[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

The thread yet lives, although its movement is becoming slow. Perhaps soon others will join in and speed things up a little.

The compiler of Tolkien's work on Beowulf (Michael Drout, Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College, Massachusetts) freely admits that its release is not imminent. However, since the world has been waiting a good forty years and more for its release, it will still be 'soon', relatively speaking. The latest information I've been able to find suggests that the first volume will be published next year and the second in 2005, and more information is available here and at Professor Drout's web-page here.

Drout's compilation of Tolkien's notes for The Monsters and the Critics is already available, and the details can be found at the sites I've linked to above.

Now it's time, I think, to hear again from Tolkien himself. His comments below, taken from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture at the University of Glasgow, 1953) are yet another example of his sensitive approach to criticism. He always appreciated literature for what it was rather than what he thought it should be, which is one of the many reasons why I feel that he deserves to be offered the same courtesy by his successors.

There is a strength and life about this poem which is almost universally admitted. This is more likely to be due to the greater seriousness of the author than to have survived in spite of it. But much depends on what you want, or think that you want. Do you demand that the author should have the same objects that you would expect him to have, or the views that you would prefer him to hold? That he should, for instance, be an anthropological antiquarian? Or that he should simply devote himself to telling an exciting fairy-story well, in such a way as to produce literary credibility sufficient for entertainment? And how will he do that, in terms of his own time and thought? Surely, if that simple object was his only object (unlikely enough in the complex and didactic fourteenth century), he would in the process of giving life to old legends inevitably slide into the consideration of contemporary, or permanent, problems of conduct? It is by that consideration that he has vivefied his characters, and by that has given new life to old tales - totally different to their former significance (about which he probably knew, and certainly cared, much less than some men of this day). It is a case of pouring new wine into old bottles, no doubt, and there are some inevitable cracks and leaks. But I at any rate find this question of ethics both more vivid for its curious and bizarre setting, and in itself more interesting than all the guesses about more primitive times. But then I think the fourteenth century superior to barbarism, and theology and ethics above folklore.

It seems to me that a lot of what Tolkien says in the passage above could be applied to his own work (save that he clearly knew and cared a great deal about the old bottles into which he poured his own new wine). Much of the criticism levelled against him appears to be based around others' idea of what a story ought to be about, and how it ought to be told, rather than on what is actually written on the paper. It seems to me that he has ironically suffered a similar fate to two of his own favourite writers: the anonymous authors of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf.