[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

That last post has been waiting far too long for a response. How sad that the best I can offer is a simple "I don't know". Seamus Heaney certainly respects Tolkien's place among Beowulf scholars, but his approach to the translation is very different: Heaney asked himself "...how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version", but I doubt that Tolkien would have asked such a question of himself. I'm sure that he would have wanted it to capture as fully as possible the tone and content of the Old English original, and he was better placed than Seamus Heaney to achieve this aim because he was that much more deeply immersed in Old English language, thought and literature than the Irish poet, who has specialised in different areas.

On the other hand, Heaney never falls foul of Tolkien's insistence that

Words should not be used merely because they are 'old' or obsolete. The words chosen, however remote they may be from colloquial speech or ephemeral suggestions, must be words that remain in literary use, especially in the use of verse, among educated people. (To such Beowulf was addressed, into whatever hands it may since have fallen.) They must need no gloss. The fact that a word was still used by Chaucer, or by Shakespeare, or even later, gives it no claim if it has in our time perished from literary use.

I suspect that Tolkien would not have been overly critical of the later translation, but we shall see very soon how the two handlings differ when his own verse translation is published. Perhaps then we will be given a clearer idea of Tolkien's own opinions on translation as briefly explored in 'On Translating Beowulf', but I can't comment any further without an understanding of Old English that I simply don't possess.

Here's Tolkien on Beowulf again; demonstrating as usual his own deep appreciation of the work and of Anglo-Saxon poetic culture in general:

He who in those days said and who heard flæschama 'flesh-raiment', ban-hus 'bone-house', hreðer-loca 'heart-prison', thought of the soul shut in the body, as the frail body itself is trammelled in armour, or as a bird in a narrow cage, or steam pent in a cauldron. There it seethed and struggled in the wylmas, the boiling surges beloved of the old poets, until its passion was released and it fled away on ellor-sið, a journey to other places 'which none can report with truth, not lords in their halls nor mighty men beneath the sky' (50-52). The poet who spoke these words saw in his thought the brave men of old walking under the vault of heaven upon the island earth beleaguered by the Shoreless Seas and the outer darkness, enduring with stern courage the brief days of life , until the hour of fate when all things should perish, leoht and lif samod. But he did not say all this fully or explicitly. And therein lies the unrecapturable magic of ancient English verse for those who have ears to hear: profound feeling, and poignant vision, filled with the beauty and mortality of the world, are aroused by brief phrases, light touches, short words resounding like harp-strings sharply plucked.