Tolkien and the Beowulf Saga

jackalski sent in this story about a translation of the Beowulf epic by J.R.R. Tolkien being discovered and which is now set to be published next year. Tolkien found Beowulf inspirational.

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[Anonymous Coward]

New Tolkien book discovered
December 30, 2002

A YELLOWING manuscript by J.R.R.Tolkien discovered in an Oxford library could become one of the publishing sensations of 2003.

The 2000 handwritten pages include Tolkien's translation and appraisal of Beowulf, the epic 8th century Anglo-Saxon poem of bravery, friendship and monster-slaying that is thought to have inspired The Lord of the Rings.

He borrowed from early English verse to concoct the imaginary language spoken by Arwen, played by Liv Tyler, and other elves in the second film made from the Rings books, The Two Towers.

A US academic, Michael Drout, found the Tolkien material by accident in a box of papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

An assistant professor of English at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, Dr Drout was researching Anglo- Saxon scholarship at the Bodleian, and asked to see a copy of a lecture on Beowulf given by Tolkien in 1936.

It was brought to him in a reading room in a large box. Professor Drout, who reads Anglo-Saxon prose to his two-year-old daughter at bedtime, said: "I was sitting there going through the transcripts when I saw these four bound volumes at the bottom of the box.

"I started looking through, and realised I had found an entire book of material that had never seen the light of day. As I turned the page, there was Tolkien's fingerprint in a smudge of ink."

After obtaining permission from the Tolkien estate, Professor Drout published Beowulf and the Critics, a version of Tolkien's 1936 lecture, in the US earlier this month.

Even more exciting will be Tolkien's translation of the poem and his line-by-line interpretation of its meaning, which will be published next summer.

Tolkien's name on the cover is likely to make the translation a bestseller.

Professor Drout says Tolkien found inspiration for many of his storylines and characters in Beowulf. The Anglo-Saxon hero's friendship with Wiglaf is mirrored in the relationship between Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings.

Elves, orcs and ents, the latter a type of giant that becomes a walking and talking tree in Tolkien's work, are all mentioned in Beowulf.

Merlin Unwin, son of Tolkien's original publisher, said: "Beowulf is a wonderful story, and if you put Tolkien's name to it, it would probably be a great commercial success."

Obviously a Critical Author ...

[SuperDuG]

Obviously Tolkien was very critical of his own works as this one has been kept in a box for so long. The epic Beowulf has been depicted in so many ways in the past that it is actually quite amazing to see it translated the ways it has been. The Thirteenth Warrior was by far the coolest interpretation to date, I don't care if they did leave out nearly half the tale.

It's a timeless tale and Tolkein is a great author, this won't reach the best seller list because of the name of the author, but because I'm sure it will be great. Such a shame that it has been hidden for so long.

Re:Obviously a Critical Author ...

[FosterSJC]

"The Thirteenth Warrior was by far the coolest interpretation to date, I don't care if they did leave out nearly half the tale."

Sigh. I don't mean to be a troll here, but it is surely not coincidence that you chose a film addaptation of this great work as "the coolest interpretation." ::Sarcasm:: Yes I agree, Antonio Banderas brought clout and intelligence to this film opus. ::Sarcasm:: Not. Of all the interesting 'interpretations' and 'translations' out there of late, you choose the one that is as much based on Beowulf as it is on Crichton's Eaters of the Dead. While I am intrigued to see what Tolkien has to say on this seminal work, I would recommend to those discerning reads who are capable of reading and not just moviegoing to take a gander at Seamus Heaney's new translation. It is a side-by-side metered rendering (of the whole work) by an accomplished poet. Take my advice, and ditch the 13th Warrior. Sorry for the rant, also.

Re:Elves, Orcs, and Ents in Beowulf?

[Vann_v2]

I had to find this online, but here you go:

So lived the clansmen in cheer and revel

a winsome life, till one began
to fashion evils, that field of hell.
Grendel this monster grim was called,
march-riever mighty, in moorland living,
in fen and fastness; fief of the giants
the hapless wight a while had kept
since the Creator his exile doomed.
On kin of Cain was the killing avenged
by sovran God for slaughtered Abel.
Ill fared his feud, and far was he driven,
for the slaughter's sake, from sight of men.
Of Cain awoke all that woful breed,
Etins and elves and evil-spirits,
as well as the giants that warred with God
weary while: but their wage was paid them!

It's in the first "book" of Beowulf, around line 110-115.

Re:Any chance there is a pending copyright violati

[kaltkalt]

There would be a CR violation in using Tolkien's name on his translation, except the article clearly says that the professor who found the manuscript got permission from Tolkien's estate to publish it. Thus, the "Tolkien's Beowulf" to be published next year will not be an infringement, since it was done with permission. Indeed, the story of beowulf is in the public domain, but any translation of it would be a derivative work protectible by copyright. If you spent 2 years of your life translating beowulf, I don't have the right to steal your translation and publish it just because the story you translated from is in the public domain. We all know disney steals stuff from the public domain (Brother's Grimm, etc) to base their stories on, and they get subsequent copyrights. Way it works.

The article is nothing but exaggerated hype

[Jorge Quinonez]

Tolkien scholars have known about the Beow. translation and commentary for decades. This is nothing but a blatant attempt by either the publisher or the scholar to hype and market their book. It wasn't 'discovered'. It has always been in the Tolkien Collection at the Dept. of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. And thus available to any qualified scholar. However, in all fairness, Michael Drout (the editor), may probably be the first scholar to actually have the time, motivation and energy to accomplish the task of actually getting this thing published. Also, I believe the figure of 2000 pages sounds a bit inflated, its far less than that. In my view, Tolkien's Beow. work would probably have been published by now by the Tolkien Estate if they had thought it worthwhile. But with any book selling like crazy that has Tolkien's name on it: Now is the time to do it.

