Beowulf

Beowulf is the oldest surviving work of fiction in the English language - so old, in fact, that the
language it's written in is barely recognizable as English. It recounts two stories from the life of its
eponymous Swedish hero: how, as a young man, he visited Denmark and slew the monster Grendel,
then faced the wrath of Grendel's even more monstrous mother; and how, toward the end of his life
back in Sweden, he was the only man who dared fight a rampaging dragon.
And did we mention that it's a poem?
Beowulf is probably the most famous of all Old English literature, and is a staple of university
English programs. It is usually read in translation, as it is not only written in a very old form of
English, it makes heavy use of a poetic register that is quite different from prose. No one knows
precisely when it was written, much less where the story originated. Certain lines of the text involve
a clearly Christian narrator commenting on the pre-Christian Paganism of the characters, therefore
the text is believed to have been the work of a monk recalling a much older story. The only known
manuscript contains two distinct styles of writing, indicating more than one scribe was involved in
the transcription. This manuscript was also damaged in a fire in 1731, so certain lines of text are
obliterated and their contents purely left to conjecture.
In 1936, a lecture by JRR Tolkien, "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics" had a lasting influence
on Beowulf research. Lewis E. Nicholson said that the article Tolkien wrote about Beowulf is
"widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism", noting that Tolkien established the
primacy of the poetic nature of the work as opposed to the purely linguistic elements. At the time,
the consensus of scholarship considered ''Beowulf'' childish because they considered battles with
monsters rather than realistic tribal warfare to be not worthy of study; Tolkien argued that the
author of Beowulf was addressing human destiny in general, not as limited by particular tribal
politics, and therefore the monsters were essential to the poem. Where Beowulf does deal with
specific tribal struggles, as at Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic
elements. In the essay, Tolkien also revealed how highly he regarded Beowulf: "Beowulf is among
my most valued sources," and this influence can be seen in The Lord Of The Rings.
The story has been adapted many times. Some of the adaptations have been quite offbeat: they
include John Gardner's novel Grendel, from the point of view of the monster; Michael Crichton's
novel Eaters of the Dead (filmed as The 13th Warrior), which purported to tell the historical events
that inspired the Grendel plot; and the weird 1999 sci-fi film starring Christopher Lambert. The
2005 film Beowulf & Grendel was comparatively faithful.
Most (but not all) of the Beowulf references on this wiki are to the 2007 film Beowulf, written by
Roger Avary (who co-wrote Pulp Fiction) and Neil Gaiman, directed by Robert Zemeckis, and
starring Ray Winstone. The screenplay for this has similarly unusual diversions from the original
story, to say the least. It seems Beowulf has a knack for inspiring artists to put their own spin on the
material. This could perhaps be owing to the somewhat alien worldview in which the piece was
written.

The epic provides examples of:

