Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary Paperback – 4 Aug. 2015

This book is a real gem and a great literary feat. There is a lot of hidden treasure waiting to be explored is this book which Christopher Tolkien, son of JRR Tolkien, has expertly edited. JRR Tolkien's translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, is both scholarly and easy to read. I have read several English translations of Beowulf. I found this translation by JRR to be the most accurate literal translation in English of Beowulf. It may not sing as lyrically as Seamus Heaney's translation - but it is clearly more literal and accurate for helping modern English readers understand the story of Beowulf.The real rich treasure lies buried in the copious footnotes and rich commentary on Beowulf taken from JRR Tolkien's lectures which he gave to students at Oxford University. The third treasure is a poem written by JRR Tolkien as a prequel to the original poem, Beowulf.You get more than your money's worth in this rich book.

If you are a long standing Tolkien reader like myself then you will undoubtedly get around to reading this. Beowulf was a wellspring of Tolkien's imagination and a work that deeply concerned him as a scholar of Anglo-Saxon. The northern and Anglo-Saxon heroic ethos of the poem inspired important aspects of middle-earth and the reader will recognise some passages as having inspired episodes in the Lord of the Rings.However, this is neither an easy or very readable translation. It is a prose translation with archaic and rather stiff language. Tolkien never published it which suggests that he was either unhappy with it and wanted to do further work to it (which he never got around to finishing, as is all too typical with Tolkien) or that he wrote it as a crib and an aid to further study. The best thing is Tolkien's illuminating commentary (which sadly does not cover the entire poem but only the first half which was set in the Oxford syllabus) and the accompanying poem Sellic Spell, an imaginative recreation of the folk tale Tolkien assumed must have lain behind Beowulf.If you have never read Beowulf, don't make Tolkien's translation your first reading. I recommend first reading Tolkiens magisterial essays on the poem - "Beowulf - the Monsters and the Critics" and "On Translating Beowulf" - both of which are reprinted in the easily available collection of essays "The Monsters and the Critics". That should whet your appetite for the poem. Then read a good modern verse translation - I like the one by Seamus Heaney. Then some background reading on the poem and the age would be useful - I recommend Tom Shippey's recent small book, "Beowulf and the North before the Vikings". This will give you the background to appreciate Tolkien's version and get the most from the commentary.Despite my reservations about the readability of Tolkien's translation, this book is essential for any lover of Tolkien or Beowulf.

Hwaet! First, before you pop this book into your basket, you might like to know that for the time being, it's also available in one of Harper Collins's fancy deluxe editions - see Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell. This version comes in a slipcase matching those of its predecessors. The slipcase is covered in an episcopally purple paper, and decorated with a golden version of the Tolkien dragon that once embellished Allen and Unwin's deluxe edition of The Hobbit. The slipcase fits the book snugly, but not so tightly that extracting the book is difficult, which is more than I can say of my copy of The Fall of Arthur! The book itself - rather fatter than it looks in Amazon's photo - is quarter-bound in purple and grey, with the same golden dragon coiling on the front board and a golden JRRT monogram on the back. As usual, the monogram also appears in gold on the spine. The book is printed by L.E.G.O. Spa on lovely thick, opaque, creamy paper, and bound in signatures with brown and white head- and tail-bands and a grey silk ribbon marker.A folding frontispiece shows Tolkien's original colour painting of the dragon, as well as two black and white Tolkien drawings of Grendel's Mere. (No sign of Angelina Jolie, alas.) At the foot of the half-title page, another Tolkien-drawn dragon confronts a warrior who looks in imminent danger of being lunch. It all adds up to a book that's very handsome indeed, and more than beautiful enough to justify its premium pricing.As for the text - which seems to be the same in both editions - the book begins with a seven page preface by Christopher Tolkien. Then there's Christopher's eleven page introduction to his father's translation. The crib-style prose translation itself, with marginal line numbers to aid reference to the original poem, occupies ninety-three pages, supplemented by twenty-four pages of JRRT's notes. Next we get Christopher's five page introduction to the commentary that he has assembled from his father's lectures, which, at two hundred and seventeen pages, is by far the biggest part of the book. Finally, as a dessert after the scholarly main course, we happily get some JRRT inventions: there's a sixty page section devoted to the great man's Sellic Spell, which is an attempt to imagine a folk tale that the Beowulf poet could have used as a source, and then nine concluding pages for JRRT's Beowulf Lays. Conspicuous by its absence, as noted by J. Grigsby, is JRRT's celebrated British Academy lecture, still in print in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, and neither do we get that book's chapter On Translating Beowulf or JRRT's unfinished rendition of Beowulf into modern verse.Subjectively - and writing as an unscholarly hobbitomane less interested in Beowulf than in Tolkien - I rank this in the middle of JRRT's professorial output; it's distinctly more accessible than his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode, but not as much fun as his translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: With Pearl and Sir Orfeo or The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. JRRT's Beowulf is compelling, but it does suffer from being cast in prose instead of in verse. Reading it just hasn't been as engaging as listening to Seamus Heaney reading his own verse translation of the poem on Radio 4. (An abridged audio download of Seamus's recording is available from amazon - see Beowulf: A New Translation.)JRRT's commentary, by contrast, is impossible to fault. His imaginative involvement in Beowulf's world is so deep that it animates his erudition with a wonderful vitality, and for those of us who love The Lord of the Rings, there are many passages that feel like premonitions of Rohan. Because of course, there would be no Rohirrim if the Anglo Saxons hadn't inspired them, and not the least of the pleasures of this book is the way in which it hints at the alchemy that turned Beowulf's culture into Théoden's. For serious students of Beowulf, this book is no doubt essential, but I'd expect that many a fan of The Lord of the Rings, OE specialist or not, would find plenty in it to enjoy.