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Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell by J.R.R.

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Article  in  Tolkien Studies · January 2015

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 Book Reviews
Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell, by J.R.R.
Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Har-
court, 2014. xiv, 425 pp. $28.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-544-44278-8.
Scholars have long known that J.R.R. Tolkien translated Beowulf into
Modern English. Various individuals had, over the years, examined
the manuscripts of the translation in the Bodleian Library, a few small
excerpts of the text were published in other contexts, and in late 2002
it was reported in the mass media that the present reviewer was edit-
ing the text for publication.1 But for a variety of reasons it was not until
2014 that Christopher Tolkien’s edition of his father’s prose Beowulf
translation supplemented with commentary, the story Sellic Spell, and
a short poem entitled “The Lay of Beowulf” appeared in print. This
volume not only gives us important insights into Tolkien’s thought but
also is a rather significant contribution to Beowulf studies despite being
published nearly three-quarters of a century after it was written. In
what follows, I endeavor to set the published volume in its several con-
texts, including Tolkien’s substantial writings on Beowulf (published
and unpublished), the tradition of scholarly interpretation of Beowulf,
and Tolkien’s intellectual and creative oeuvre. To this end, I have
divided my review into six parts:
1. A survey of Tolkien’s translations of and commen-
taries on Beowulf
2. The history and purpose of the prose translation
3. The prose translation itself
4. The commentary
5. Sellic Spell and “The Lay of Beowulf”
6. Conclusions

1. Survey of Tolkien’s Translations of and Commentaries

on BEOWULF

Manuscripts
The manuscripts of Tolkien’s Beowulf translations and commentar-
ies (see Table 1 for a summary) are held by the Bodleian Library at
Oxford in the Modern Papers collection, to which they were donated
by Christopher Tolkien. The major manuscripts are as follows:2

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 Book Reviews

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tolkien A 28 A. This manuscript, dating

from the time he was at Leeds (1920–25) or earlier, contains Tolkien’s
earliest Beowulf commentary, which runs approximately 146 folios.
The first 15 folios are almost impossible to read in microfilm. Folio
15 contains a mostly legible translation of lines 3058–75. On folio 18
a commentary on the poem begins. The commentary includes gen-
eral remarks on editions, translations, background, and scholarship
but quickly becomes very technical, focusing on historic and legendary
materials. There is much discussion of the identity of the Geatas, the
Völsung digression and saga, and the Finn episodes. The text is excep-
tionally difficult to read (due to faded ink). While it includes much
material that is of great interest, the commentary is not complete in
itself, although it appears to have served as the foundation for much
of the other material.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tolkien A 28 B. This is a later commentary,
dated by Christopher Tolkien to both pre– and post–World War II. It
begins with a few general comments and then begins to work through
the poem line by line, explicating cruces but also discussing regular
and important features of the poem. The manuscript becomes pro-
gressively difficult to read and stops approximately halfway through
the poem. There is also a typescript fragment of another lecture that
provides introductory notes on Beowulf, but then focuses almost solely
on a comparison of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This
lecture is not complete. There is also a prose translation of Grendel’s
attack on Heorot (ll. 702–49).
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tolkien A 28 C and D. These discussions of
the cruces in Beowulf, which Christopher Tolkien dates to the 1930s,
cover almost the entire poem and are mostly readable. There is a long
discussion of lines 168–69, in which Tolkien weaves together the evi-
dence in such a way as to strongly support his view of the “re-handling”
of the text by a later author who was not the primary poet (some of
this material is hinted at in the appendices of “Beowulf: The Monsters
and the Critics”). Folios 100–03 are direct antecedents of the end of
the B text of Beowulf and the Critics and therefore the precursors, at one
remove, of the final pages of “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.”
Almost the entire poem is analyzed, although a discussion of the cru-
ces in the last few lines of the poem is missing.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tolkien A 29 A. This is a partial alliterative
translation of Beowulf, covering the first 594 lines of the poem. Tolkien
wrote “Beowulf: Early attempts at alliterative translation” on the enve-
lope in which it was contained. Christopher Tolkien dates the translation

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 Book Reviews

to Tolkien’s years at Leeds (1920–25) and suggests that it is associated

with Tolkien’s alliterative “The Lay of the Children of Húrin.”3
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tolkien A 29 B. A fragmentary and difficult-
to-read typescript of a prose translation of Beowulf translating lines
1–2112 of the poem, B(i), is supplemented with a manuscript transla-
tion of the rest of the poem, B(ii). Some emendations to A 29 B are, as
Christopher Tolkien notes, in the hand of C. S. Lewis.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tolkien A 29 C. This is an amanuensis type-
script, by Christopher Tolkien, of the prose translation of Beowulf dis-
cussed in the previous item. This translation of Beowulf is complete in
typescript with additional handwritten changes. There are a few places
where commentary is included in parentheses (e.g., “Danes” written
after “Servants of Ing” on folio 34r). On folio 66r, Tolkien writes (of
lines 2032–35) “passage corrupt and doubtful, see notes,” but no spe-
cific notes are referenced. Christopher Tolkien dates the typescript
from 1940 to 1942, with 1942 being the most likely date (2, 126–27).
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tolkien A 31 A. This is approximately 152
folios of handwritten Oxford lectures on “Historical and Legendary
Traditions in Beowulf and Other OE Poems,” dating from 1933. The
writing is difficult, and there are serious problems with faded ink as the
manuscript progresses, particularly from folio 104 onwards.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tolkien A 31 B. This material on “Offa” focuses
on the links between various historical Offas and Beowulf. It includes a
hand-drawn map of northern Germany and southern Denmark.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tolkien A 31 C. The fragmentary lectures in
this section have some particularly interesting opening passages, includ-
ing one that shows how Tolkien dealt directly with his classes (instruct-
ing how to prepare for his lectures, etc.). There are also some lines in
these lectures that could be precursors to Beowulf and the Critics.

Table 1.
Manuscripts that Contain Translations of Lines from Beowulf
Manuscript Lines Form
A 29 A 1–594 Alliterative verse
A 29 B Entire poem (with lacunae) Prose
A 29 C Entire poem Prose
A 28 A 3058–75 Prose
A 28 B 702–49 Prose

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 Book Reviews

There thus remains much material about Beowulf that is not pub-
lished in the 2014 edition. The multiple commentaries and lectures
would surely have overburdened the volume (which is 425 pages
long). Being working drafts and scripts for lectures rather than pol-
ished work, many of these texts are extremely messy and difficult to
read. They often repeat and at times contradict each other, so editing
them into a consistent discussion of the poem would likely have been
an impossible task. Christopher Tolkien was surely correct in choosing
one of the more finished commentaries for the book.
The exclusion of the alliterative poetic translation from the edi-
tion is more puzzling. This translation is a well-done piece of poetry,
truer to the original in both form and content than any other poetic
translation of Beowulf. Except for W. H. Auden, Tolkien was perhaps
the finest alliterative poet of the 20th century, and general readers
would very likely enjoy the poetic translation more than they will the
prose. Scholars would be able to compare it to Tolkien’s other allit-
erative compositions and translations. In my “feasibility study” I had
proposed the alliterative and prose translations be presented synopti-
cally where both were extant, with the poetic version on the left and
the prose on the right, and it still seems to me that such an approach
could have been taken in the edition without too much difficulty (if
the length of the resultant volume was a problem, slightly less gener-
ous margins could have allowed the number of pages to remain the
same).
Previous Publications
As noted, Tolkien included a short excerpt of the alliterative transla-
tion from MS A 29 A in “Preface: On Translating Beowulf,” published
in 1940, perhaps selecting what he believed to be the most success-
ful and finished section of the translation and further polishing it for
this purpose. In the published version, Tolkien marks each half line
with a letter indicating the Sievers verse “type” (A, B, C, D, E), which
he defines on the previous page. He also indicates stress and pauses
in the text. The inclusion of an apparently antecedent version of this
passage in the manuscript of Beowulf and the Critics (Tolkien A 26, fol.
86r), printed in Beowulf and the Critics (430), may suggest that in the
1930s Tolkien returned to the alliterative translation while writing the
lectures printed as Beowulf and the Critics, but the fragment in A 26 may
also simply be an artifact of the deposition of Tolkien’s very complex
and originally disordered scholarly materials. An excerpt of this pas-
sage (cleaned up from the diplomatic edition I presented) was pub-
lished in the London Sunday Times of January 3, 2003.

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 Book Reviews

Two passages of the prose translation were published in Wayne G.

Hammond and Christina Scull’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator. The
first, a line from the description of the dragon in line 2561a–62b: “Now
was the heart of the coiling beast stirred to come out to fight” [ða wæs
hringbogan heorte gefyséd],4 accompanies Tolkien’s illustration of a
coiled dragon (A&I 53).5 Hammond and Scull also print a passage
from the prose translation in association with Tolkien’s drawing of the
Grendelkin’s watery home, which he labeled “wudu wyrtum fæst”:
In a hidden land they dwell upon the highlands wolf-
haunted, and windy cliffs, and the perilous passes of the
fens, where the mountain-stream goes down beneath the
shadows of the cliffs, a river beneath the earth. It is not far
hence in measurement of miles that the mere lies, over
which there hang rimy thickets, and a wood clinging by its
roots overshadows the water. (A&I 54–55)6
In the appendix to The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, Christopher
Tolkien used lines 702–34 of the prose translation (corresponding to
lines 867b–902a of the poem) to help explain the complex matter of
Sigmund, Sigurd, and the Nibelungs (S&G 349–50).

2. History and Purpose of the Translation

From Christopher Tolkien’s donation notes it is possible to reconstruct

an approximate chronology for the creation of the translations. While
a professor at Leeds, between October 1920 and December 1925 (Bio
103–08), Tolkien began his alliterative translation (MS Tolkien A 29 A)
at the same time that he was seriously engaged in writing alliterative
poetry of his own. This translation was never completed, but it seems
likely that Tolkien returned to it in his writing “Preface: On Translat-
ing Beowulf” for C. L. Wrenn’s revision of J. R. Clark Hall’s Beowulf and
the Finnsburg Fragment: A Translation into Modern English, which was
published in 1940.7
Some time after Tolkien had moved from Leeds to Oxford (1926)
he produced the prose translation of Beowulf (Tolkien A 29 B), which
he showed to C. S. Lewis, whose corrections are primarily matters of
word choice and contribute more to Modern English clarity than to
any disputed points of Old English translation. The prose translation
does not in all particulars agree with the extensive commentaries in
Tolkien A 28 A–D.
Evidence as to the purpose of the translation may be found in
Tolkien A 31, a three-part manuscript, the third part of which consists

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 Book Reviews

of “scraps relating to lectures . . . enclosed in a newspaper with a com-

pleted cross-word puzzle.”8 On folio 168 begins an eight-page typescript
of a lecture on Beowulf in which Tolkien writes that it is his intention to
read through in one sitting all of Beowulf in modern prose from his own
translation, which is not intended to imitate the style of the poem but
instead to help his students to grasp the poem “whole and entire.” He
states that such a reading will take only one or two hours,9 and that he
will then supplement the straightforward prose translation with shorter
pieces from his verse translation. Other comments in the script indicate
that Tolkien met with this group of students twice per week, and that
he expected them to “prepare” for this meeting—presumably by being
ready to translate and discuss the Old English text.
At the beginning of the lecture Tolkien employs a modesty topos,
saying that he probably fails biennially at making the study of Beowulf
pleasurable, which suggests that Tolkien had been teaching at Oxford
for several years before the script was written. According to Hammond
and Scull’s Chronology, Tolkien taught Beowulf three times in 1925–26
but did not teach it again until Trinity term in 1927, when he lectured
on only lines 1251–1650. His lectures in Michaelmas term 1927 and
Hilary and Trinity terms 1928 were on Beowulf and the Finnsburg epi-
sode. Only in Michaelmas of 1929 did he return to lecturing on the
entire poem. This might imply that the lecture script was written several
years after the translation was in existence, perhaps in the summer of
1928, in preparation for teaching a more general course of lectures
on Beowulf for nonspecialist students in Schools. On the other hand,
the assumption that some students might have the Wyatt and Cham-
bers edition of the poem even though Klaeber was preferred perhaps
suggests an earlier rather than a later date in this range, since the first
edition of Klaeber was published in 1922 (the second in 1928). Regu-
lar use of the translation in lecturing and teaching might explain the
poor state of the B(i) typescript, though it does not explain why B(i)
was a finished text (despite being subsequently emended) while B(ii)
appears to be more of a work in progress (6–8).

3. The Prose Translation Itself

Rather than being a “means of judging the original” poem, “the proper
purpose of a prose translation is to provide an aid to study,” wrote
Tolkien in “Preface: On Translating Beowulf” (49). Students would use
such a translation to help explicate the Old English text, referring to
the translation when they were having difficulties parsing the syntax
of a sentence or recognizing unusual word forms. To be useful as a
teaching and learning aid, a prose translation must above all else be

154
 Book Reviews

accurate, taking no liberties for the sake of ornamentation or smooth-

ness of idiom in Modern English. Students also need to be able to
determine easily which lines of the original language are being trans-
lated at any given point. A translator of Beowulf must decide whether
to proceed half line by half line, line by line, clause by clause, or sen-
tence by sentence. Each approach has both strengths and weaknesses.
Unfortunately for both translators and students, while Old English is
an inflected language, in which case endings for nouns and adjectives
provide significant grammatical information, Modern English is an
analytic language, in which grammatical relations are primarily indi-
cated by word order. So, while translating each half line individually
would allow readers to orient themselves immediately in the text, this
practice would come at the cost of often producing what my students
call a “word salad,” a collection of words whose syntactic relationships
are unclear. Translating full line by full line barely mitigates the prob-
lem. Translating by complete clauses does a better job of illuminating
the syntax of the poem and allowing students to understand what is
happening in any given section, but unfortunately the most difficult
and complex sections of the poem, those that students need the most
help in parsing, often contain multiple nested or interlinked clauses.
These need to be translated as whole sentences even if at times a half
line must be displaced by five or even ten lines in order to align sub-
jects and objects and match them with the correct verbs.
Tolkien has taken, primarily, the sentence-by-sentence approach in
his translation, though within these constraints he very often manages
to keep the clauses, full lines, and even half lines in the same order
that they appear in the Old English text. At times this practice gener-
ates inversions and other archaisms in syntax. Indeed, there are places
where Tolkien produces a somewhat awkward syntax that is not forced
by the text. For example, in lines 1866–67, the Old English reads:
Ða git him eorla hleo inne gesealde,
mago Healfdenes, maþmas twelfe;
This would be literally translated as:
Then again, to him, the protector of good men, inside, gave,
the son of Healfdene, twelve treasures.
The challenge for the Modern English translator is to indicate
that the subject of the sentence is the pair of appositives “protector
of good men” and “son of Healfdene,” while the direct object is the
treasure and the indirect object is “him” (Beowulf). Tolkien, reason-
ably, moves the subjects to the beginning of the sentence: “Then the
son of Healfdene, protector of good men,” which he follows with the

