The translation of Beowulf by J.R.R. Tolkien
was an early work, very distinctive in its mode, completed in 1926: he
returned to it later to make hasty corrections, but seems never to have
considered its publication.
This edition is twofold, for there
exists an illuminating commentary on the text of the poem by the
translator himself, in the written form of a series of lectures given at Oxford in the 1930s; and from these lectures a substantial selection
has been made, to form also a commentary on the translation in this
book.
From his creative attention to detail in these lectures
there arises a sense of the immediacy and clarity of his vision. It is
as if he entered into the imagined past: standing beside Beowulf and his men shaking out their mail-shirts as they beached their ship on the
coast of Denmark, listening to the rising anger of Beowulf at the
taunting of Unferth, or looking up in amazement at Grendel’s terrible
hand set under the roof of Heorot.
But the commentary in this book includes also much from those lectures in which, while always anchored
in the text, he expressed his wider perceptions. He looks closely at the dragon that would slay Beowulf ‘snuffling in baffled rage and injured
greed when he discovers the theft of the cup’; but he rebuts the notion
that this is ‘a mere treasure story’, ‘just another dragon tale’. He
turns to the lines that tell of the burying of the golden things long
ago, and observes that it is ‘the feeling for the treasure itself, this
sad history’ that raises it to another level. ‘The whole thing is
sombre, tragic, sinister, curiously real. The “treasure” is not just
some lucky wealth that will enable the finder to have a good time, or
marry the princess. It is laden with history, leading back into the dark heathen ages beyond the memory of song, but not beyond the reach of
imagination.’
Sellic Spell, a ‘marvellous tale’, is a story
written by Tolkien suggesting what might have been the form and style of an Old English folk-tale of Beowulf, in which there was no association
with the ‘historical legends’ of the Northern kingdoms.
