[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I'm resurrecting this thread in the hope that I can generate some fresh interest in Tolkien's scholarly writing, but also to share a more widely available piece of his Beowulf criticism. This passage concerns the origins of Hrothgar's ancestors, the Scyldings. It is taken from Christopher Tolkien's commentary on King Sheave, a poem connected with the unfinished time-travel story The Lost Road; and it may be found in The History of Middle-earth, volume V.

Why then did [the poet] make Scyld the child in the boat? - plainly his own device: it occurs nowhere else. Here are some probable reasons: (a) He was concentrating all the glamour on Scyld and the Scylding name.
(b) A departure over sea - a sea burial - was already associated with northern chieftains in old poems and lore, possibly already with the name of Scyld. This gains much in power and suggestiveness , if the same hero arrives and departs in a boat. The great heights to which Scyld climbed is also emphasized (explicitly) by the contrast thus made with his forlorn arrival.
(c) Older and even more mysterious traditions may well still have been current concerning Danish origins: the legend of Ing who came and went back over the waves. Our poet's Scyld has (as it were) replaced Ing.
Sheaf and Barley [Sceaf and Beow] were after all in origin only rustic legends of no great splendour. But their legend here catches echoes of heroic traditions of the North going back into a remote past, into what philologists would call Primitive Germanic times, and are at the same time touched with the martial glories of the House of the Shield. In this way the poet contrives to clothe the lords of the golden hall of Hart [Heorot] with a glory and mystery, more archaic and simple but hardly less magnificent than that which adorns the king of Camelot, Arthur son of Uther. This is our poet's way throughout, seen especially in the exaltation among the great heroes that he has achieved for the Bear-boy of the old fairy-tale, who becomes in his poem Beowulf last king of the Geatas

A later passage from the same lecture describes a sense that Tolkien derived from the text of

the suggestion - it is hardly more; the poet is not explicit and the idea was probably not fully formed in his mind - that Scyld went back to some mysterious land whence he had come. He came out of the Unknown beyond the Great Sea, and returned into It: a miraculous intrusion into history, which nonetheless left real historical effects: a new Denmark, and the heirs of Scyld in Scedeland. Such must have been his feeling.
In the last lines 'Men can give no certain account of the havens where that ship was unladed' we catch an echo of the 'mood' of pagan times in which ship-burial was practised. A mood in which the symbolism (what we would call the ritual) of a departure over the sea whose further shore was unknown; and an actual belief in a magical land or otherworld located 'over the sea', can hardly be distinguished - and for neither of these elements or motives is conscious symbolism, or real belief, a true description. It was a murnende mōd, filled with doubt and darkness.

As he so often did when talking about Beowulf, here Tolkien slips quite naturally into a more general discourse on the atmosphere and beliefs of the pagan Germanic age. His deep appreciation for this world (or at least his understanding of it) not only gives us a fascinating insight into his own creative writing but also opens up to us the legendary past of the real North. It also demonstrates how closely related were his private writing and his professional concerns. To Tolkien, medieval literature was not something to be pinned down in cases like an entomologist's collection, but to be read, appreciated and enjoyed, giving in the process an appreciation and understanding of the people who produced it and their world. If this world seems familiar to us already, we again have Tolkien to thank.