Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell

by J. R. R. Tolkien

  CONTENTS

  A Note to the Reader

  Preface

  Introduction to the Translation

  Beowulf

  Notes on the text of the Translation

  Introductory note to the Commentary

  Commentary

  Sellic Spell

  The Lay of Beowulf

  Also by J.R.R. Tolkien

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  The page numbers in this text relate to the printed version of the book; they do not match the pages of your ebook. Where no hyperlink is present you can use your ebook reader’s search tool to find a specific word or passage.

  PREFACE

  Since the nature and purpose of this book could very easily be misunderstood I offer here an explanation, which I hope will also be a justification.

  It is well-known that there exists a translation of Beowulf into modern English prose made by J.R.R. Tolkien; and in view of his reputation and eminence in Old English literary and linguistic scholarship the fact that it has remained unpublished for so many years has even become a matter of reproach.

  I am responsible for this; and the primary reason, or explanation, is fairly simple. The translation was completed by 1926, when my father was 34; before him lay two decades as the professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, two decades of further study of Old English poetry, together with an arduous programme of lectures and classes, and reflection most especially on Beowulf. From his lectures of those years there survives a great deal of writing on the poem, including much on the interpretation of the detail of the text. Clearly, there was no step-by-step relationship between the lectures and the translation, but changes made to the translation (and there are many) at different times can often be seen to accord with discussion of the questions in his lectures. In other cases he did not alter the translation in the light of his later, revised opinion.

  There seemed no obvious way in which to present a text that was in one sense complete, but at the same time evidently ‘unfinished’. Merely to print what appears to have been his latest choice in the translation of a word, a phrase, or a passage and to leave it at that seemed misleading and mistaken. 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 he expounded his views on the textual problems in question.

  He did indeed explicitly intend that the series of lectures on Beowulf which I have used in this book should be a ‘textual commentary’, closely concerned with verbal detail. In practice however he found this restriction confining: he was very often led from the discussion of a word or phrase to more far-reaching exposition of the characteristics of the Old English poet, his thought and his style and his purpose; and in the course of the lectures there are many short but illuminating ‘essays’, arising from specific points in the text. As he wrote, ‘I try to do it, yet it is not really possible or satisfactory, to separate one’s commentary into “legendary content” and “text”.’

  There is here, amid the huge library of Beowulf criticism, a very evident individuality of conception and insight; and in these characteristically expressed observations and arguments there can be seen the closeness of his attention to the text, his knowledge of the ancient diction and idiom, and his visualization of scenes thus derived. There emerges, as it seems to me, his vivid personal evocation of a long-vanished world – as it was perceived by the author of Beowulf; the philological detail exists to clarify the meaning and intention of that poet.

  Thus after much reflection I have thought to enlarge and very greatly extend the scope of this book by extracting a good deal of material from the written form of those lectures, providing (as I hope) a readily comprehensible commentary arising in express relationship with the actual text of the poem, and yet often extending beyond those immediate limits into expositions of such matters as the conception of the wrecca, or the relation of the characters in the poem to the power of ‘fate’.

  But such a use of these abundant writings, in a way that was of course by no means intended, necessarily raises problems of presentation that are not easy to resolve. In the first place, this is a work of my father’s (distinct in this from all save one of the editions of his unpublished writings that I have made) which is not of his own conceiving, but is concerned with a specific work, of great celebrity and with a massive history of criticism extending over two centuries. And in the second place, the lectures in question were addressed to an audience of students whose work on Old English was in part based on the demanding language of Beowulf, and his purpose was to elucidate and illuminate, often in precise detail, that part of the original text that was prescribed for study. But his translation would of course have been addressed primarily, though not exclusively, to readers with little or no knowledge of the original language.

  In this book thus conceived I have tried to serve the different interests of possible readers; and in this connection there is a curious and interesting partial parallel with my father’s dilemma that he expressed in a letter to Rayner Unwin of November 1965, concerning his inability to compose the ‘editorial’ matter to accompany his completed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

  I am finding the selection of notes, and compressing them, and the introduction, difficult. Too much to say, and not sure of my target. The main target is, of course, the general reader of literary bent but with no knowledge of Middle English; but it cannot be doubted that the book will be read by students, and by academic folk of ‘English Departments’. Some of the latter have their pistols loose in their holsters. I have, of course, had to do an enormous amount of editorial work, unshown, in order to arrive at a version; and I have, as I think, made important discoveries with regard to certain words, and some passages (as ‘importance’ in the little world of Middle English goes). . . . I think it desirable to indicate to those who possess the original where and how my readings differ from the received.

