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Tolkien and the Beowulf Saga
jackalski sent in this story about a translation of the Beowulf epic by J.R.R. Tolkien being discovered and which is now set to be published next year. Tolkien found Beowulf inspirational.
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It's a timeless tale and Tolkein is a great author, this won't reach the best seller list because of the name of the author, but because I'm sure it will be great. Such a shame that it has been hidden for so long.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Tolkien scholars have known about the Beow. translation and commentary for decades. This is nothing but a blatant attempt by either the publisher or the scholar to hype and market their book. It wasn't 'discovered'. It has always been in the Tolkien Collection at the Dept. of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. And thus available to any qualified scholar. However, in all fairness, Michael Drout (the editor), may probably be the first scholar to actually have the time, motivation and energy to accomplish the task of actually getting this thing published. Also, I believe the figure of 2000 pages sounds a bit inflated, its far less than that. In my view, Tolkien's Beow. work would probably have been published by now by the Tolkien Estate if they had thought it worthwhile. But with any book selling like crazy that has Tolkien's name on it: Now is the time to do it.
The Silmarillion is hard because it was never finished. Tolkien had various stories written out to various degrees of completion and then his son combined them all into the Silmarillion. It probably would have been better as a collection of short stories.
You can't deny that some of the stories are excellent - Fingolfin vs. Morgoth or Beren and Luthien for example. In the movies Peter Jackson seems to be using the parallels between Beren/Luthien and Aragorn/Arwen to flesh out the whole romance storyline that was barely present in the books.
Even discounting the value of the Silmarillion itself, after reading the Silmarillion you will get much more from the Lord of The Rings.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Not so; there are only three supernatural beings who have roles in the plot, but others are mentioned. For example, in this passage:
That's from the Robinson and Mitchel edition, titled "Beowulf: An Edition". In case you can't read Anglo-Saxon, here is my (prose) translation:
This is a passage describing the origin of all unholy creatures from Cain following his banishment by God. Grendel (and his mother) were descended from Cain. "Eotenas" is a synonym for "giants"; "gigantas" is probably a loan-word from Latin.
So the version you read in high school is correct, it's just that elves and orcs and giants don't figure very large in the poem. Elves are only mentioned a couple of times, and are always evil; orcs are mentioned all of once in the passage above, and the term is not clearly defined, though my glossary offers "evil spirits of the dead." Giants are mentioned several times, but only as a race that got destroyed in Noah's flood.
Unfortunately Heaney's translation got involved with a fixup by the booker prize committee which put off a lot of people.
Not many literature buffs here, I guess. The Booker Prize is given for new fiction, and so Heaney's Beowulf isn't even eligible.
However, the two books did go head to head in 1999 for a somewhat less influential award, the Whitbread Prize. Both Heaney and Rowling won in their respective categories (poetry and children's), but the Whitbread judges go on to pick a "book of the year" from all the winners, and they did pick Beowulf as the book of the year.
That aside, I really don't think you can make a case that Rowling writes better than Heaney.