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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;
"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.
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
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/
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.