• Added Alliterative Appeal - The poem is written in alliterative verse, like most Germanic
poetry.
• Badass Boast - Unferth, one of Hrothgar's men calls Beowulf a loser for losing a swimming
contest. Beowulf responds that he got ambushed and had to stay on the sea floor ruining the
shit of nine monsters, and tells the drunk he's going to hell.
o Perhaps mentioning that he took part in a swimming contest equipped with a
chainmail and a sword is in order.
• Badass Grandpa - Beowulf is one of these during roughly the last third of the story.
• Badass Normal - Why is Beowulf the only one destined to kill Grendel? Because he's a
hero. It should be noted that was how the Anglo-Saxons portrayed their heroes.
• Because Fate Says So - The most important word in the poem is wyrd, which means fate.
Beowulf relies less on his Super Strength and more on the favour of fate before his battle
with Grendel.
• Beyond The Impossible: Beowulf tells a story early on in which he kills nine sea monsters
with only his sword.
o underwater.
• BFS: The sword of the giants, which Beowulf finds in the cave of Grendel's mother
• Buy Them Off - Wergeld, or "man price" is a custom of the age that if a man killed another
man he could buy exemption from the deceased family for essentially a handful of gold,
which apparently was ok in the time.
• Celibate Hero - Beowulf never marries in the 50 years he rules. As this troper's English
professor is fond of pointing out, the only "action" Beowulf gets with a woman is with
Grendel's mother.
o Not being married does not necessarily mean he was chaste...
• Cool Sword - they don't usually manage to be of much use, though, because Beowulf tends
to break them because of his strength.
• Downer Ending - Beowulf dies in the fight against the dragon, and it's implied that, without
a leader, the Geats will be conquered by their Swedish neighbors. Of course, Saxons love
reminding their readers of the fate after.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas - Grendel basically lives in his mother's basement.
• Everythings Worse With Bears - 'Beowulf' is a kenning for bear. 'Wulf' basically just meant
'predator' in Old English, so the literal meaning is 'Predator of Bees' or 'Enemy of Bees'.
Basically, Beowulf is like a wolf with bees in its mouth, and when it howls, it shoots bees at
you.
o Bees. My God.
• Famed In Story
• Folk Hero
• Genre Savvy - Beowulf is remarkably unfond of unnecessary combat, wenching, and getting
roaring drunk for a Norse hero. It saves his life in combat against Grendel.
• God Save Us From The Queen - Modthryth, who had any man who looked her in the eye
tortured to death. She became better after marrying her husband Offa.
• Good Old Fisticuffs - Beowulf decides to fight Grendel unarmed, because the monster itself
doesn't use any weapons. The fight culminates in Beowulf ripping Grendel's arm off.
• Heroic Fantasy - Ur Example in English literature.
• It Was A Gift - both the king and queen give him rings after his victory. Worth mentioning
that it was common practice at the time, with the king being multiple times referred to as the
"ring-giver".
• Made A Slave - is just hinted at in the queen's Back Story, because her name means "foreign
slave"
• Monster in the House, or Over Coming the Monster, depending on whose perspective you
take. Beowulf the Geat (one of the baddest of the Big Damn Heroes) comes over to fight the
Big Bad Grendel that has been ravaging the Dane's house for 12 years, i.e. he comes over
and they've got a monster in their house.
• Mutual Kill - The dragon and Beowulf.
• Name's The Same - A dude who was Shield Sheaffson's son shares his name with the titular
hero.
o It's fairly widely accepted that Shield's son was called Beow, and that the copyist
wasn't paying attention and corrected a mistake that wasn't there.
o ...If you've been reading the translations, which usually shorten the first Beowulf's
name to "Beow" to avoid confusion.
• Narrative Poem
 • No Title - The original manuscript has no title. "Beowulf" is merely the name given to it by
scholars.
• Our Dragons Are Different - The dragon is of the fairly conventional cave-dwelling, fire-
breathing, gold-hoarding sort.
• Post Humous Character: Scyld Scefing (pronounced "Shield Sheafing") starts the story dead.
He is essentially the Beowulf of the previous generation.
• Rated M For Manly
• Royals Who Actually Do Something - Of course, kings in that era became kings by proving
themselves in combat. Hrothgar is capable, but can't do anything, because... he's not a hero.
(No, seriously.) Of course, there is also Beowulf himself.
• Shout Out - A minstrel in the poem compares Beowulf to Sigurd Fafnebane, a hero that was
known throughout the Northern tribes since the 6th century. And it's fitting.
• Super Strength - Beowulf has the strength of 30 men in just the grip of one hand. He is able
to wrestle Grendel to a stand-still before ripping his arm off. Basically, the rule that states
that he is the only one allowed to do anything heroic is justified.
o Better yet - he actually just stood there holding Grendel's hand, not even budging,
while Grendel, the wimp, kept thrashing away. In a sense, Grendel ripped his own
arm off.
• The Hero Dies
• Too Dumb To Live/Schmuck Bait - All the would be Grendel slayers who show up before
Beowulf think it's an excellent idea to get drunk and party at the Mead Hall knowing full
well the monster attacks at night when everyone is drunk and asleep. Beowulf goes,
knowing damn well this is the perfect way to lure Grendel in.
• Youth Is Wasted On The Dumb

Beauty And The Beast

 TOLKIEN’S TWO VIEWS OF BEOWULF: ONE HAILED, ONE IGNORED.
BUT DID WE GET THIS RIGHT?