155
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locative “in the that hall” and the adverb “again.” But then, instead
of moving to the verb as would a standard Modern English sentence,
Tolkien inserts the object, “twelve treasures” before “gave,” conclud-
ing the sentence with the indirect object (as a prepositional phrase)
“unto him.”
Then the son of Healfdene, protector of good men, in
that hall again twelve costly things gave unto him. (67, ll.
1562–63)
Since the direct object does not appear before the verb in the Old
English text, the syntax of Tolkien’s sentence cannot be a straightfor-
ward mirroring of the source. It seems as if, both here and many other
places, that despite his intention of simply providing a straightforward
prose translation, Tolkien has slipped into a practice of communicat-
ing some of the “feel” of the Old English source. In the lines quoted
earlier, the Old English is marked by formal diction and gives the sense
that the sentence is part of a set piece that includes the giving of gifts,
leave-taking, and departure (a topos that appears in The Lord of the Rings
in passages that also are characterized by formal and archaic style).10
Such stylistic formalism, inversion, and occasional awkwardness appear
throughout the translation, which, although it is not intended to be
poetic, nevertheless contains alliterative passages and other ornamen-
tation that is not always the same as that found in the original.
Perhaps more distinctively, the translation is consistently rhythmic.
This rhythm is roughly trochaic and closer to a whole-line meter rather
than the half-line metrics of the Old English text. Both stressed and
unstressed syllables are less frequently stacked together than is the case
in standard Modern English prose, but the rhythm never becomes as
obvious as Shakespearean pentameter. As Christopher Tolkien notes,
the desire to maintain the underlying rhythm of the Anglo-Saxon text
explains Tolkien’s use of stress-markers on some –éd endings, the use
of “unto” in place of “to,” and –eth endings on some verbs (8–10).
There are some similarities between this rhythmical prose and the
speech of Tom Bombadil in The Fellowship of the Ring, which looks like
prose but in fact has essentially the same rhythm as Tom’s poetry. In
both cases there are some concessions made to Modern English idiom
and syntax, but the general “feel” of poetry is preserved in the prose
by sticking relatively close to a metrical system even though the text is
not broken into lines.
In content the translation presents few surprises to the reader who
already knows Beowulf in Old English. Tolkien does not incorporate
much of his own interpretation but instead presents what would be
the consensus view of the 1920s through 1940s on most of the cruces

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 Book Reviews

and ambiguities. That the translation contains little that most scholars
(both contemporary and of Tolkien’s day) would find unusual is, to
me, further evidence that the text was intended to give students a basic
understanding of the poem, as an “aid to study” that would not put
them very far out of the mainstream of Beowulf criticism.
Taken as a whole, in both content and style, Tolkien’s is the equal of
any previous prose translation (though this is in itself, sadly, not a par-
ticularly high standard). It is accurate and transmits some of the high
formality and serious tone that Beowulf has in Old English. I doubt,
however, that it will replace Seamus Heaney’s poetic translation of
Beowulf as the text most introductory students encounter. Although
Heaney’s translation is poetic, it in many ways makes more concessions
to Modern English syntax and style and is thus a bit easier to read. But
the quality of a translation is not measured by its potential popularity.
Tolkien’s prose Beowulf is a successful rendering of the Old English
poem and provides both illumination and pleasure to its reader. Expe-
rience shows that when read aloud by a gifted speaker, some passages
have great rhetorical and aesthetic power.

4. The Commentary

Tolkien’s commentary on Beowulf is in many ways more interesting

than the translation itself, especially because it is at times quite far
from the consensus mainstream. Marked by great originality, the com-
mentary regularly displays the signal quality of Tolkien’s scholarship:
his ability to combine the rigor and knowledge of a hard-core philolo-
gist with the creativity and sensibility of a literary creator. Few schol-
ars before or since have been able to transition so smoothly from the
detailed analysis of the etymologies and sound changes that support
an emendation to an evocative reading of the thus-emended passage.
Tolkien was a superb close-reader of the text, but he did not hesitate to
emend not only where manuscript readings are obviously nonsensical
but also in places where the poem is only somewhat obscure or confus-
ing. Few contemporary editors of Beowulf would be so daring.
The commentary moves through the poem line by line, explor-
ing not only cruces but also words and scenes that do not necessarily
require emendation or disambiguation but are simply of interest.
Keyed to the lineation of the prose translation, but with secondary
reference to the lines numbers of Old English editions of Beowulf,11
the commentary is focused primarily on the first third of the poem
and almost entirely neglects the final 1,000 lines. Many of the tech-
nical details of the philological and critical arguments have, accord-
ing to Christopher Tolkien, been omitted, so nonspecialists will not

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be distracted from the main lines of reasoning. Although the com-

mentary was not written for publication, it nevertheless demonstrates
Tolkien’s rhetorical brilliance and his humor. One of the most enjoy-
able—and representative—passages is what can only be called a rant
against translating line 10a, “ofer hronrade” as “over the whale-road.”
Tolkien points out that such a translation is incorrect stylistically
because a compound like hronrád was not clumsy or bizarre in Anglo-
Saxon the way it is in Modern English. It is also incorrect in fact, both
because rád is not a road per se but a “riding,” a place where a ship
(or horse) moves in an up-and-down manner, and because a hron is
described as being larger than a seal and smaller than a real hwæl and
therefore is most likely a porpoise or dolphin.
The word as “kenning” therefore means dolphin’s riding—
that is, in full, the water fields where you can see dolphins
and lesser members of the whale-tribe playing, or seeming
to gallop like a line of riders on the plains. That is the pic-
ture and comparison the kenning was meant to evoke. It is
not evoked by “whale-road,” which suggests a sort of semi-
submarine steam engine running along submerged metal
rails over the Atlantic (142–43).
In the prose translation Tolkien renders line 10a as “over the sea where
the whale rides” (13), avoiding the ubiquitous “whale-road,” but he
nevertheless translates hron as “whale” rather than “porpoise.” This
inconsistency between the translation and commentary is emblematic
of the problems Christopher Tolkien faced when attempting to use
the latter as critical notes for the translation. Quite often particular
interpretations for which Tolkien argues in the commentary are not
incorporated into the translation, which, as noted earlier, is in content
kind of a lowest common denominator of what would be accepted by
Beowulf scholars. It is unfortunate that Tolkien never brought the trans-
lation into harmony with his notes, and it is even more to be regretted
that he never produced an edition of the poem of his own, for an edi-
tion and translation that matched the commentary would be a power-
ful challenge to entrenched opinion in Beowulf studies and might get
scholars and students to see the poem in a fresh light.
Nevertheless, scholars of Beowulf should read the commentary care-
fully, if for no other reason than for the pleasure of watching one of
the greatest philologists of the 20th century plying his trade. Many
of Tolkien’s suggestions for individual emendations are both innova-
tive and convincing, with detailed philological arguments supporting
insightful readings of the text. His general view of the artistic and aes-
thetic qualities of Beowulf in the commentaries is consistent with his

