come across, is to read it. This is an excerpt of the arrival of Beowulf and his men in the land of the Ring-Danes, there to do battle with the ogre terrorizing the country: “The street was paved in stone patterns; the path guided those men together. There shone corslet of war, hard, handlinked, bright ring of iron rang in their harness, as in their dread gear they went striding straight unto the hall. Weary of the sea they set their tall shields, bucklers wondrous hard, against the wall of the house, and sat then on the bench. Corslets rang, war-harness of men. Their spears stood piled together, seaman’s gear, ash-hafted, grey-tipped with steel. Well furnished with weapons was the iron-mailed company.” I still feel the DNA of the high school experience with warriors, blood and gore. What was new to me was “Sellic Spell,” Tolkien’s telling of a version of the story (the hero’s name in this one is Beewulf, not Beowulf). The story has the air of playfulness around it; it’s not exactly a send-up but perhaps a more contemporary interpretation. I was reminded of Tolkien’s Christmas letters he wrote to his children for a number of years, when they were still young enough to be enraptured by the magic. The letters were published in 1976 as "The Father Christmas Letters," and the polar bear is still one of my favorite story characters. Reading this prose translation of the Beowulf story is also a reminder of how much the epic and other Norse tales influenced "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of Rings." "Beowulf" includes all the familiar elements we know from Tolkien’s stories and Peter Jackson’s movies – a quest, a monster needing to be tamed, swords with powers and names, heroism and courage, and the battle between good and evil.

When approaching this posthumous J.R.R. Tolkien "edition" of BEOWULF, it's best to keep in mind various clarifying remarks made by Christopher Tolkien in his own editorial introductions for different aspects of the volume. Perhaps the most important is that as the scare quotes above indicate, this is not an edition of the poem in the usual sense. Most translations for popular consumption would be accompanied by comprehensive and specially-prepared commentary, so students and other readers unfamiliar with the poem could be introduced to its milieu and its key issues. But J.R.R. Tolkien appears not to have seriously considered using his prose translation for such an edition, so the commentary here comes from Tolkien's lectures on the poem. Because student exams only covered about half of BEOWULF, the lectures and therefore the commentary are overwhelmingly focused on that first half, and length constraints on the present volume have required that the lecture material be further condensed. In doing so, Christopher Tolkien has given special emphasis to material that relates to word choices made in translation. It is, then, more a commentary on the translation than on the poem, if you see the distinction. And the book as a whole is more a guide to some of Tolkien's opinions on BEOWULF-- a "memorial volume," as Christopher Tolkien puts it-- than an edition of the poem. Which is not to say that this is not a valuable book. On the contrary, it's both useful and delightful to those interested in Tolkien and in BEOWULF. The translation, while hard going at times due to complicated syntax, is an interesting addition to the long list of attempts to capture in modern English the power we are told the Old English original possesses, and is sometimes atmospheric in its own right. The commentary is precise, forceful, and punctuated with scholarly humor that is far from dry, a polite, subtle sarcasm that might almost earn the modern label of "snark." Those who have enjoyed Tolkien's non-fiction voice in his letters and essays will enjoy his opinions on the poem, even when complexity and lack of context make his arguments rather tough to follow. In addition to the translation and the lecture excerpts, this volume includes "Sellic Spell," Tolkien's playful attempt to reconstruct the original folk-tale that he believed lay beneath the part-historical, part-legendary poem, and two versions of "The Lay of Beowulf," a brief retelling of BEOWULF in rhyming modern English. This last item, which lingers in the mind as do many poems from THE LORD OF THE RINGS, serves as a reminder of Tolkien's gift for narrative verse, whether rhyming or alliterative. Indeed, one of the regrettable aspects of this edition is the near absence of his unfinished translation of BEOWULF into alliterative verse. I imagine this is due to the already-mentioned length restrictions, and to a desire to present complete rather than incomplete works, but it's still a shame: the brief snippet quoted here suggests some of the compressed effect of the original meter. I could also wish for reprints of Tolkien's other non-fiction on the poem and on related topics, some of which appears in the essay collection THE MONSTERS AND THE CRITICS, now unfortunately out of print in the United States. But that too would have bloated a book already long by the evident standards of recent Tolkien titles. Full appreciation of BEOWULF, and of Tolkien's opinions on it, will require much more material (some published, some not) than is available here, but this edition is coherent and rewarding enough to be well worth a purchase for those who wish to delve into such matters.

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.

Tolkein's notes on Beowulf are of more use to a teacher or reader who wants to appreciate the poem than the Norton's Anthology! The prose translation makes for interesting comparison with the Seamus Heaney translation. This is a book worth owning.

Any review I can offer pales to the reflective self-analysis that Christopher Tolkien puts into the preface to this text; thankfully, you can see that preface in its entirety by clicking on the book preview at the top of this page. In summary, he discusses the dilemma of putting this book out--the same dilemma I had in deciding to purchase it: this isn't truly an academic text, since Tolkien was translating and tinkering with this since before his professorial career, and many of the final translations and decisions about this published body were made through Christopher Tolkien's conjecture about what J.R.R. would want. Besides that, it can't be considered a true academically valid work until it's been in the field for a few years and other experts have had a chance to think about it. And yet, it also isn't truly a public text: the language is thick, reflective of Old English word orders, some of the word and spelling choices are archaic or obsolete forms... so who's the book for? Ultimately, Christopher Tolkien settles it on being a mix of the two demographics, with emphasis on people who specifically want to capture some of J.R.R. Tolkien's mind, while also getting a damned deep translation of Beowulf. Christopher Tolkien puts it better; read his preface. As for my own opinion on it, this translation is delightful. I love archaic word forms. I love ye olde grammar styles. I love the alliteration that sneaks into every line, I love the fact that I have to warm up to reading it all before I can start to comprehend it as it flows. I also really love Tolkien. And I love Beowulf, both as a concept and a story. For me? This book is golden. It's readable (but you might require a bit more of an academic mind than Christopher Tolkien believes...), and as someone who understands a great deal about how Modern English has evolved over the last 1,000 years, it's delicious seeing all of that come into play. If I sound like you, get the book. However, if you're just interested in Beowulf as a casual reader? No real insight into language evolution, you don't particularly care about Tolkien's essays, or even about Tolkien... or maybe you just hate dense language, and struggling to get through a particularly poetic paragraph with esoteric yet perfect words sounds awful rather than wonderful... maybe go with the Heaney translation. For me, this one will be on my shelf, and it'll probably also be my primary source when I feel like looking up or quoting the text.

Regalo super gradito, arrivato come sempre nei tempi stabiliti!

The great monsters and a dreadful dragon with a magneficient hero. Descriptions are so beautiful litteraly. I love this book very much as well as other books by professor Tolkien.

Useful translation for pre exam study. Straightforward to read.

Tolkiens Übersetzung des Gedichtes, sowie Auszüge aus dazugehörigen Vorlesungen. Wer sich dem alten Mythos annähern möchte und obendrein philologisch geneigt ist, kommt hier voll auf seine Kosten.