By Tom Shippey

Almost thirty years ago, in the first edition of Road to Middle-earth, I commented that
“Tolkien's mind was one of unmatchable subtlety, not without a streak of deliberate guile”.
Thanks to the researches of Michael Drout, we now have an example of the “deliberate
guile” better than any I could have had in mind back then. We can now be sure that when
he gave his famous 1936 lecture on “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics”, Tolkien was,
if not laughing up his sleeve at his distinguished British Academy audience, then smiling
inwardly, at least at one moment, at what he knew and they didn’t about what he was
telling them.

The moment I mean is the one when – arguing that a fascination for dragons was
at least as likely and reasonable as a fascination with heroes – he declared that:

Even today (despite the critics) you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and
history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them, who yet have been
caught by the fascination of the worm. More than one poem in recent years … has
been inspired by the dragon of Beowulf, but none that I know of by Ingeld son of
Froda. (Cited here from Tolkien 1997: 16)

All the statements made here are literally true, but if Tolkien had spelled out what he
meant, it would have devalued the argument he was making. The “men” Tolkien was
talking about were himself and his friend C.S. Lewis – by no means a representative
sample of popular taste. They certainly were “not ignorant of tragic legend”, and they had
indeed “seen” heroes (for both were infantry combat veterans of World War I), and they
had both written poems about dragons. In his drafts of the lecture, now edited by Michael
Drout, Tolkien actually quotes them both: his own poem from 1923, “Iúmonna Gold Galdre
Bewunden”, later rewritten as “The Hoard”, and Lewis’s “A Northern Dragon”, published in
1933 (see Drout 2002: 56-58, 199-205). So “more than one poem” had indeed been
written “in recent years … inspired by the dragon of Beowulf”– to be precise, two. But the
British Academy would hardly have been impressed if Tolkien had said directly, “well, I like
dragons, anyway, and what’s more, my best friend does too!” But that, in effect, is just
what he was saying.

Of course, Tolkien’s claim was part of a larger argument. And as everyone now
knows, that argument was outstandingly successful. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture is one of the
most frequently cited articles in the humanities of all time, and may even be the all-time
champion, if records were complete. It certainly altered the current of Beowulf scholarship,
which is only slowly starting to look for new channels. Nevertheless, there was an element
of luck about this, and an element of overstatement (or “guile”), as well as a very large
element, which people continue strangely to under-estimate, of Tolkien’s rhetorical skill: he
could make a shaky case look rock-solid, and several times did, and the results have not
always been totally fortunate.[1]

In this particular case Tolkien had perhaps three main, linked goals. He wanted people to
see the poem as a whole, as an integrated and purposeful work by a single poet who had
a very good idea of what he was doing – not, as had been the case for much of the
preceding century, as a mish-mash, hodge-podge, or Wirrwarr of different stories tacked
together by a whole sequence of incompetent bunglers, defacing, alas, what had originally
been something much more interesting. Along with that, he wanted to argue for the right to
write fantasy, and in that mode to create something valuable and autonomous. And in
order to make that case, he was obliged to argue down the powerfully-expressed opinion
of, for instance, R.W. Chambers (whom Tolkien greatly respected, and with whom he was
on very good personal terms) that in the Ingeld legend, which the Beowulf-poet only
alluded to, and which no-one has ever been able to reconstruct fully, “we have a situation
which the old heroic poets loved, and would not have sold for a wilderness of dragons”
(Chambers 1912: 79). (Chambers, it deserves to be said, if parenthetically, was very
nearly as good at putting a case memorably and dramatically as Tolkien, and I suspect
that Tolkien learned a lot from him.) Nevertheless, Tolkien had to take him on, and there is
no doubt that he did so successfully.