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large-scale interpretation of the poem in “Beowulf: The Monsters and

the Critics” and is therefore both familiar and well within the current
critical consensus.
The same cannot be said, however, for his interpretation of the his-
tory, composition, and sources of the poem, which is novel and idio-
syncratic. Unfortunately, Tolkien’s view is never presented as a single
sustained argument but is instead distributed throughout the sep-
arate notes of the commentary. It has therefore been necessary for
the purposes of discussion to produce the following synthesis of Tolk-
ien’s understanding—as best it can be determined—about the origins,
sources, and textual history of Beowulf, although undoubtedly this is
not precisely the way that Tolkien himself would have presented the
material.12
Toward the beginning of the eighth century, a monk in Mercia
decided to write a poem about a hero named Beowulf. Learned in
the Christian Latin tradition, this poet also had a great deal of knowl-
edge of native, Anglo-Saxon heroic legend and history, the stories of
Germanic heroes against which Alcuin had inveighed. He also had
access to a poem, written in Old English, that told the history of the
Danes from the founding of their dynasty to the infestation of the hall
of Heorot by a monster. In addition, this poet knew a folktale in which
a hero of bear ancestry used his enormous strength to defeat monsters,
one in a hall and one in a cave protected by water. From these disparate
materials he crafted Beowulf, using the folktale motif to shape the plot of
his hero’s story, but setting it not in Fairyland but in the historical world
of the peoples surrounding the North Sea in the Migration period. A
Christian who knew full well that the characters in his story lived before
the conversion of the North to Christianity, the poet was interested in
the origins of the traditional Germanic monsters and found an expla-
nation for them in Genesis. He therefore augmented the original poem
about the Danes with brief explanations of the theological status of the
characters and events, producing a synthesis of Germanic tradition
and Christian outlook. His poem became justifiably famous and was
frequently copied and disseminated. Many years, perhaps centuries,
later, another poet touched up the poem slightly. Whereas the original
Beowulf poet had written when paganism in England was but a memory,
this later writer lived when pagans lived and practiced their religion
throughout the country. He was therefore wanted to be certain that the
audience of Beowulf understood that despite the good and heroic quali-
ties of the heroes of the poem, their worship of the pagan gods was a
major failing and that only Christianity offered hope for eternal life.
This later poet, Tolkien thought, was Cynewulf, the author of Juliana,
Elene, The Fates of the Apostles, and Christ II.

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 Book Reviews

In today’s critical climate, such an interpretation is not just radical

but heretical. The idea that Beowulf could be a composite poem has
not been widely accepted since the demise of liedertheorie in the 19th
century (Shippey and Haarder 54–62). As Tom Shippey has noted, the
dominant quality of scholarship in the postwar era has been appre-
ciative enthusiasm for the artistic unity of Beowulf, with one of the
most popular critical approaches being the reclassification of features
or passages disapproved of by previous generations as “integrative
masterstroke[s]” on the part of the poet (“Afterword” 469). And much
of this scholarly industry is taken to be intellectually supported directly
by Tolkien: “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is almost univer-
sally accepted as having convincingly demonstrated that the poem is a
unified whole.13 The discovery that Tolkien himself believed Beowulf to
have been in part assembled from previous materials and worked on
by more than one poet has to be one of the greatest ironies in the two-
century history of Beowulf scholarship.
Such a major challenge to contemporary orthodoxy deserves to
be taken seriously, as Tolkien’s conclusions, if they are correct, would
necessitate a significant revision of the received view of the poem. It is
therefore incredibly unfortunate that Tolkien did not, at least in these
commentaries, make an explicit case for this interpretation of the evi-
dence. The conclusions are mentioned without laying out the chain
of reasoning by which Tolkien arrived at them, so even experienced
scholars of Beowulf are often left bobbing in his intellectual wake, des-
perately struggling to understand why he thinks what he thinks.
For instance, in a long note that begins with a discussion of line 101,
in which Grendel is called “feond on helle,” Tolkien states, “I think
that in all this early part of Beowulf our poet is sticking very close to
some old material already in verse, hardly doing more in parts than
to work over it. One of the things he did in this process was to insert
this passage (106–14) which expresses his philosophy of the northern
monsters” (158–63 at 162–63). Unfortunately it is not clear how many
lines Tolkien is invoking with “this early part of Beowulf.” From the
context, it could be the first 180 or 193 lines of the poem, but the
hypothesized source could be even longer. So although Tolkien’s spe-
cific argument for seeing 106–14 as an insertion or addition (which he
distinguishes from a later interpolation by another poet) is convinc-
ing, based as it is on syntax and narrative continuity as well as on phil-
osophical content,14 his assertion of the existence of an Old English
verse source is never supported with specific analysis. Instead, he relies
on a parallel he finds in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, from which, he
says, “you can here and there lift whole chunks and say ‘Ha! Master
Geoffrey, you stuck that in. You think it an improvement, do you? Well,

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perhaps it is. Perhaps’” (163). This is brilliant rhetoric, but hardly rig-
orous argument.
The case for Cynewulf’s having “retouched” Hrothgar’s giedd or
sermon, a far more controversial claim, is made in somewhat greater
detail. Earlier in the commentary, Tolkien argued that the single big-
gest crux in the entire poem, lines 168–69, in which the poem seems
to say that Grendel could not approach the “gift-seat” of the Danes, is
solved be recognizing the two lines as an interpolation into or expan-
sion of an earlier source, and that the point of the passage should
not be that Grendel could not approach Hrothgar’s throne15 but that
Hrothgar could not approach God’s throne because the king was not
Christian (182–86). In his later discussion of the sermon, Tolkien
argues that Cynewulf, an eloquent writer but a much lesser poet than
the author of Beowulf, similarly turned a formal address by Hrothgar,
the king’s words of wisdom to young Beowulf, into a full-blown Chris-
tian homily (310–12). The sermon was the point in Beowulf, Tolkien
believed, that was closest to Cynewulf’s own homiletic interests and so
he was unable to resist the temptation to adapt it.
Plausible? Certainly. But with so little evidence surviving in Anglo-
Saxon poetry, it is extremely difficult to know how likely it would be
for more than one poet to have similar styles. I can think of no con-
temporary scholar who would make such a bold claim without a great
deal of additional data to support it.16 But Tolkien’s commentaries do
not give the impression of being wild speculation; nor does he seem
to be consumed by a hypothesis and thus willing to subordinate all
evidence to a single provocative thesis. His conclusions read as if he
finds them self-evident, that he could have justified them if he had
taken the time.
Tolkien’s “feel” for Beowulf was so acute that it is worth taking his
hunches, guesses, and assertions seriously, if only as a guide for future
research,17 because when he does explain his deductions in detail, he
is very convincing indeed. For example, lines 303–06, in which the
armed Geatish warriors disembark from their ship, are a notorious
problem in Beowulf criticism, in great part because gúþmod grummon
(war-mind, roared or raged [third-person plural]) in line 306a makes
no sense, but also because there is a mix of singulars and plurals in
the description of the warriors’ helms and armor. Tolkien’s solution is
elegant. He takes the whole passage as being an example of the “repre-
sentative singular,” in which one warrior’s accouterments stand for all
of them, but then accounts for the plural by concluding that there are
two cheek-guards decorated with boar images on the single represen-
tative helmet. The resulting sentence still requires an additional sin-
gular subject, which Tolkien finds in grummon, which he believes was

