[Bêthberry]

The article which the above link went to has now been archived, and so I will c&p it here for future reference:

Tolkien's monster resurfaces: The Beowulf manuscript
National Post
Monday, January 13, 2003
Page: A16
Section: Discovery
Byline: Joseph Brean
Column: Literature
Source: National Post

A J.R.R Tolkien manuscript discovered by accident in an Oxford University library may give new popularity to the poem Beowulf, long the scourge of English literature undergraduates.

For many well-intentioned students, the epic Anglo-Saxon poem is rivalled only by James Joyce's Ulysses as the greatest work they have never read, and not for lack of trying. And while most consider it a venial sin to give up on Joyce's masterpiece, these are bad days to ignore Beowulf.

Students may not be aware that failure to decipher Beowulf's intricate and unfamiliar syntax is a direct snub to Tolkien, the currently fashionable author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Tolkien, who taught Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University for most of his life, argued in an influential lecture that Beowulf's monsters are the stuff of high poetry, not just fairy tales, and that the poem is a worthy classic because it chronicles the Christian struggle against evil, symbolized by such foul monsters as Grendel, Beowulf's first foe. This lecture, published in 1936 as a brief essay, is responsible for Beowulf's place on academic reading lists.

Now, Tolkien's complete argument for Beowulf has been published for the first time, and some critics are saying it will confirm the poem's place in the literary canon, but for entirely the wrong reasons.

A common opinion among modern scholars of Beowulf is that Tolkien misunderstood the poem, despite studying and teaching it his entire life and drawing heavily on it for his own fiction, referring to the poem in letters as "among my most valued sources." For example, Frodo's relationship with Sam in the Rings trilogy mirrors that of Beowulf with his companion Wiglaf in the poem.

But modern theorists believe Beowulf is best understood as a study in iconography, rather than as a tale of moral struggle. Its greatest insights, they say, are about how we describe the heroes of the past, not about how we triumph over evil.

The first advance copies of the new book Beowulf and the Critics -- discovered six years ago as a yellowing pile of handwritten pages, then edited into book form by the Massachusetts scholar who found them -- have just been shipped to academics eager to vindicate or condemn Tolkien. The book, in which he gives full form to his watershed argument, has been in print for only a month.

Initial buzz has centred on the book's appendix, which includes a brief excerpt from Tolkien's own unpublished translation of Beowulf. Depending on whom you ask, Tolkien's version is either "umbilically linked" to the Norse myths from which the story arose or a "bizarre" and awkward failure.

The hype over the secret translation is so great that British newspapers were falling over each other last week to report, falsely, that Tolkien's estate had approved its publication. It remains locked up at Oxford, however, and might never see the light of day to compete with the scores of other translations.

The poem, the oldest copy of which is under glass at the British Library, tells the story of a great Scandinavian warrior of the 6th century who saves his people from monsters and dragons and eventually dies a hero. It was written down from the oral tradition sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries.

It was Professor Michael Drout, of Wheaton College in Massachusetts, who stumbled across Tolkien's manuscript while researching his graduate thesis in Oxford's Bodleian Library. It was at the bottom of a storage box, inauspiciously labelled "Tolkien A26," which was full of looseleaf papers donated by Tolkien's son Christopher.

"It's a very messy manuscript," Drout said, describing lines crossed out and rewritten sometimes four and five times, all in different coloured inks. "He was a compulsive reviser."

Tolkien's academic record bears out this description. Although he was "a towering figure" in Anglo-Saxon scholarship in the mid-20th century, says Drout, Tolkien published only infrequently. When he did publish, however, on linguistics, philology or literary theory, his work was noticed.

According to David Doughan, one of his many biographers, Tolkien's childhood was lived "on the genteel side of poverty." His father died when he was three, and his mother soon after, leaving young John Ronald Reuel, known as Ronald, in the care of a priest and then an elderly aunt.

