SYNOPSIS
Tolkien argues that critics of Beowulf to 1936 had viewed it ‘as a quarry of fact and fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art’ (p. 5). It had not been considered as a poem, though it is ‘in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite overshadows the historical content’ (p. 7). Nor have critics appreciated the importance to the poem of the monsters that Beowulf defeats: Grendel and the dragon (Tolkien does not include Grendel’s mother). Quoting, inter alia, an influential statement by W.P. Ker that Beowulf has a ‘radical defect, a disproportion that puts the irrelevances [the monsters] in the centre and the serious things [allusions to history and other stories] on the outer edges’ (pp. 10–11), Tolkien remarks that while critics have praised the detail, tone, style, and total effect of Beowulf, they have felt that the talent of the Beowulf-poet ‘has all been squandered on an unprofitable theme: as if Milton had recounted the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in noble verse’ (p. 13). ‘The high tone, the sense of dignity, alone is evidence in Beowulf of the presence of a mind lofty and thoughtful’, he writes.
It is, one would have said, improbable that such a man would write more than three thousand lines (wrought to a high finish) on matter that is really not worth serious attention. … Or that he should in the selection of his material, in the choice of what to put forward, what to keep subordinate ‘upon the outer edges’, have shown a puerile simplicity much below the level of the characters he himself draws in his own poem. [pp. 13–14]
The great critics of Beowulf have thought otherwise partly because they have been more concerned with ‘research in comparative folk-lore, the objects of which are primarily historical or scientific’, and because the allusions contained in Beowulf ‘have attracted curiosity (antiquarian rather than critical) to their elucidation; and this needs so much study and research that attention has been diverted from the poem as a whole, and from the function of the allusions, as shaped and placed, in the poetic economy of Beowulf as it is’ (pp. 14–15). Also there is ‘a real question of taste … a judgement that the heroic or tragic story on a strictly human plane is by nature superior’ (p. 15); but one must consider the ancient taste of the audience of the poem as well as the modern taste of its critics.
Beowulf, Tolkien claims, helps us to esteem ‘the old heroes: men caught in the chains of circumstance or of their own character, torn between duties equally sacred, dying with their backs to the wall’ (p. 17). Its poet has devoted his whole work to the theme of ‘defeat inevitable yet unacknowledged … and has drawn the struggle in different proportions, so that we may see man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time’ (p. 18). The monsters of the poem are essential to this, ‘fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem’ (p. 19). They are at a point of fusion between the Heroic Age and Christendom, ‘adversaries of God’ but still ‘mortal denizens of the material world, in it and of it’ (p. 20). They are also connected to the theory of courage, for which Tolkien turns to ‘the tradition of pagan imagination as it survived in Icelandic’, in which men are allied with the Northern gods, able to share in the resistance to Chaos and Unreason, though defeat is inevitable. ‘At least in this vision of the final defeat of the humane (and of the divine made in its image), and in the essential hostility of the gods and heroes on the one hand and the monsters on the other, we may suppose that pagan English and Norse imagination agreed’ (p. 21). In Beowulf both the specifically Christian and the old gods were suppressed, but ‘the heroic figures, the men of old … remained and still fought on until defeat. For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come. A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world. The monsters remained the enemies of mankind, the infantry of the old war, and became inevitably the enemies of the one God …’ (p. 22).
Tolkien concludes that Beowulf is ‘a poem by a learned man writing of old times, who looking back on the heroism and sorrow feels in them something permanent and something symbolical’ (p. 26), a learned ‘Englishman of the seventh or eighth centuries’ (p. 27). ‘It is essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death’ (p. 28). Tolkien analyzes and praises its structure and the harmony of this with its elements, language, metre, and theme. ‘We have … in Beowulf a method and structure that within the limits of the verse-kind approaches rather to sculpture or painting. It is a composition not a tune’ (p. 30).
HISTORY
The Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture is given biennially. Endowed in 1924, it deals with ‘Old English or Early English Language and Literature, or a philological subject connected with the history of English, more particularly during the early periods of the language, or cognate subjects, or some textual study and interpretation’. The subject is left entirely to the chosen scholar, who is nominated by a specialist committee of fellows of the British Academy, and is sent an invitation to deliver the lecture at least two years in advance of the event. Tolkien therefore would have received an invitation from the British Academy c. 1934.
He derived Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics from a longer work, originally entitled Beowulf with Critics, later Beowulf and the Critics. The latter exists in two manuscripts, the second much enlarged from the first. Both were transcribed and annotated by Michael D.C. Drout in Beowulf and the Critics, first published in 2002. Drout dates the two texts, on various grounds, to between August 1932 and 23 October 1935; the first of these dates refers to the composition of a poem by *C.S. Lewis which Tolkien quotes in full. Internal evidence and general prose style clearly mark the work as a series of lectures; and given its subject and presumed terminus post quem, its first text seems likely to have been prepared for the lecture series ‘Beowulf: General Criticism’ which Tolkien was scheduled to give at *Oxford beginning in Michaelmas Term 1933. (At that time he also gave a series entitled ‘The Historical and Legendary Traditions in Beowulf and Other Old English Poems’, concerned, however, with the background of those works rather than their criticism. The manuscript of these lectures, the first page of which is dated at the time of writing ‘October 1933’, is preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives).)
Tolkien produced the second, expanded manuscript of Beowulf and the Critics presumably for a later iteration of ‘Beowulf: General Criticism’, scheduled for Michaelmas Term 1934 and 1936. For delivery to the British Academy in November 1936, he revised the second manuscript into a more concise and polished form; see comments in Drout, introduction to Beowulf and the Critics as published, and Drout’s ‘Rhetorical Evolution of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ in The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (2006).
In late 1936 or early 1937 Tolkien sent the text of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, with an appendix and notes, to his friend and fellow Beowulf scholar *R.W. Chambers. On 2 February 1937 Chambers advised him to make no cuts, and to include the appendix (concerning Grendel’s titles, Christian and pagan ideas of praise and judgement as expressed in Beowulf, and particular difficulties arising from lines 175–88 of the poem). On 6 February, apparently in reply to a nervous message by Tolkien, Chambers wrote to reassure him that his lecture held together well, and again that it should be printed in its entirety. After its first publication in July 1937, Tolkien received numerous letters of congratulations from his academic colleagues.
It may be a measure (if unscientific) of the attention paid to Tolkien’s lecture that in the copy of the 1936 Proceedings of the British Academy shelved in the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library,