There was in this, as said above, an element of luck. In 1936 Tolkien was not exactly
charging an open door, but certainly opening a door which had already been unlocked.
The “mish-mash” view of Beowulf had been challenged with increasing authority by
scholars writing in German like Alois Brandl and Andreas Heusler, though Heusler gave a
good deal of the credit for his ground-breaking work Lied und Epos (1905) to earlier
remarks by W.P. Ker, who may have been rather surprised by this – Ker was another
scholar, like Chambers, whom Tolkien respected but contradicted. So “seeing the poem as
a whole” was something which was in the air, at least, in 1936, and it was something which
later critics were very ready to do, perhaps because it wasn’t too difficult. After World War
II a whole industry grew up of books and essays which demonstrated that Beowulf was a
work of great “organic unity” (a favourite phrase), and that all the many bits which had
been taken as “digressions” or insertions actually played an important part in the poet’s
conception, and might well be seen as (another favourite word in the critical vocabulary)
“ironic”. It has been said that Tolkien was himself a New Critic, just like F.R. Leavis and
W.K. Wimsatt, and though I think Tolkien would have viewed such a label with absolute
horror – he really did not like literary critics, or professors of literature – he certainly
opened the door for a whole rush of Beowulfian New Critics.

Seeing the poem as a fantasy perhaps did not catch on quite so much. Literary critics have
never been very confident about dealing with the literature of the fantastic, perhaps
because it’s popular, and under all the protestations they remain determinedly elitist.
Things are beginning to change, as humanities enrolments collapse in British and
American universities, and even critics find they have to look for students instead of having
them delivered on the doorstep. And, of course, the idea of Beowulf as a fantasy about
monsters has ever since dominated the popular view of the poem, as one can see by
viewing any or all of the recent Beowulf movies – Grendels, water-hags and dragons
continually re-imagined, sometimes very remarkably, but no interest at all in the heroic
background of the Scyldings and the Scylfings and the Hrethlings or even “Ingeld son of
Froda”.

But in this something has got lost, which I think Tolkien would have regretted. He pitched
his argument as strong as ever he could. But did he really mean it? All of it? Or did people
only hear the bit of what he said that they wanted to hear? Whatever the explanation, the
effect of what Tolkien wrote has been to terminate interest in Beowulf as a guide to history.
It is regularly, even formulaically, written off with such comments as “completely useless
for the students of history” (a Swedish voice), “does not offer reliable historical fact” (three
very authoritative voices writing collectively). Meanwhile, “The search for genuine history
in the Danish episodes of Beowulf is the search for a chimera” (one of the three
authoritative voices writing independently), “doubt surrounding the origins of Beowulf’s
narrative argues strongly against the use of it … as a historical source” (a very subtle voice
who may deep down hold a rather different opinion), and “history is not written on the basis
of legends” (a severe voice, the more remarkable in that its owner has again and again
unearthed rather compelling and unexpected evidence for the truth of legends). But there:
Tolkien said firmly that “The illusion of historical truth and perspective [in Beowulf] is
largely a product of art” – though he didn’t say how the art worked – and further that “the
seekers after history must beware lest the glamour of Poesis overcome them” (1997: 7).
Ever since then, terrified of being caught falling for glamour, let alone Poesis, critics and
historians too have left Beowulf as a “historical document” severely alone.

And of course it isn’t a “historical document” of the sort historians would like: it doesn’t
have any dates, for one thing. Just the same, it seems a pity to junk it, for several reasons,
as for instance: (1) one of the least likely events it records, the death of a member of an
otherwise totally unrecorded dynasty, Beowulf’s own, has been accidentally confirmed by
rather good evidence which is actually datable within limits (2) the poem’s explanation of
an event repeatedly recorded elsewhere, in legendary form, is much more plausible,
detailed, and realistic than any of the others (3) the poet doesn’t seem to be making a
case of any kind, he just mentions things as if they’re generally known, and (4) if you reject
his evidence, you don’t have anything else: the history of sixth-century Scandinavia is
even more of a documentary blank than the history of sixth-century Britain, but this last
has never stopped people from writing serious analyses of “the age of Arthur” (misguided
as they usually are).

