Beowulf is also often seen as an influence on *The Lord of the Rings, especially in regard to the men and culture of Rohan and in the heroism of the hobbits. For example, Tolkien acknowledged that there was probably a connection between the wasting away of Beowulf’s sword, with which he cut off Grendel’s head and killed Grendel’s mother, and both the melting of the Witchking’s knife in Book I, Chapter 12 of The Lord of the Rings and the withering of Merry’s sword in Book V, Chapter 6; and Christopher Tolkien has noted the distinct echo of the passages in Beowulf in which Beowulf and his men are accosted by the watchman on the coast of Denmark, and the challenge made to Aragorn and his companions by the doorward of Edoras in Book III, Chapter 6 (a text written in draft in Old English). On The Lord of the Rings and Beowulf, see further, Reader’s Companion, and on the subject of Beowulf and Rohan, see Clive Tolley, ‘And the Word Was Made Flesh’, Mallorn 32 (September 1995). Tolley also comments on Tolkien and Beowulf in ‘Tolkien and the Unfinished’, in Scholarship and Fantasy: Proceedings of The Tolkien Phenomenon, May 1992, Turku, Finland, ed. K.J. Battarbee (1993), noting, for example, that Unferth in Beowulf has a counterpart in Edoras, in the person of Gríma Wormtongue.
Beowulf was also an acknowledged source for the episode concerning King Sheave (Scyld Scefing) in *The Lost Road. ‘I have been getting a lot of new ideas about Prehistory lately (via Beowulf and other sources of which I may have written)’, Tolkien wrote to Christopher, ‘and want to work them into the long shelved time-travel story I began’ (18 December 1944, Letters, p. 105).
In September 1927 Tolkien painted in The Book of Ishness (*Art) a coiled dragon, inscribed ‘hrinȝboȝa heorte ȝefysed’ (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 48). These words are derived from a passage in Beowulf, ‘ða wæs hrinȝboȝan heorte ȝefysed / saecce tó séceanne’ (‘now was the heart of the coiling beast stirred to come out to fight’). In May 1928, also in The Book of Ishness, Tolkien drew an untitled watercolour sketch of a warrior with spear and shield facing a fire-breathing dragon (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 49); on 1 January 1938 he used this picture in a slide lecture at the University Museum, Oxford to illustrate how the king and his attendant fought the dragon at the end of Beowulf. In July 1928 Tolkien drew two pictures of Grendel’s mere, each inscribed ‘wudu wyrtum fæst’ (‘wood clinging by its roots’; Artist and Illustrator, figs. 50, 51).
By the early 1930s Tolkien composed two short poems, or two versions of the same poem, concerned with Beowulf and Grendel, or with Beowulf, Grendel, and Grendel’s mother. These were published in 2014 as *The Lay of Beowulf in Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell.
In the early 1940s Tolkien wrote a story, *Sellic Spell, as an attempt to reconstruct the Anglo-Saxon tale that lies behind the folk- or fairy-tale element in Beowulf (here ‘Beewolf’). In 1945 Tolkien’s friend *Gwyn Jones, Professor of English at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, read Sellic Spell and remarked that it should be prescribed for all university students of Beowulf.
Books and essays about Beowulf are legion. Among these, the present authors have found the following particularly helpful: *R.W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn (3rd edn. with a supplement by C.L. Wrenn, 1959); Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment, ed. C.L. Wrenn, rev. W.F. Bolton (1973); Beowulf by T.A. Shippey (1978); Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Anthology, ed. R.D. Fulk (1991); A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (1997); A Critical Companion to Beowulf by Andy Orchard (2003); and The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment, ed. Leonard Neidorf (2014). Wrenn’s preface to his Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment credits Tolkien, together with R.W. Chambers, with ‘what is valuable in my approach to Beowulf’ (p. 5). See also references cited in the entry *Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.
Michael D.C. Drout describes the manuscripts of Tolkien’s translations of and commentaries on Beowulf in the Bodleian Library in Tolkien Studies 12 (2015), pp. 150–1.
Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell. Translation by J.R.R. Tolkien of *Beowulf and related material, edited with notes and commentary by *Christopher Tolkien, first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins, London, and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, in May 2014.
The volume contains Tolkien’s Modern English prose translation of Beowulf, with commentary drawn from his *Oxford lectures on Beowulf; *Sellic Spell, an adaptation of Beowulf in the form of a folk-tale; and two versions of a short poem, *The Lay of Beowulf. Three illustrations by Tolkien related to Beowulf are reproduced on the dust-jacket, and a fourth on the half-title.
The page breaks and line numbering in the American edition from p. 21 to p. 105 differ from those in the British edition, and thus are out of sync with references in the notes and commentary.
HISTORY
Tolkien had translated the entirety of Beowulf into Modern English prose by ?26 April 1926, when he wrote of it to *Kenneth Sisam of Oxford University Press (*Publishers). (See further, the subsection ‘Translations by Tolkien’ in the article *Beowulf.) But it was not yet to Tolkien’s satisfaction, and on 25 October 1932, when he suggested its publication to R.W. Chapman at Oxford University Press, he felt that it would require introductory matter on Old English verse and notes on textual problems. As Christopher Tolkien comments in his preface to the 2014 volume, his father, as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, still had years of study of Beowulf ahead of him, and in the course of time made many changes to his translation, often in accord with discussion of textual problems in his lectures about the poem; but when he revised his opinion about a textual point, he did not always alter his translation.
In the event, Tolkien never brought his translation into a final form. Its existence, however, was well-known; and in view of Tolkien’s ‘reputation and eminence in Old English literary and linguistic scholarship’, as Christopher Tolkien writes, its publication was a matter of importance. And yet there was ‘no obvious way’ to present the text: ‘To alter the translation in order to accommodate a later opinion was out of the question. It would of course have been possible to attach my own explanatory notes, but it seemed very much better to include in this book actual passages from the lectures in which [Tolkien] expounded his views on the textual problems in question’ (Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, p. viii).
Tolkien’s lectures display, ‘amid the huge library of Beowulf criticism, a very evident individuality of conception and insight’ (p. viii), and the commentary Christopher Tolkien drew from them ‘is and can only be a personal selection from a much larger body of writing, in places disordered and very difficult, and strongly concentrated on the earlier part of the poem’ (p. xi). The lectures from which the commentary was largely derived are concerned with the portion of Beowulf that Oxford English students were required to learn (lines 1–1650). The later part of the commentary, however, was drawn from yet ‘another set of lectures, addressed to the “philologists”, clearly written and lengthy discussions of major problems in the interpretation of the text of Beowulf’ (p. 132). (See further, the subsection ‘Lectures on