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originally gríma (mask), a word not unfamiliar to readers of The Lord

of the Rings. The original gríma was miscopied by a scribe’s eye flitting
between it and the next word in the line, guman, resulting in a mean-
ingless form, *gruman, which was then emended by a scribe to the real
word grummon, which had the benefit of not being nonsense. The over-
all interpretation of the passage, then, is that the Geatish warriors wore
fierce masks as part of their helmets (201–04).18 Tolkien’s technical
emendation is sound, and his reconstruction of the passage more con-
vincing at every level—lexical, syntactic, semantic, archeological, and
poetic—than any other solution to the crux. The reconstruction illus-
trates his remarkable synthesizing ability, his talent for moving, seem-
ingly effortlessly, between minute details of language and a broader
interpretation of the poet’s intentions and effects.
As noted, Tolkien was much more assertive in emendation than
most contemporary scholars, who have substantially less confidence
in philology. This tentative approach to emendation can be valu-
able when skepticism clears away the dense layers of conjecture that
surround many lines in Beowulf, but veneration of the manuscript
becomes fetishization and healthy skepticism approaches paralysis
when scholars accept irregularities in meter, sense, and grammar
to preserve manuscript readings. Tolkien’s confidence in both his
discipline and his own skills is eye-opening. It may seem paradoxi-
cal, but philologists are often more comfortable with more complex
emendations than they are with the simplest ones. You would be
hard-pressed to find a scholar who would defend the mess that is the
manuscript reading of line 2921, even though changing the incom-
prehensible “mere wio ingasmilts” to the reasonable “Merewiongas
milts” requires multiple emendations,19 but most critics would balk at
the argument that there are a number of lines in which negative par-
ticles have dropped out. Though it can radically change the meaning
of a sentence or passage, a missing negative particle leaves no trace
at the lexical and grammatical levels of the text, and so philologists
are very hesitant to give themselves a tool by which they can easily
invert meanings. Tolkien recognizes the problem but nevertheless
proposes that in several places negative particles have been lost from
the text, justifying his emendations in part on the grounds that for
purely mechanical reasons ne- is easily omitted in writing and that
in speech the negative particle “is often reduced to a very fugitive
element in spite of linguistic renewal, and even then is sometimes
accidentally omitted” (315). Tolkien is so confident about his under-
standing of Beowulf that he is willing to invert completely the logic of
several manuscript readings in order to make the text consistent with
his larger-scale interpretation of the poem (263).

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Such confidence is not unearned. Some of Tolkien’s interpreta-

tions of individual scenes and passages are so good, so rich, complex,
and detailed, that I find myself worrying that he has improved upon
rather than merely explicated the text, that in his interpretation he has
made Beowulf better than it really is by inferring more detail than the
poet provides. Take, for example, Tolkien’s discussion of lines 553–58,
in which Beowulf is describing his fight against sea monsters.
Me to grunde teah
fah feondscaða, fæste hæfde
grim on grape; hwæþre me gyfeþe wearð
þæt ic aglæcan orde geræhte,
hildebille; heaþoræs fornam
mihtig meredeor þurh mine hand.
Tolkien translates this as:
to the abyss drew me a destroying foe accursed, fast the
grim thing held me in its gripe. Nevertheless it was granted
to me to find that fell slayer with the point of the warlike
sword; the battle’s onset destroyed that strong beast of the
sea through my hand. (28–29)
This is a relatively straightforward translation, and the only difference
between Tolkien’s version and that of hundreds of students and schol-
ars would be that others might employ different synonyms for some
of the nouns, perhaps using “sea floor” instead of Tolkien’s “abyss” for
“grund” or “monster” for “aglæca” instead of “fell slayer.” The gram-
mar of the passage is not complex nor the vocabulary recondite, but
in his commentary Tolkien finds nuances that would not, I think, be
detected by most scholars. The Old English text says that Beowulf
“reached” or “hit” the monster “with the point of the battle sword.” We
teach students to translate these and similar constructions as examples
of metonymy, where the part (the point) stands for the whole (the
sword), and so a normal, simplified interpretation of the line would be
“he hit the monster with his sword.” Tolkien, however, takes the poetic
description absolutely literally, not as a metaphor but as a detailed
description, interpreting the poet’s words as giving a precise visual pic-
ture of what Beowulf was doing against the sea monster:
We are, or at any rate I am, not familiar, as actor or onlooker,
with savage infighting with the sword. Nor indeed with
swords in their variety. But it does not take a great effort
of imagination to get some idea of Beowulf’s predicament.
He was seized by a sea-beast of great strength, and no
doubt held close. It took great strength to resist the grip

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sufficiently to prevent himself being gored or bitten; he

had had only one hand; the other held a naked sword, a
weapon at least two feet long. Only by a great effort could
he retract this so as to level the point at his enemy; there
would then be little striking-distance, and to thrust this
through the tough hide would require very great strength
of hand and arm. It was a great feat. (255–56)

I will never read that section of Beowulf the same again; Tolkien shows
here that attention to detail is rewarded by a visual richness that is
completely lost if the translation is simply “he hit the monster with his
sword.” You cannot find a better example of how close reading can
illuminate a text. But is Tolkien right? Did the Beowulf poet construct
the scene at this level of precise detail, or was he merely finding a word
that alliterated with “aglæca” in the A-verse and so chose “ord” out
of his very large collection of words for weapons? The answer is not
entirely obvious. Tolkien himself said that “all is not perfect in Beowulf”
(B&C 108, n. 1), and over the years critics have pointed out apparent
confusion or awkwardness that probably arises from the challenges of
composition. For example, the Danes are called North-Danes, South-
Danes, East-Danes, West-Danes, Bright-Danes, and Victory-Danes, with
each stressed prefix allowing the word to alliterate on a different con-
sonant. The most parsimonious explanation for having “Danes from
all four corners of the compass” is that the variety of names made the
poet’s job easier. The same could be true of the use of “ord” in this
line, with the poet more concerned about vocalic alliteration and con-
veying the idea that Beowulf hit the monster with his sword than about
crafting a specifically visualized tableau. Tolkien’s scene is more visu-
ally and emotionally engaging than the generic translation, but this
may be, perversely, a good reason to resist his rhetorical and creative
gifts. Although his interpretations avoid the monomaniacal tenden-
tiousness that is (and has been for two centuries) the most common
flaw in Beowulf criticism, they nevertheless work in concert to produce
a poem exquisitely crafted down to the smallest details. I find this inter-
pretation particularly appealing, and so, I imagine, will other scholars.
It would therefore likely be a mistake to accept all of Tolkien’s readings
on his authority alone.
These readings are seductive not only because they give scholars
what we want (a Beowulf that repays close reading as much as works by
James Joyce or T. S. Eliot) but also because they explain some of the
poem’s surface features in terms of a richer and more complex under-
lying culture about which the poet and audience were well informed
but which to us is partially hidden in the shadow of the past. For