  Years later, in 1974, soon after my father’s death, I referred to this letter of his when writing to Rayner Unwin on the subject of a posthumous publication of his translation of Sir Gawain. I said that I had searched through his notes on Gawain, but ‘I can find no trace of any that would be remotely suitable for “the general reader of literary bent but with no knowledge of Middle English” – or for most students, for that matter’; and I wondered ‘whether it was not his complete inability to resolve this question that prevented him from ever finishing the book.’ I said that the solution that I (doubtfully) favoured was to have no ‘learned’ commentary at all; and continued:

  But quite apart from this, and assuming that the philological gunmen whom my father was anxious about can be safely neglected, what of ‘the general reader of literary bent but no knowledge of Middle English’? The situation is so highly individual that I find it difficult to analyse. In general I would assume that a book of translations of mediaeval poems of this order published without any commentary on the text at all would be so odd as to arouse hostility.

  My solution in the present case is of course based on different materials standing in different relationships, in origin going back some three quarters of a century and more, but it is certainly open to criticism: the commentary as here presented 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. But it goes no further than
that; and it has therefore no more than a very superficial resemblance to an ‘edition’. It does not aim at any degree of general inclusiveness, any more than my father’s lectures did: as he himself said, he was largely restricting himself to matter where he had something personal to say or to add. I have not added explanations or information that a reader might look for in an edition; such very minor additions as I have made are mostly those that seem needed by elements in the commentary itself. And I have not myself related his views and observations to the work of other scholars before him or after him. In making this selection I have been guided by relevance to features of the translation, by my own estimate of the general interest of the subject-matter, and by the need to keep within limits of length. I have included a number of notes from the lectures on very minor points in the text that illustrate how from a small grammatical or etymological detail he would derive larger conclusions; and a few elaborate discussions of textual emendations to show how he presented his arguments and evidences. A fuller account of these lectures as they survive in written form, and of my treatment of them, will be found in the introduction to the commentary, pp. 131 ff.

  In his lecture-commentary he assumed (perhaps too readily) some knowledge of the elements of Old English, and the possession of or at any rate easy access to a copy of ‘Klaeber’ (the major and generally used edition of Beowulf, by Frederic Klaeber, of which he was often critical but which he also esteemed). I on the other hand have throughout this book treated the translation as primary; but side by side with those line-references I have invariably given the corresponding references to the Old English text for those who wish to have it immediately accessible without a search.

  In my foreword to The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún I said: ‘Of its nature it is not to be judged by views prevailing in contemporary scholarship. It is intended rather as a presentation and record of his perceptions, in his own day, of a literature that he greatly admired.’ The same could be said of this book. I have most emphatically not seen my role in the editions of Sigurd and Gudrún or The Fall of Arthur as the offering of a critical survey of his views, as some seem to have thought that it should be. The present work should best be regarded as a ‘memorial volume’, a ‘portrait’ (as it were) of the scholar in his time, in words of his own, hitherto unpublished.

  As a further element it thus seems especially appropriate to include his work Sellic Spell, also now first published, an imagined story of Beowulf in an early form; so also at the end of the book I have printed the two versions of his Lay of Beowulf, a rendering of the story in the form of a ballad to be sung. His singing of the Lay remains for me a clear memory after more than eighty years, my first acquaintance with Beowulf and the golden hall of Heorot.

  The two illustrations that are reproduced as part of this ebook are the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. Beneath the painting of the dragon on the front cover he wrote these words from Beowulf, line 2561, (ðá wæs) hringbogan heorte gefýsed, which he translated as ‘(now was) the heart of the coiling beast stirred (to come out to fight)’ (2153–4). The drawing on the back cover of the printed dustjacket is of Grendel’s mere: the words wudu wyrtum fæst that appear beneath this are from Beowulf, line 1364; in the translation (1136–9) ‘It is not far hence . . . that that mere lies, over which there hang rimy thickets, and a wood clinging by its roots overshadows the water.’ Another drawing of the mere, made at the same time (1928), is reproduced on the rear flap of the printed dustjacket. The drawing on the title page of this book, showing a dragon attacking a warrior, was done in the same year.

  All four illustrations are reproduced, with interesting observations, in J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, pp. 52–5.

  INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION

  The textual history

  The texts of my father’s prose translation of Beowulf are, superficially at least, easily described. There is, first, a typescript, made on very thin paper and using what he called his ‘midget’ type on his Hammond typewriter; this I will call ‘B’. It extends as far as line 1773 in the translation (line 2112 in the Old English text), ‘warrior of old wars, in age’s fetters did lament his’: the last word stands at the end of the last line on the page, at its foot.

  The 32 pages of B are in very poor condition, the right-hand edges being darkly discoloured and in some cases badly broken or torn away, with the text at that point lost. In appearance it bears an odd resemblance to the Beowulf manuscript itself, which was badly damaged in the ruinous fire at Ashburnham House in Westminster in 1731: the edges of the leaves were scorched and subsequently crumbled away. But whatever caused the damage to the text B of my father’s translation, he wrote in most of the lost words in the margins (though occasionally this is not so).

