Marc Hudson, also a translator of Beowulf (1990), wrote in the Sewanee Review (‘Of Beowulf: A Commentary and a Few More Leaves of Tolkien’s Tree’, Winter 2016) was disappointed with Tolkien’s work. ‘In truth, Tolkien’s translation is a faithful and scholarly reading of the poem. It has dignity, if not grace, and passages of some beauty’ (p. 158). But he finds its prose rhythms often ‘ungainly, not at all resembling “the common and compact prose patterns in ordinary language”’ as Christopher Tolkien has described them, and he criticizes ‘Tolkien’s habitual use of an antiquated diction’ although this approach still had currency when Tolkien made his translation c. 1926. ‘Even a casual perusal of his scholarly writing reveals that he is quite capable of writing vigorous modern prose. So we may conjecture that Tolkien admired Beowulf too much and cared too keenly about his reading of individual passages to veer very far from a strict word-by-word translation. Tolkien’s translation is a principled effort: its limitations, even its aforesaid failures, were possibly intended’ (p. 159). Hudson finds Tolkien’s commentary on Beowulf to be a greater treasure, derived ‘from his tremendous erudition – his knowledge of medieval Germanic literatures and languages, as well as of the cultures that gave rise to them – and from his mythopoeic imagination’ (p. 163). Although it has its eccentricities, the commentary is ‘often illuminating’ and ‘essential reading for all serious students of the poem, whether they are just entering the anterooms of Anglo Saxon literature or are emeriti professors seeking fresh insights into the poem and its daunting darknesses’ (p. 163). Hudson praises Sellic Spell as ‘a strong creative effort to imagine the wonder tale, the myth which was the matrix, as Tolkien conceived it, to which the Beowulf poet added the historical matter of the poem’, but describes The Lay of Beowulf as ‘rather awkward rhythmic contraptions, occasionally redeemed by memorable imagery, and lurking in the homely borderlands of the literary ballad’ (p. 164).
Jeremy Noel-Tod, writing in the Telegraph (‘Beowulf, Translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, Review’, 20 May 2014), was also disappointed, in the first instance because the translation is in prose rather than verse, ‘and long-winded prose at that. This literal rendering is faithful to the formulaic circumlocutions, inversions and amplifications of Old English poetry. … Moments of comparable potency flash out from Tolkien’s prose’, however, ‘especially during the grand guignol fights with three monsters that were at the heart of his enthusiasm for the poem’. Noel-Tod is by no means unique among reviewers of the book in preferring, or at least prominently mentioning, the popular 1999 verse translation by poet Seamus Heaney, which is seen as more contemporary (to the present day) and less academic.
Kevin Kiernan, a retired professor of English at the University of Kentucky, argues on the website The Conversation that
the lofty metre of Beowulf is lost even in admirable poetic versions like Seamus Heaney’s, which is recognised as a new poem. … Prose translations such as Tolkien’s claim to be more ‘faithful’, but this fidelity refers to the literal translation of poetry, which captures only the facts of the story in unavoidably stodgy prose, struggling to sort out the word order while losing the grandeur of the verse.
Because Tolkien himself denigrated his translation (in his April 1926 letter to Kenneth Sisam, where he wrote that it was complete but not to his liking), Kiernan holds that it should not have been published. ‘Tolkien’s own creative legacy is secure. It will be a travesty if his Beowulf legacy turns out to be a translation he was the first to disparage’ (‘Publishing Tolkien’s Beowulf Translation Does Him a Disservice’, 29 May 2014).
In the New Statesman (‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf: One Man’s Passion for the Threshold between Myth and Reality’, 29 May 2014) John Garth comments that Tolkien, ‘with too many projects to fit in one lifespan, would have needed a hard push, from a publisher and perhaps from a strong-armed friend such as C.S. Lewis, to finalise and publish his prose translation. The version that survives, though, is far from prosaic. He cannot conceal the strangeness of the underlying idiom but his cadence is commanding and his language evocative. …’ Garth feels, however, that although ‘students may prefer Tolkien for accuracy [of the text] and fans will snap his book up … it won’t convert admirers of Heaney’s poetic latitude’.
To date the most substantial response to Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary is the review by Michael D.C. Drout published in Tolkien Studies 12 (2015). Another Anglo-Saxonist, Drout has made a study of Tolkien’s papers related to Beowulf, at one time preparatory to a planned edition of both the verse and prose translations. The ‘volume not only gives us important insights into Tolkien’s thought’, he writes, ‘but also a rather significant contribution to Beowulf studies despite being published nearly three-quarters of a century after it was written’ (p. 149); but he is puzzled that Tolkien’s verse translation of Beowulf was excluded. He analyzes and discusses the prose translation at length, concluding that ‘in both content and style, Tolkien’s is the equal of any previous prose translation (though this is in itself, sadly, not a particularly high standard). It is accurate and transmits some of the high formality and serious tone that Beowulf has in Old English. I doubt, however, that it will replace Seamus Heaney’s poetic translation of Beowulf as the text most introductory students encounter’ (p. 157).
Like other reviewers, Drout finds Tolkien’s commentary on Beowulf ‘in many ways more interesting than the translation itself, especially because it is at times quite far from the consensus mainstream. Marked by great originality, the commentary regularly displays the signal quality of Tolkien’s scholarship: his ability to combine the rigor and knowledge of a hard-core philologist with the creativity and sensibility of a literary creator’ (p. 157). Scholars of Beowulf, he says,
should read the commentary carefully, if for no other reason than for the pleasure of watching one of the greatest philologists of the 20th century plying his trade. Many of Tolkien’s suggestions for individual emendations are both innovative and convincing, with detailed philological arguments supporting insightful readings of the text. His general view of the artistic and aesthetic qualities of Beowulf in the commentaries is consistent with his large-scale interpretation of the poem in ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ and is therefore both familiar and well within the current critical consensus. [pp. 158–9]
Tolkien’s ‘interpretation of the history, composition, and sources of the poem’, however, are ‘novel and idiosyncratic’ (p. 159). Drout notes in particular his ‘heretical’ view, ‘in today’s critical climate’ (p. 160), that Beowulf reflects the work of both its original author (a monk in Mercia, living long after paganism had disappeared from England) and a much later poet (perhaps Cynewulf), in a time of pagans, who wished to show that Christianity was the path to eternal life.
See further, Mark Atherton, ‘“Seeing a Picture before Us”: Tolkien’s Commentary in His Translation of Beowulf’, Mallorn 55 (Winter 2014), pp. 21–2.
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