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example, Tolkien teases out multiple unstated but implied messages in

the speech-exchanges between Beowulf and the Coast Guard, noting
that the interaction contains much more submerged hostility than is
explained solely in the text itself but makes sense if we realize (as the
audience of Beowulf would) that it was not possible to be friends with
both Swedes and Geats (who were mortal enemies), and that the Danes
had already been allied to the Swedes when Beowulf arrived on their
shore (216–20). Tolkien provides a similarly convincing explanation of
the complex politics that underlie the Freawaru and Ingeld episode,
linking it to a tradition of Heorot having been a center of pagan wor-
ship (324–43 at 329). This interpretation clarifies a confusing digression
in Beowulf as much as Tolkien’s explanation of the Finnsburgh episode
in Finn and Hengest, but it is much easier to follow than that argument.
Tolkien not only provides a rationale for the actions and attitudes of the
characters in the digressions, but also gives a plausible explanation for
the poet’s decision to set the first part of the poem in Heorot.
Hrothgar’s great hall was, Tolkien argues, analogous to Camelot in
Arthurian texts. Although the two courts were not in any way geneti-
cally related to each other, they played equivalent roles in their cultural
traditions, and their similarity went deeper than merely both being the
home of the greatest king. Readers of an Arthurian tale know that cer-
tain people will be at Camelot, regardless of whether those characters
are part of the specific story being told. In addition to the wise and just
King Arthur, the beautiful and enigmatic Queen Guenevere will be in
attendance, as will Lancelot the great champion, and Gawain with his
bad temper and his generosity. Sir Kay will be abrasive to newcomers.
Mordred may be plotting; Agravaine sulky and resentful. The audi-
ence knows the personalities of the characters, so the author of any
single story does not need to explain in detail their presence or their
motivations. Tolkien asserts that the audience of Beowulf had similar
knowledge about Heorot. They knew that Unferth would be giving
dishonest counsel at the feet of the king (Tolkien calls him a “worm-
tongue”), that Hrothgar’s nephew Hrothulf would be lurking in the
background, that Wulfgar would answer the door and both challenge
and welcome the visitors. They even knew, perhaps, who Yrmenlaf
was and why Hrothgar would identify the slain Aschere as his older
brother. Heorot was the legendary heart of the Danish kingdom, per-
haps originally based on historical truth, and by the time of Beowulf a
well-developed setting for heroic stories. And, Tolkien thought, the
Danish court had a reputation for having a problem with a monster,
but the audience knew that this monster, as bad as its attacks were, was
not in the end responsible for the destruction of Heorot, for the great
hall was burned as a result of kin-strife. This was the legendary and

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historial (to use Tolkien’s terminology) setting into which the Beowulf
poet placed his hero story.
This interpretation is another compelling synthesis that illuminates
many obscure elements of Beowulf. But Tolkien does not make the com-
plete case—though the argument is more developed than his assertion
that the author of Beowulf had a written, Old English verse text as a
source for the beginning of the poem. If Heorot is the Camelot of the
Migration-era North (and independent evidence, such as that found
in Saxo Grammaticus, does support the idea), then we can see Beowulf
as being a compilation, made by the poet out of several kinds of mate-
rial: legends of Heorot (which Tolkien calls “Book of Kings”), tradi-
tional lore, historical knowledge about the peoples who lived around
the North Sea, biblical history, Christian theology, and a folktale motif
closely allied to mythology (which he calls “Tales of Wonder” [208]).
This last type of material is what Tolkien explores in his constructed
folktale, Sellic Spell.

5. SELLIC SPELL and “The Lay of Beowulf”

In line 2109 of Beowulf, the hero tells Hygelac, king of the Geats, that
in Denmark King Hrothgar recited a “syllic spell,” a “strange tale,” to
celebrate the defeat of Grendel. Sellic Spell is Tolkien’s “‘reconstruc-
tion’ or specimen” of such a tale (358). Composed primarily in the
early 1940s, Sellic Spell is an effort to produce “a form of story that would
have made linking with the Historial Legend easiest” (356).20
Scholars have worked to identify a putative folktale source for
Beowulf since the early days of Beowulf criticism. In 1878 Guðbrandr
Vigfússon noted similarities between Beowulf and certain episodes in
the Old Norse Grettis saga. In 1910 Friedrich Panzer pointed out that
the apparent parallels were those parts of the texts that were similar
to “the Bear’s son tale,” a widely distributed folktale in which a child
found in a bear’s den grows up to have enormous strength, which he
uses to defeat a monster or monsters.21 Scholars were convinced that
the texts are related to each other not only because of the general simi-
larity of characters and plot but also because of some specific details
that they have in common: the bear-hero first fights a monster in a hall
and then in a cave to which he is lowered. While he is underground,
his companions either betray him or conclude that he is dead and
abandon him, so that he is forced to escape from the cave by other
means before surprising them with his return to the hall.22 Continued
research tabulated many analogues to the “Bear’s son tale” and also
identified “the Hand and the Child” as a possible parallel to Beowulf’s
adventures with Grendel.

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Tolkien is thus part of a long tradition of reconstruction, from