  There is no trace of any other sheets of the typescript B, but a manuscript takes up with the words (following ‘did lament his’ where B ends) ‘youth and strength in arms’. I will refer to the typescript therefore as B(i) and the manuscript, which continues to the end of the poem, as B(ii).

  The translation had been completed by the end of April 1926, as is seen from a letter in the archive of Oxford University Press from my father to Kenneth Sisam:

  I have all Beowulf translated, but in much hardly to my liking. I will send you a specimen for your free criticism – though tastes differ, and indeed it is hard to make up one’s own mind . . . 1

  (My father took up his appointment to the professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in the winter of 1925 and my family moved from Leeds in January 1926.)

  Following B(i) and B(ii) is a further typescript (extant also in a carbon copy) which I made, and which can be dated to about 1940–2.2 This typescript I will call ‘C’. There are no other texts.

  The typescript B(i) was fairly heavily emended, most substantially in the passage describing Grendel’s coming to Heorot and his fight with Beowulf (in the translation lines 574–632), which my father after preliminary emendation struck through and replaced with a rewritten passage in another type; but curiously, from this point onwards the emendations become very few and far between, to the end of the B(i)-typescript.

  Turning to the manuscript B(ii), which takes up in the middle of the last sentence in B(i), this was written fluently and fairly quickly, legibly enough for the most part to one familiar with my father’s handwriting, but here and there presenting difficulty. There are a good many emendations, but the majority were made at the time of the writing of the manuscript. Some of these corrections were much altered in the making and difficult to interpret; while there are notes here and there in this text of an explanatory nature or suggesting alternative interpretations of the Old English text.

  The typescript C contains the whole text of the translation. The great mass of the corrections to B(i) were incorporated in C, but a few were made to B(i) later. In the case of B(ii) the manuscript had virtually reached its latest form when my father gave it to me to make a copy.

  When I typed C the text of B(i) had become in places difficult to make out, but I made a surprisingly accurate rendering of it (no doubt with requests for assistance here and there). In the latter part of the translation, the handwritten B(ii), on the other hand, I made a fair number of mistakes (it is strange to look back over three-quarters of a century at my earliest struggles with the famous handwriting).

  Finally, at some date(s) unknown, my father went quickly, even cursorily (as with other works of his) through the C typescript and jotted down – in some cases scarcely legibly – many further changes of wording. If at that stage he compared my text with its antecedents he seems not to have done so very closely (at any rate he did not observe cases where I had plainly misread the B(ii) text).

  Thus, while the series of texts, B(i), B(ii), C, is simply stated, the layers of textual correction constitute an extremely intricate history. To present it all would be out of place in this book; but following the translation I have provided a substantial list of notable textual features, and i
n order to give some idea of the process I print here a much emended passage as it appears in different stages. This is in the translation lines 263–79, in the Old English text lines 325–43.

  (a) The text as originally typed in B(i).

  Weary of the sea they set their tall shields [word lost]. . . ed and wondrous hard, against that mansion’s wall, then turned they to the benches. Corslets clanged, the war-harness of those warriors; their spears were piled together, weapons with ashen haft each grey-tipped with steel. Well furnished with weapons was [words lost: the iron-]clad company. There a proud knight then asked those men of battle concerning their lineage: ‘Whence bear ye your goldplated shields, your grey shirts of mail, your vizored helms and throng of warlike spears? I am Hrothgar’s herald and esquire. Never have I seen so many men of alien folk more proud of heart! Methinks that in pride, not in the ways of banished men, nay, with valiant purpose are you come seeking Hrothgar.’ To him then made answer, strong and bold, the proud prince of the Weder-Geats; these words he spake in turn, grim beneath his helm: ‘Companions of Hygelac’s table are we; Beowulf is my name.’

  (b) The text of B(i) as emended

  Weary of the sea they set their tall shields and bucklers wondrous hard against the wall of the house, and sat then on the bench. Corslets rang, war-harness of men. Their spears were piled together, seamen’s gear, ash-wood steel-tipped with grey. Well furnished with weapons was the iron-mailed company. There then a knight in proud array asked those men of battle concerning their lineage: ‘Whence bear ye your goldplated shields, your grey shirts of mail, your vizored helms and throng of warlike spears? I am Hrothgar’s herald and esquire. Never have I seen so many men of alien folk more proud of heart! I deem that with proud purpose, not in the ways of banished men, nay, in greatness of heart you are come seeking Hrothgar.’ To him then, strong and bold, the proud prince of the Weder-Geats replied, these words he spake in answer, stern beneath his helm: ‘We are companions of Hygelac’s board; Beowulf is my name.’