But there are two more Tolkienian reasons for not forgetting what the poem has to say
about history. One is that the poem is absolutely full (and quite apart from the monsters) of
something we know Tolkien liked very much indeed, which is, “lost tales”. Again and again
the poet hints at, alludes to, tells a bit of a story which we sometimes get hints of
elsewhere, and sometimes know nothing about. I count about twenty of them. One of the
“total unknowns” is the story of how Unferth the thyle killed his brothers. Beowulf accuses
him of it, the poet corroborates the accusation, but how did that come about? As
Chambers pointed out (1959: 27-29) the strange thing is a known fratricide in a place of
honour at the Danish court. But it’s not impossible. People caught in terrible dilemmas, kin
or lord, brother or husband, loyalty or blood-brotherhood, half-brotherhood, brother-in-law-
hood, are the staple of Northern heroic legend – there could have been a good story there,
but we don’t know what it was. Or there’s the story of Offa’s queen (that’s the first Offa,
before the Angles ever got to England, after whom Offa’s Dyke Offa called himself) – what
was she, a shrew who got tamed, a valkyrie-figure? We don’t know, and you will find no
mention of them, or any of the others, in any of the modern movies: just monsters, as
Tolkien advised. But they’re still a loss.

The other reason is that whatever he said in 1936, Tolkien still took Beowulf seriously as a
historical source. His posthumously-published Finn and Hengest (1982), edited by A.J.
Bliss on the basis of Tolkien’s lectures, goes into very great detail in trying to discover the
truth behind the truncated account of “the fight at Finnsburg” in Beowulf, and the
fragmentary account of the same event in a scrap of a quite independent Old English
poem, the Finnsburg Fragment. It’s clear from this that Tolkien thought the event actually
took place, and that he thought you could work out why it was so well remembered. He
thought, in fact, that it was politically significant; that it was connected with the founding of
England, by Hengest the Jute who first arrived on the shores of Kent with three ships; and
that the name of the Danish hero Hnæf, who gets killed in the fight, was remembered in
the name of his own Aunt Jane Neave, while Hengest, Hnaef’s first lieutenant and
avenger, was still there in the Oxford place-name Hincksey < OE hengestes-iege,
“Stallion’s Island” or alternatively “Hengest’s Island”.

Tolkien’s reconstruction of the event is hard to make out from his book as published, which
may be one reason why it is hardly ever mentioned by modern critics – though another
reason is the rejection of historicism in this whole area, for which, as said above, Tolkien
was largely responsible: such are the ironies of scholarship! Curiously, however, his
scenario is faithfully followed in a children’s book by Jill Paton Walsh, called Hengest’s
Tale, and published 1966. If you want to know what Tolkien thought, it’s there. Now
Hengest’s Tale came out way before Finn and Hengest, but her website informs me that
Ms Walsh – whose first book this was, but who has since established a solid reputation
with other books – was an undergraduate at Oxford, though her website doesn’t say what
subject she read, seemingly 1956-59. Tolkien did not lecture on Finnsburg while she was
an undergraduate, but did give his course on “The Freswæl: Episode and Fragment” (the
basis for Finn and Hengest) in Hilary Term 1963, i.e. from January through March, when
he was acting as stand-in for his successor, C.L. Wrenn. Could Ms Walsh have attended
these lectures, or perhaps been told about an earlier occasion when he gave them? I don’t
know, but it’s possible. Anyway, if she did, Tolkien had at least one careful listener, which
(in this area) is one more than he has found more recently, so Ms Walsh is to be
commended on getting the idea and turning it into a book. I’m sure Tolkien would have
liked it if he ever read it.[2]