Re:This will be a hard read...

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

The Silmarillion is hard because it was never finished. Tolkien had various stories written out to various degrees of completion and then his son combined them all into the Silmarillion. It probably would have been better as a collection of short stories.

You can't deny that some of the stories are excellent - Fingolfin vs. Morgoth or Beren and Luthien for example. In the movies Peter Jackson seems to be using the parallels between Beren/Luthien and Aragorn/Arwen to flesh out the whole romance storyline that was barely present in the books.

Even discounting the value of the Silmarillion itself, after reading the Silmarillion you will get much more from the Lord of The Rings.

Tim

Re:sir gawain

[ufoo]

You can actually read this edition online from U-Michigan. http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/c/cme/cme-idx?type=he ader&idno=Gawain Must be in the public domain. Not much of a translation, though, seems more like an edition. More of a transcription than a translation.

Re:tolkien inspirations

[dmoynihan]

OK, I'm linking to my own site here, cause OMACL seems to be down for the count.

You're absolutely right in your Christian elements--still to be chatted about is Tolkien's use of the Story of the Volsungs [blackmask.com] -- text that most feel is his primary source.

Then, like Wagner, he also read up on the
Nibelungenlied [blackmask.com] (though not to the same extent as Wagner) as well as the Elder Edda [blackmask.com]

If you're not into reading online, I do recommend a Haney translation.

Re:Elves, Orcs, and Ents in Beowulf?

[Selanit]

Hmmm, I must have read a severely truncated version in high school, because I only remember three supernatural creatures in "Beowulf" -- Grendel, Grendel's mom, and the Dragon.

Not so; there are only three supernatural beings who have roles in the plot, but others are mentioned. For example, in this passage:

anon untydras ealle onwocon eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas swylce gigantas a wið gode wunnon lange rage . . .

That's from the Robinson and Mitchel edition, titled "Beowulf: An Edition". In case you can't read Anglo-Saxon, here is my (prose) translation:

From thence all evil things awake: giants and elves and orcs, such giants as strove against God for many ages . . .

This is a passage describing the origin of all unholy creatures from Cain following his banishment by God. Grendel (and his mother) were descended from Cain. "Eotenas" is a synonym for "giants"; "gigantas" is probably a loan-word from Latin.

So the version you read in high school is correct, it's just that elves and orcs and giants don't figure very large in the poem. Elves are only mentioned a couple of times, and are always evil; orcs are mentioned all of once in the passage above, and the term is not clearly defined, though my glossary offers "evil spirits of the dead." Giants are mentioned several times, but only as a race that got destroyed in Noah's flood.

+5 Troll

[blamanj]

Unfortunately Heaney's translation got involved with a fixup by the booker prize committee which put off a lot of people.

Not many literature buffs here, I guess. The Booker Prize [bookerprize.co.uk] is given for new fiction, and so Heaney's Beowulf isn't even eligible.

However, the two books did go head to head in 1999 for a somewhat less influential award, the Whitbread Prize [whitbread-...ards.co.uk]. Both Heaney and Rowling won in their respective categories (poetry and children's), but the Whitbread judges go on to pick a "book of the year" from all the winners, and they did pick Beowulf as the book of the year.

That aside, I really don't think you can make a case that Rowling writes better than Heaney.

The Aragorn/Arwen story...

[devphil]

...is told later, in appendices and in one of the other books, can't recall which one. Parts of LOTR that Tolkien had to drop due to publishing costs post-WWII were later published.

There's a great scene set in Minas Tirith, for example, while everybody's just hanging around, killing time and waiting for Arwen to show up. It's Gandalf and some of the other characters, sitting around a room, with Gandalf making some links between this story and _The Hobbit_.

Re:The Aragorn/Arwen story...

[nhaines]

The snippet taken out of LotR at Minas Tirith is available in the book Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth edited by Christopher Tolkien. Rather interesting. Not worth buying the book for, but the wealth of supplimental info around LotR and The Silmarillion makes it very worth it. Anyhow, you can probably find it at a library, too.

Never "lost"

[Endorendil]

As with most "journalism", this should be taken with a shaker of salt. There's a lot of promotional and journalistic bombast.

Tolkien's translation of _Beowulf_ has never been "lost". It was deposited in the Bodleian archives by Christopher Tolkien himself, and has been listed in the Tolkien MS catalogue ever since. I myself saw it during the Tolkien Centenary Conference in 1992, as I am sure have many other readers before and since that time.

The same, by the way, is true of the two versions of the essay, "Beowulf and the Critics", which Michael Drout has recently published. In fact, no manuscript deposited with the Bodleian archives can, without great hyperbole, be described as "lost".

I'll also note that the figure of "2000" manuscript pages is either a typo or the result of great confusion; it is too high by about a factor of 10.

Do not confuse translation with . . .

[kfg]

transliteration. Or for that matter merely "translating" into a readable grammer. This is what untalented hacks do. A proper translation will go as far as it can to preserve everything, including idiom.

Poetry is the hardest to translate, but it can be done, particularly in the older metrical non rhyming "saga" type poems.

If any modern author has an inate sense of the importance of, and a fine ability to produce, proper cadanced epic poems, for God's sake man, it's certainly J.R.R.

KFG

Re:This will be a hard read...

[Eimi Metamorphoumai]

I have to agree with most of what you said, especially Gimli being reduced to comic relief. But my penantry is bugging me to mention that Tinúviel is Sindarin for "nightingale", not "morning star". Which makes sense when you realize that the morning star is the evenstar, and is the light of Eärendil the Mariner, who wasn't even born when Lúthien died.