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Tolkien scholar John Garth reviews Tolkien’s long-awaited translation of Beowulf (together with the short story Sellic Spell<\/i>) in The New Statesman.<\/p>\n\n
Tolkien scholar John Garth reviews Tolkien’s long-awaited translation of Beowulf (together with the short story Sellic Spell<\/i>) in The New Statesman.<\/p>\n
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by John Garth<\/b><\/p>\n
In his story \u201cLeaf by Niggle\u201d, J R R Tolkien imagines an artist painting a picture he can neither complete nor abandon. \u201cIt had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots.\u201d In the end the picture is never put on show.<\/p>\n
The metaphor captures the scale and gorgeous impracticality of Tolkien\u2019s writing but not its fate. Most of his \u201ctree\u201d has been saved and his posthumous titles outnumber those published in his lifetime by roughly three to one. In this latest book, a deep root is exposed: his work on the Old English poem Beowulf. The surprise is how \u201cfantastic\u201d the root turns out to be, twisting thirstily through the scholarly subsoil to tap the groundwater of a forgotten folk tale \u2013 or \u201cfairy story\u201d, as Tolkien prefers to call it.<\/p>\n
The poem, written down around 1000AD, mixes fiction with 5th- and 6th-century history. Beowulf sails from his Geatish homeland in Sweden to defeat Grendel, an ogre who has usurped the Danish feast hall of King Hrothgar. Beowulf then hunts down Grendel\u2019s vengeful mother, but in old age, now king of the Geats, he slays and is slain by a dragon. In his 1936 lecture \u201cBeowulf : the Monsters and the Critics\u201d, Tolkien insisted that the poem is not just a mine for historical data into which some fantastical monsters have inconveniently strayed but a work of art in which the monsters are foils for an entire cultural attitude to life, death and courage.<\/p>\n
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The literary landscape has changed since then in a way that Tolkien would have neither expected nor accepted: he now towers in fame over Beowulf. Last year, Penguin repackaged its Michael Alexander translation as one of five \u201cclassic [stories] that inspired J R R Tolkien\u2019s The Hobbit\u201d.<\/p>\n
Tolkien\u2019s prose translation has been edited by his long-serving son Christopher, now 89, from versions dating back to 1926 (regrettably omitting an earlier, unfinished verse translation). A large, nuggety selection from Tolkien\u2019s lectures, presented by way of commentary, ranges from semantics to genealogy, from the giants of Genesis to the Germanic concept of fate. Also included are two short, lapidary pieces of creative writing, \u201cSellic Spell\u201d and \u201cThe Lay of Beowulf\u201d. All this illuminates the poem but far more people will read the book for Tolkien\u2019s sake than for Beowulf\u2019s. That is fair enough.<\/p>\n