And there are other reasons for re-thinking the embargo on historical speculation with
regard to Beowulf. One is a very big one. In the poem, the Danish King Hrothgar
announces his intention to build “a bigger hall than the children of men had ever heard of”,
which is the hall Heorot which attracts the ire of Grendel. Hrothgar was a Scylding (the
poet says), and the Scyldings in Old English are clearly identical with the Skjöldungar of
Old Norse, and the legend of the Skjöldungar says repeatedly that their base was
somewhere called Hleithra (or variants thereof). There has been general agreement for
centuries that that place is the small modern village of Lejre on the island of Sjælland, not
too far from Copenhagen. But the idea that the legend might be true was repeatedly pooh-
poohed in confident terms up till quite recently. Then the archaeologists, their attention
attracted in part by stray finds, decided to have a look. And what they found, in
excavations now stretching over more than twenty years, but continuing right up to
summer 2009, was not one hall but six of them, on three different sites all close together
round the village, built successively but with overlaps, and all of them, even the earliest
(mid-sixth century, just a little late for the events of Beowulf as normally dated), very large
indeed, and the largest – well, bigger than the children of men have ever been able to find
elsewhere. Even the smallest makes Yeavering, in Northumbria, look like the porter’s
lodge (see Niles 2007, which however does not take in the most recent discoveries of
2009). So, a quite illusory product of literary art, eh?

There’s another thing. Tolkien indeed noted that the (rare) heroic names he was interested
in, like Hnæf and Hoc, did turn up far away in the records of Bavaria. But very recently
indeed the whole matter has been gone into much more thoroughly by Dr Carl Hammer, in
a long article which has just appeared in the journal Medieval Prosopography – which, to
be frank, not everybody reads – and Dr Hammer has found that there is a whole sequence
of related names to be found in the records of connected noble families in a rather small
area. He suggests that these names were an element of self-accreditation (claiming old
and distinguished descent, just like Offa’s Dyke Offa re-naming himself), and were based
on stories plausibly derived from the activities in that area of known Anglo-Saxon
missionaries, who could have brought their ancestral heroic legends with them. It may
well be relevant that Dr Hammer, scrupulous scholar though he is, has never held a
university post, being more profitably engaged as a top executive of Daimler-Benz. So he
can say what he likes, and ignore academic fashion. But this too, like the excavations at
Lejre, ought to cause some re-thinking – if anyone reads it (and they haven’t been reading
Finn and Hengest).

Dr Hammer’s work tends to confirm one view held very clearly by Tolkien, which is that
Beowulf was composed in “the age of Bede”, i.e. the earlier 8th century. Tolkien called this

“one of the firmer conclusions of a department of research most clearly serviceable to

criticism” (1997: 20).

However, for the last thirty years at least this conclusion has been rejected, often
savagely rejected, by a majority of Anglo-Saxonists, their view entrenched in a thoroughly
one-sided “conference” (it was really more of a party rally), some of the results of which (at
least one dissentient paper appeared elsewhere) were published in a volume on The
Dating of Beowulf (Chase 1981). The arguments need not concern Tolkienists, but it
should be noted that there is an agenda here, very well described by Bryan Ward-
Perkins’s short but excellent book on The Fall of Rome (2005). The agenda stems from
the traumas of the first half of the twentieth century. In brief (Ward-Perkins shows), after
World War II the old Gibbon view of “the Fall of Rome”, Germanic barbarians swamping
civilised Latin-speaking southern Europe, was much too close to recent reality to be
comfortable. A new view of “late Antiquity” was accordingly created, in which the Roman
Empire did not fall, but mutated gently and co-operatively into a new and eventually
Charlemagnian more-or-less United Europe, populated by New Roman gentry and what
Ward-Perkins calls “Euro-Barbarians” (he has some very funny illustrations of this). Ward-
Perkins’s main point is that all this flies in the face of overwhelming archaeological
evidence of a catastrophic slump in living standards across Europe, and not least in
Britain, not to be reversed for many centuries. To the “Late Antiquity” or “Euro-Barb”
school, the older view of an 8th-century Beowulf, remembering events of the 6th century,
and packed with legends from across the whole Germanic world, was thoroughly
unwelcome – just like Tolkien to so many literary critics, and for not dissimilar reasons.