At about 19, Tolkien entered Oxford University as a student. After a brief stint in France during the First World War, which ended due to illness, Tolkien spent his entire life in universities. He worked as an assistant lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary, and taught Old English literature in between his prolific efforts at fiction writing, which he shared at bookish parties with such friends as C.S. Lewis.

While at Oxford as a professor in the 1920s, he turned his scholarly efforts against Beowulf's detractors.

"The previous critics had been saying 'Beowulf would be a great poem if it didn't have these stupid monsters in it. The monsters are childish, the monsters are immature. We would really like something about slaughter and divided allegiances.' And Tolkien said 'No, no, no. The monsters are absolutely necessary because the monsters show that the poem is really about man's place in the hostile universe, not about tangled allegiances or struggles between competing warrior kings or something like that. It's that the universe is hostile, the universe is out to get you just like the monsters are,' " Drout said.

Although Tolkien's efforts are credited with raising Beowulf into the rarefied company of Shakespeare and Chaucer after the Second World War, his interpretation is considered passe in the world of postmodern academia.

"That interpretation went over very well [after the Second World War] because it fit the way people wanted to read the book, rather than the way the book, if it had a voice, wanted to be read," said George Clark, a professor emeritus of English literature at Queen's University who has edited a book on Beowulf and teaches it to senior students.

"It was just what the times demanded ... an archetypal struggle against the closest approximation to pure evil that history has afforded thus far," he said, drawing a parallel between the monster Grendel and the evil of the Nazi regime.

Clark says the poem is best studied as an historical record of how stories can construct a people's glorious past, not an expression of archetypal images of evil, and that "everything Tolkien ever said about Beowulf is wrong."

He has similarly harsh words for Tolkien's translation, which he called "bizarre," and "an attempt to achieve the impossible" because it tries to recreate the rhythm of Anglo-Saxon, an inflected language, in English, an uninflected one.

This tall task seems appropriate for Tolkien, who by all accounts was an intrepid linguistic adventurer. His biographies show he was a wordsmith and prolific reader since childhood, and had mastered Latin, Greek, Gothic and Finnish by his teenage years. For his stories, Tolkien invented complete languages.

In his verses describing Boewulf and his men setting sail, Tolkien consistently alliterates in the same style as the original, and tries -- some say successfully -- to recreate the meter of the ancient language.

Drout said this constitutes a remarkable achievement, and the British poet and Anglo-Saxon expert Kevin Crossley-Holland has described Tolkien's tone as capturing "the sound of big waves crashing on a shingle beach and the lines die away like water running up a beach."

Clark disagrees. "You don't do that," he said. "It strikes the ear as being really odd.... We don't say 'blithely' anymore, and 'fleet foam twisted' doesn't even make sense."

The well-lauded and now authoritative translation by Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney is written in a much more colloquial tone, with only infrequent alliteration.

His translation is praised for capturing how the story of Beowulf was first heard, as a folk tale spoken in the common language of the people.

Tolkien's translation is probably years away from publication, but his argument for how the poem should be read is set for a new public airing. Whether the expanded argument manages to convince a new generation of academics remains to be seen, but it may inspire a new generation of undergraduates to read the poem.

THE TEXT:

Heaney's translation:

Time went by, the boat was
on water,
in close under the cliffs.
Men climbed eagerly up the
gangplank,
sand churned in surf, warriors
loaded
a cargo of weapons, shining
war-gear
in the vessel's hold, then
heaved out,
away with a will in their
wood-wreathed ship.

Tolkien's translation of Beowulf and his men setting sail:

On went the hours:
on
ocean afloat
under cliff was their craft.
Now climb blithely
brave man aboard;
breakers pounding
ground the shingle.
Gleaming harness
they hove to the bosom of the
bark, armour
with cunning forged then cast
her forth
to voyage triumphant,
valiant-timbered
fleet foam twisted.

(Copyright) From Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney, faber and faber, 1999

Bethberry

PS. Cute, Bill Ferny [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img], but a double entendre does not eradicate the fact that your evaluation here of Tolkien's translation confuses different poetic enterprises.