[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Anglo-Saxon or Old English is not a particular dialect of modern English. It is a different language.

I'm not sure that this is what Bethberry was trying to say, Bill. It is possible to recreate Anglo-Saxon meter in a different language, just as Shakespeare's iambic pentameter is not restricted to English. It may be more difficult, perhaps impossibly so, to do this, but Tolkien's love of the old form clearly prompted him at least to try. I am increasingly concerned about the pretensions of modern literary criticism. I cannot see how it is possible to recapture the sense of Beowulf with any hope of completeness in modern English anyway, and I fail to see why Heaney's approach, which attempts to re-create the type of language in which (in Seamus Heaney's opinion) the poem was first heard, should be considered any more valuable than Tolkien's, which attempts to recapture the rhythmic structure of the piece. In my opinion Tolkien was sufficiently familiar with the original to understand the Anglo-Saxon poet's intent, and if he chose to attempt an ambitious alliterative verse translation, I think this noble rather than something to be dismissed as "bizarre".

To my unlettered eyes, Tolkien's translation exceeds Heaney's in elegance and linguistic beauty. Heaney has an undeniable way with words, and I very much enjoyed reading his introduction to his translation, but Tolkien flies where he plods. Without having read the original Anglo-Saxon poem I feel unqualified to comment on the relative accuracy of the two translations, but I think that people who really want to experience Beowulf in its authentic form would do better to refer to the source, as no translation is even going to come close to the feeling of the original work. Any attempt to infuse beauty into the verses, thus encouraging people to tackle the daunting task of comprehending the old poem, will meet with my approval, and in my opinion this is what Tolkien was trying to do.

For the record, I thought that the Professor Clarke's comments, accurate though they may be, sounded carping and pretentious. Consider the following

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."

Firstly, I used the word "blithely" in a post on this forum less than a fortnight ago. I did so quite naturally and without affectation, and I am still a relatively young man. The statement that nobody says that any more is therefore a total fallacy. Secondly "fleet-foam twisted" makes perfect sense, conveying as it does the buffeting of the stormy deep with its twining frothy ropes of foam. Only someone with no poetry in his soul could regard this as a meaningless phrase. I get the distinct impression that Professor Clarke is searching desperately for faults to find, and I'm given to wonder why. Even if nobody did use this language any longer, why should it be wrong to do so? Transliteration is only one approach to translation, albeit that it is the most fashionable one at the moment. Tolkien was not given to fashionable approaches, and I for one feel that his ideas as put forward in The Monsters and the Critics have genuine merit. Although I haven't the knowledge with which Clarke appears to be blessed, I still think it somewhat overly-simplistic so dismissively to announce "...everything Tolkien ever said about Beowulf is wrong" at least without offering clear evidence to support that point of view.

I find it very depressing that Tolkien's critics often appear to offer no real support for their views beyond the current fashion in translation or literary interpretation. Who is to say that Tolkien was wrong about a subject to which he devoted decades of study? Surely not those who have never even read the original poem, and certainly not me. I do not put forward the argument that Tolkien was invariably right, merely that I preferred the fragment quoted by Bethberry to that from Heaney's translation given therewith, and I will continue to do so even if I find it utterly at variance with the original, which I fully intend to read as soon as I can get hold of an Anglo-Saxon dictionary. Taken as a simple piece of poetry, Tolkien's is by far the more pleasurable to read, and I think that it inspires much more of a sense of beauty than Heaney's translation, brilliant though that undoubtedly is. I put this down to a difference in approach and in no way intend it as a criticism of Seamus Heaney, for whom I have a great deal more respect after having read his carefully-considered work on Beowulf.