The Professor as scholar

[Bêthberry]

Tolkien's 1936 essay on Beowulf changed the way the Old English poem was studied and read in universities (which was about the only place it was read). Here's what Seamus Heaney has to say about Tolkien's influence in the Introduction to his new translation of Beowulf (which came out in 2000):

For generations of undergraduates, academic study of the poem was often just a matter of construing the meaning, getting a grip on the grammar and vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon, and being able to recognize, translate, and comment upon random extracts which were presented in examinations. For generations of scholars too the interest had been textual and philological....
However, when it comes to considering Beowulf as a work of literature, there is one publication that stands out. In 1936, the Oxford scholar and teacher T.R.R. Tolkien published an epoch-making paper entitled "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" which took for granted the poem's integrity and distinction as a work of art and proceeded to show in what this integrity and distinction inhered. He assumed that the poet had felt his way through the inherited material--the fabulous elements and the traditional accounts of an heroic past--and by a combination of creative intuition and conscious structuring had arrived at a unity of effect and a balanced order. He assumed, in other words, that the Beowulf poet was an imaginative writer rather than some kind of back-formation derived from nineteenth-century folklore and philology. Tolkien's brilliant literary treatment changed the way the poem was valued and initiated a new era--and new terms--of appreciation.

This was how Tolkien was presented to me when I studied Old English also, many decades later (although I was still required to translate it as a way of learning the language, before I could discuss it).

Tolkien also produced an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a Middle English text which is written in a dialect different from Chaucer's and which is much more difficult to read, without translation, than Chaucer. Maybe you could look it up and tell us about it, since you are taking a medieval lit course.

*curtsies on a first meeting*

Bethberry


Edit: Carpenter's biography discusses Tolkien's battles to change the curriculum at Oxford.

[ September 08, 2002: Message edited by: Bethberry ]