which Sellic Spell differs not so much in content as in form. Instead of a
list of characteristics that a common source must have, Tolkien creates
a plausible version of that source, although he is quick to note that it
is “a story, not the story,” (355)23 and that his version differs substan-
tially from Beowulf in some points. He translates his folktale into Old
English to give it “a Northern cast of expression” (355), producing a
text that is simultaneously a charming story, a clever reconstruction of
a lost source, and (possibly unintentionally) an extremely useful tool
for teaching Old English.
In Sellic Spell the hero Beewolf (i.e., “Honey-thief” and thus “Bear”)
is found as a baby in a bear’s den. A clumsy and bad-tempered youth,
he is not held to be of much account by his people, but he does grow
up to have enormous strength. Beewolf’s first adventure is a swimming
match against Breaker (Breca in the poem) in which he is attacked
by and kills sea monsters. Learning that a monster has been terroriz-
ing the King of the Golden Hall (Hrothgar), Beewolf sets out to offer
his assistance. On his journey he encounters Handshoe (Hondscio),
so named because he wears enormous gloves that allow him to break
rocks. Handshoe joins Beewolf, and they sail to a strange land, where
they are greeted by Ashwood (either the Coast Guard or Wulfgar), who
can put to flight a host of men with his spear.
The three companions travel to the Golden Hall (Heorot), where
they meet the king and learn that the monster’s name is Grinder
(Grendel), for whose defeat the king offers a reward. Beewolf says he
will fight the monster with bare hands, but the men of the court are not
convinced that this will be an effective approach. Handshoe asserts that
the gloves that allow him to tear apart rocks will allow him to defeat
Grinder. The men of the court are more impressed, but they worry
that the monster will be harder than stone. Ashwood shows his spear,
and the men think he is most likely to triumph, since he has such a
weapon. The king’s counselor, Unfriend (Unferth), is not pleased, and
challenges Beewolf, asserting that the bear-hero had fled from Breaker
in the swimming match. Beewolf disagrees, tells the true story, and then
gives Unfriend a hug of friendship that the counselor barely survives.
That night, Ashwood remains in the hall, but when Grinder attacks
he is frightened, knocks over his spear, and is killed by the monster.
Handshoe takes his turn the next night, but when he sleeps his gloves
fall from his hands and he is easy prey for Grinder. Beewolf uses no
weapons, so they cannot fail him. He wrenches off Grinder’s arm and
the monster flees.
The king is pleased, but Unfriend taunts Beewolf for not killing
Grinder outright and suggests that he track the monster to its underwater

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lair. Beewolf agrees, but turns the tables by insisting that the counselor
come with him. Unfriend does and offers to lower a rope down the cliff
and wait for Beewolf, who dives into the water with Ashwood’s spear
and Handshoe’s gloves. There he is attacked by water-monsters, who
drag him into a cave, where he is set upon by Grinder’s mother. The
ogress snaps Ashwood’s spear and almost kills Beewolf with a knife, but
he spies a giant sword on the wall, which he uses to kill her. Explor-
ing the cave, he finds his passage blocked by a huge stone, but he uses
Handshoe’s gloves to hurl it aside. Behind it, he finds Grinder’s body
along with great wealth. He chops off the monster’s head and heads for
the surface with a bag of gold and jewels, but Unfriend has untied the
rope, and so the hero must swim very far across the water and make a
long journey back to the Golden Hall. There, he humiliates Unfriend
and is rewarded by the king. Eventually he returns to his own country,
where he celebrates, weds the king’s daughter, and in the end becomes
king himself. “As long as he lived he loved honey dearly, and the mead
in his hall was ever of the best” (385).
I have given such a long plot summary so that it is possible to see
how cunningly Tolkien has shaped his story so that it seems to explain
some of the more confusing aspects of Beowulf by suggesting that a
more elaborate folktale plot has been compressed into the form found
in the poem. For example, in Beowulf, Grendel’s immunity to weap-
ons is announced abruptly, almost as if it were a last-minute expla-
nation, and we do not learn the name of the warrior who was eaten
until Beowulf returns to Geatland and gives his report to King Hygelac.
Through Sellic Spell, Tolkien implies that the awkward way this informa-
tion is introduced is a problem originally created by the removal of the
hero’s companions24 and only partially fixed. Sellic Spell also suggests
that Unferth’s original hostility to Beowulf is not incompatible with
his later giving the hero a valuable sword before his adventure in the
mere: Tolkien imagines the evil counselor as having been consistently
malevolent but this character trait being dropped by the Beowulf poet
in order to make the poem more “Historial” and less of a folktale but
also more focused on Beowulf’s fights against monsters than on his
struggles with humans. Beowulf as we have it is a synthesis of this folk- or
fairy-tale material with the “Historial” or legendary tradition of Heorot
and the poet’s own tale of Beowulf:
Behind the stern young pride of Beowulf, on the surface
credible enough, lies the roughness of the uncouth fairy-
tale champion thrusting his way into the house. Behind
the courtesies (tinged with irony) of Hrothgar lies the
incredulity of the master of the haunted house; behind his

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lament for his vanquished knights lurk still the warnings

given to frighten off the new-comer, with stories of how
everyone who has tried to deal with the monster has come
to a bad end. (206)
Sellic Spell is both an entertaining story with obvious Tolkienian touches
(in phrasing and in detail) and a thought-provoking reconstruction of
the possible antecedents of Beowulf. Tolkien’s translation of part of the
text into Old English is a pleasure to read, and it is a very useful teach-
ing tool. One difficulty in teaching Anglo-Saxon is the lack of appeal-
ing prose texts. The easiest texts to read, such as the works of Ælfric,
are among the most tedious, and the most interesting are often too
challenging in language and style for novices. Some professors (myself
among them) start straight in on the poetry in order to retain student
interest, but the spare syntax of Old English poetry can take some get-
ting used to, and students at the beginning of their studies often can-
not read it smoothly in segments of more than one sentence. Sellic
Spell solves several of these problems at a stroke. The text is simultane-
ously a very clearly written piece of Old English prose and an enjoyable
story, and even beginning students find themselves able to read whole
paragraphs without having to stop to parse out tangled relationships
between subjects, verbs, and objects. The publication of Sellic Spell as a
separate, inexpensive paperback with a glossary would be a significant
addition to the teaching and learning of Anglo-Saxon.
“The Lay of Beowulf” is the final piece in the volume. A short ballad
that, Christopher Tolkien states, his father sung to him when he was
seven or eight years old (417), the Lay is a fast-moving treatment of the
story of Beowulf’s adventures in Denmark. Like Sam’s Troll Song in
Fellowship of the Ring, it can be sung to the tune of “The Fox Went Out
on a Winter’s Night.”25 There are two versions of the poem, “Beowulf
and Grendel” and the somewhat longer “Beowulf and the Monsters.”

6. Conclusions

J.R.R. Tolkien was the greatest philologist of his time, his like is not
in the world today, and Beowulf was his particular object of study. To
read his thoughts about the poem, even if these are at times unfin-
ished and or in imperfect form, is a great gift. The field of Beowulf
scholarship is therefore in Christopher Tolkien’s debt for editing
and publishing these materials and for presenting them in such a
clear, logical, and physically handsome form. It is difficult to imagine
any other arrangement of text, or any different set of editing prac-
tices, that would make Tolkien’s work on Beowulf more accessible to

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multiple audiences. Anglo-Saxonists will find the book valuable for

the commentaries and Tolkien’s overall view of Beowulf. Tolkienists
will likely be most interested in the characteristic style of the trans-
lation and the rhetorical flourishes in the commentaries. They and
general readers will thoroughly enjoy Sellic Spell, which is as narratively
tight as Farmer Giles of Ham and as evocative, in places, as Smith of Woot-
ton Major. Students may find the translation itself a clear and straight-
forward introduction to the poem. Teachers can use it and the Old
English version of Sellic Spell both to whet student interest for and to
begin teaching Anglo-Saxon.
Some readers may be disappointed that, with the exception of the
parallel between Unferth and Wormtongue and Tolkien’s interest in
the word gríma, the volume does not provide us with many previously
unnoted links between Beowulf and The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and
The Silmarillion. But the lack of direct borrowings from the translation
should not obscure the deep interconnection between Tolkien’s under-
standing of Beowulf and his creation of his literary works. The transla-
tion and commentaries make evident that Tolkien believed Beowulf to
have been a synthesis of different kinds of sources: literary, historical,
legendary, folktale, mythological. We see this same blending in his fic-
tion, in which folk motifs, mythological materials, and legends are set
in a matrix of invented history and languages that evolves to become
realistic enough that it, in turn, shapes the plot and characters. The
result is a compilation of originally disparate materials into a new uni-
fied artwork that resonates with long-established tradition while bear-
ing the impress of a single mind. It is no wonder that in “Beowulf: The
Monsters and the Critics,” Tolkien implied that he and the Beowulf poet
shared both motive and technique.26 They did.
Michael D. C. Drout
Wheaton College, Norton, MA

