Of Beowulf: A Commentary, and A Few More Leaves of Tolkien’s Tree

The original Beowulf manuscript is part of a curious assemblage: the Nowell Codex—some 110 leaves of ink on vellum copied and compiled in the eleventh century. This codex later came into the possession of the seventeenth-century antiquarian, Robert Cotton, and almost perished in the fire at the Ashburnam House in 1731. Bound in the Nowell Codex with Beowulf were three Old English works of prose and another of poetry, the poetic fragment “Judith.” Anglo Saxon scholars agree that these works share a common element—they are all wonder tales and give report of marvelous creatures, anthropophagi, dragons, giants, and a sword-wielding woman. It is not unlikely that our great Old English epic found its way to future readers through both the vagaries of chance and the appetite of monks for fabulous narratives.

The tome currently under review, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, has a cover bearing “J. R. R. Tolkien” in notably larger font than the gilt lettering of Beowulf. Below those famous names are the coils of a rather droll and decorative dragon drawn by the translator himself. This book is also a curious assemblage. Its principal treasure, one might assume, would be Tolkien’s translation of the wonder tale of Beowulf itself, but it also contains two other wonder tales: products of Tolkien’s imaginative collaboration with Beowulf: “Sellic Spell” and “The Lay of Beowulf.” The bulk of the volume, however, is comprised not of these greater and lesser wonder tales but of the scholarly commentary, over two hundred pages of it, written by Tolkien and selected from a much larger body of work by the book’s editor and the author’s son, Christopher Tolkien. The younger Tolkien has provided his own share of commentary and scholarly apparatus about his father’s translations, commentary, and creative work.

As a translator of Beowulf and a longtime student of the poem and its translations, I was excited to learn of the publication of Tolkien’s translation. Perhaps this would be the Arkenstone of all translations of the poem, the great version that some believed they had encountered with the 1999 publication of Seamus Heaney’s version. J. R. R. Tolkien, the Oxford professor of Anglo Saxon and master storyteller, had the imagination, the poetic mastery, and the linguistic and literary scholarship to achieve an exemplary translation. Even though I was aware that he had written his translation in prose, which tempered my excitement, I was still eager to get my hands on the book. My expectation had also been whetted by my admiration for the alliterative verses of Tolkien’s verse play, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” (1953), a sort of coda to the famous Anglo Saxon poem “The Battle of Maldon.” In this work Tolkien handles his four-beat alliterative line well and writes in an almost contemporary idiom, inflected by the occasional archaic word. My expectation was that his prose translation would have some of the rhythmic energy and idiomatic sprezzatura of that work.

I was to be disappointed. In truth, Tolkien’s translation is a faithful and scholarly reading of the poem. It has dignity, if not grace, and passages of some beauty. Tolkien writes his translation in a diction of high register, mindful of his notion that, “If you wish to translate, not rewrite Beowulf, your language must be literary and traditional, not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient, but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day that the poem was made.” So the dignity of the poem demands a similar decorum of its translators. In that same introduction to a prose translation of Beowulf in which the above passage occurs, Tolkien also wrote that “the proper use of a prose translation is to provide an aide to study.” It is “a companion...