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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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He also did a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which (in the copy I have) is bundled with translations of both Perl and Sir Orfeo. IMHO his translation of Sir Gawain is much better than the one we were forced to read in my high school english class. Would have been cool to have had a copy of his Beowulf translation to compare to the one we had.
I dont know of any online shops that carry the book, but the ISBN number is 0-345-27760-0 if you want to look for it or special order.
I really like Tolkien, but I had to really push myself to get through the Silmarillion... Somehow a line by line explanation strikes me as being much less than 'exciting'!
a ^= b; b ^= a; a ^= b;
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
"I started looking through, and realised I had found an entire book of material that had never seen the light of day. As I turned the page, there was Tolkien's fingerprint in a smudge of ink."
If you have Tolkien's fingerprint memorized, it's safe to say you REALLY NEED A NEW HOBBY.
I feel sorry for this guy's daughter.
This will be wonderful. He had already translated Pearl and Sir Orfeo, two Middle English pieces before he died, plus Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. These are very different pieces though, much more lyrical and romantic. Perhaps the best known translation he did which will compare with this is of a fragment (about 100 lines) of an Anglo Saxon piece called "The Death of Beorthelm". He wrote a sequel, The Homecoming of Beortnoth Beorthelms' Son, as well.
I am interested to see how his Beowulf will compare with Seamus Heaney's truly masterful work, published a couple of years ago. However, given that Heaney is a poet, and Tolkien was a philologist, I sha'n't be surprised if they differ widely...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
First and foremost I think that Tokien was inspired by the war he fought in, WW1: Huge battles and complex alliances between murky powers in which little English folk from the countryside get caught up, don't fully understand, and yet trust that somehow they are acting for the better--meanwhile massive slaughter, marshes full of dead people, and so on.
On the literary side, though, he does seem to have borrowed from all sorts of great legends. I'm sure Beowulf must be one, as the LOTR, etc., are quests. Tolkien clearly believes (in his stories anyway) in caste society: dividing people up into noble classes, low classes, and so on--the line of kings figures prominently in his work.
Moreover his creation mythology interestingly enough mixes the Christian mythology of Lucifer into a Norse mythology setting. You have Melkor rebelling against Eru much as Lucifer rebelled against God, and the whole Melkor/Morgoth/Sauron thing sounds remarkably like the story of Lucifer's fall from grace. And you have the Elves being kicked out of Valinor much as Christian mythology has men being kicked out of the Garden of Eden--with the twist of free choice.
And yet the whole thing is in a Norse mythological setting--with the gods living in great halls across the ocean--and you could even sail there if you were a good enough seafarer, and a range of gods who are somehow a higher caste than men, and yet somehow also their equals. (The Vala, Elves and Men all having been created by the same maker, Eru).
In a way I think much of British quest literature has been an attempt to weave the old tales of Beowulf into the fabric of Christian mythology, and I think that's exactly what Tolkien does.
...to those who now want to read Beowulf:
Don't. Listen to it instead. It was a myth, part of an oral tradition. You really don't get the same thing out of reading it.
There's a recording available of Seamus Heaney reading his translation of it here.
Triv
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.
A translation can make a huge difference. For example, I was reading Aristophanes' "The Clouds", and I was reading a good translation. It was hilarious - like an Ancient Greek episode of the Simpsons (a good episode). My friend, who had a crappy translation, hated it and found it humorless. For example, when the lizard shits in Socrates' face, my book says "a lizard shitted on his face!", which is funny, whereas my friend's book says something like "a lizard befouled upon him.", which isn't.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
There are other translations, you know, if you're one of those people who reads the book before seeing the movie, maybe read one translation before the other?
http://www.lone-star.net/literature/beowulf/
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.