Notes

1. For a summary, see http://wormtalk.blogspot.com/2014/03/

tolkiens-beowulf-real-story.html (accessed April 4, 2015).
2. I omit from this list the manuscripts of materials that have been
substantially published previously, including the manuscripts upon
which Alan Bliss’s Finn and Hengest and my own edition of Beowulf
and the Critics are based. There are also a number of additional
manuscripts that contain commentary on other Old English
texts, but I have here listed only those that directly pertain to
Beowulf.

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3. This poem is printed (in various versions) in the Lays of Beleriand

(3–130).
4. MS Oxford, Bodleian Library Tolkien A 29 C, fol. 83.
5. Tolkien labeled the illustration “hringboga heorte gefysed.” The
image is used for the cover of the Beowulf translation.
6. Beowulf, lines 1357b–64; MS Oxford, Bodleian Library Tolkien A
29 C, fol. 45.
7. Ca. 1934 Tolkien wrote that Archibald Strong’s Beowulf, Translated
into Modern English Rhyming Verse was “on the whole the best mod-
ern English translation of Beowulf that I know, though it is rather
a transformation, since in spite of the reasons urged by the trans-
lator, I remain of the opinion that he selected the metré (that of
Morris’ Sigurd) which is the most foreign in mood and style to the
original of almost all the available metrés” (B&C 34, n. 3).
8. The puzzle was not with the notes when I examined them in 1999.
9. This estimate may be slightly optimistic, as reading all of Beowulf
aloud in Old English takes approximately three hours and 15 minutes.
10. For example, the arrival of Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli
at Edoras (TT, III, vi, 110–18) or Gandalf and Pippin’s entry into
Denethor’s presence (RK, V, i, 26–29).
11. An Anglo-Saxonist might wish that this order had been reversed,
but it is probably the right method of reference for the lay reader.
12. If indeed he would ever have presented it at all. The worry that
J.R.R. (in 1965) and Christopher Tolkien (in 1973) evinced in let-
ters about the hostility that “philological gunmen” might poten-
tially direct toward Tolkien’s translations or interpretations may
seem misplaced today, when Tolkien’s philological acumen and
creativity are universally admired, but it is important to remember
that Tolkien was not always as venerated (x–xi).
13. See, for example, the editors of the most recent revision of Friedrich
Klaeber’s of Beowulf, the authoritative edition of the poem, who state
that “in consequence of the studies of Tolkien (1936) and Bonjour
(1950: 3–11), the [opening 52 lines of the poem] has generally been
accepted as a deliberate part of the poem’s design” Fulk, Bjork, and
Niles (110).
14. Tolkien notes that there is no subject for the verb “gewat” in line
115 and that the larger passage would read much more smoothly if
lines 106–14 were deleted (162).

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15. Upon which, Tolkien says, the monster could have sat, gnawing
bones, if he had so desired (184).
16. Christopher Tolkien states that he has excluded from the text a
detailed discussion of the probabilities of Cynewulfian authorship
in different passages “since it is lengthy and difficult to follow amid
the abundant twofold line references” (312, n. 1).
17. I trust Tolkien’s “feel” more than any scholar in history, and the
hypothesis explains quite a number of features of the text, some
of which Tolkien was not aware of because they have only recently
been discovered by Lexomics Research Group using computer-
assisted techniques that were not available to him. Research is
ongoing in this area.
18. That such a war-mask helmet was part of the Sutton Hoo treasure
but in the poem is described as being characteristic of Beowulf’s
people may be oblique evidence that the Beowulf poet saw some
special cultural connection between the Anglo-Saxons and the
Geats, or it may simply be an example of a general North Sea cul-
ture in the Migration era.
19. The manuscript reading cannot be parsed without emendation. “Mere”
is “sea” or “lake,” but neither “wio” nor “inagasmilts” (nor the origi-
nal “ingannilts” that was corrected by the scribe) is a word in Anglo-
Saxon. The emended line, however, “the favor of the Merovingian
[i.e., of the king of the Merovingians] has been withheld [from us]”
makes eminent sense both philologically and contextually.
20. Tolkien’s emphasis.
21. The scholarship on this topic is enormous and far beyond the
scope of this essay. For a survey, see Andersson (125–48).
22. For a thorough discussion, see Fjalldal.
23. Tolkien’s emphasis.
24. In the version of the story printed by Grimm, Der Starke Hans, the
bear-hero’s companions are named Fir-twister and Stone-splitter.
25. See Shadow (142).
26. See Shippey (Road 46–48).

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Works Cited

Andersson, Theodore. “Sources and Analogues.” A Beowulf Hand-

book. Ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1997. 125–48.
Fjalldal, Magnús. The Long Arm of Coincidence: The Frustrated Connec-
tion between Beowulf and Grettis Saga. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1998.
Fulk, R. D., E. Robert Bjork, and John D. Niles. Klaeber’s Beowulf. 4th
ed. Toronto: Uinversity of Toronto Press, 2008.
Shippey, Tom. “Afterword.” Beowulf and Lejre. Ed. John D. Niles. Tempe:
Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2007. 469–79.
———. The Road to Middle-earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythol-
ogy. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Shippey, Tom, and Andreas Haarder. Beowulf: The Critical Heritage. New
York: Routledge, 1998.
Tolkien, J.R.R. Finn and Hengest. Ed. Alan Bliss. Boston: Houghton Mif-
flin, 1983.

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book, by
J.R.R. Tolkien, with illustrations by Pauline Baynes, edited by Christina
Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. London: HarperCollinsPublishers,
2014. 296 pp. £8.79. ISBN 9780007557271.
When Tolkien’s beloved maternal aunt, Jane Neave, asked him in Octo-
ber, 1961 if he “wouldn’t get out a small book with Tom Bombadil at the
heart of it, the sort of size of book that we old ‘uns can afford to buy for
Christmas presents” (as she is quoted in Bio 244), his correspondence
with her and with his publishers (quoted or summarized in this new vol-
ume) shows that he at first envisioned a modest booklet in the manner
of Beatrix Potter’s illustrated books for children. He had already pub-
lished a poem about “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” in the Oxford
Magazine for 16 February 1934, and he thought this might fill the bill
if Pauline Baynes, with whom he had developed a good working rela-
tionship, provided illustrations for the verses. His publishers, Allen &
Unwin, were interested, but asked to have a more substantial volume
with a number of poems.

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