The balance is now beginning to turn again, with arguments for Tolkien’s earlier dating
coming in on grounds of metrical linguistics, palaeography, and onomastics – all of which
Tolkien would gladly have accepted as part of his view of “philology”. The question is,
though, is there any chance of philology reviving, after its murder and burial, with a stake
though its heart, at the hands of Tolkien’s ancient foes, the critics? The critics have
certainly done very well, especially in the USA, at chasing university students out of
English departments, and history and language departments as well, and off to become
Business Studies or Education majors – for a remarkably tragi-comic view of the situation
in Classical studies, which has however all too many parallels with Anglo-Saxon and
medieval studies, see Victor Hanson et al., Bonfire of the Humanities (2001), as also
discussions by this writer, Michael Drout, and others in
www.heroicage.org/issues/11/toc.php, under the heading “State of the Field in Anglo-
Saxon Studies”. Will the Decline and Fall of the Critical Empire create a space for
resurgent Germanic philology, as also Celtic, Slavic, Italic, Romance, Finno-Ugric and
non-European philologies? One can only hope. Tolkien has certainly done more than
anyone else to keep that hope alive, though in the elite strata of the academic world that
achievement is still only grudgingly recognised.

NOTES

[1] Two cases in particular: Tolkien’s view of The Battle of Maldon, expressed in “The
Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” (1953), seems to me (like his 1936 view of Beowulf) to have
strong personal motivation, and – in the dramatic element – to wrench the facts very
markedly, see Shippey 2007: 323-39, esp. 335-6. It has nevertheless generated what is
now the dominant “ironic” interpretation of the poem. More seriously, Tolkien’s 1929 essay
on the language of Ancrene Wisse and its associated texts was so convincing that it all but
stopped the study of Middle English dialects in its tracks. People reckoned that without a
consistent shared and standardised dialect of the kind Tolkien discovered, one could come
to no conclusions about authorial or scribal dialect at all, because they were bound to be
Mischsprachen, jumbled by copying. It was not till 1986, when the Linguistic Atlas of Late
Middle English came out, edited by Angus McIntosh and his team, that the view was
refuted, and dialect study revived. Tolkien’s 1934 analysis of the dialect of Chaucer’s
“Reeve’s Tale” has also been challenged in recent years, see Horobin 2001.

[2] One further point, probably coincidence, is that Ms Walsh’s maiden name was Gillian
Bliss. I do not know if there was any family connection with Professor A.J. Bliss, who
edited Finn and Hengest.

WORKS CITED

Chambers, R.W., ed., 1912. Widsith: a study in Old English heroic legend. Cambridge:
CUP.

Chambers, R.W. 1959. Beowulf: an introduction to a study of the poem. 3rd edn with
supplement by C.L. Wrenn. Cambridge: CUP.

Chase, Colin, ed. 1981. The Dating of Beowulf. Toronto: U Toronto Press.

Drout, Michael, ed. 2002. Beowulf and the Critics, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Tempe, AZ: ACMRS..

Hammer, Carl I. 2009 (for 2005). “Hoc and Hnæf in Bavaria? Early Medieval
Prosopography and Heroic Poetry.” Medieval Prosopography 26: 13-50.

Hanson, Victor D., John Heath and Bruce S. Thornton. 2001. Bonfire of the Humanities:
rescuing the classics in an impoverished age. Wilmington, DEL: ISI Books.

Horobin, Simon. 2001, ‘J.R.R. Tolkien as a Philologist: A Reconsideration of the

Northernisms in Chaucer’s Reeve's Tale’, English Studies 82: 97-105.

Niles, John D., ed. 2007. Beowulf and Lejre. Tempe, AZ: ACMRS.

Shippey, Tom. 2007. Roots and Branches: selected papers on Tolkien, ed. Thomas
Honegger. Berne and Zurich: Walking Tree Press.
Tolkien, J.R.R. 1997. The Monsters and the Critics and other essays, ed. Christopher
Tolkien. Pb. edn., London: HarperCollins.

Ward-Perkins, Bryan. 2006. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation. Oxford: OUP.

N. B. Please do not post comments in this thread - post them here:

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Harry Potter, Tolkien, and the Roots of Fantasy
A history of the roots and development of the modern fantasy genre, from Homer to
Tolkien and Rowling.

The media circus around the release of the last Harry Potter novel is finally beginning
to die down, but that does little to disguise the fact that the fantasy genre is alive and
well in the twenty-first century. Hundreds of millions were spent to bring Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings, Rowling’s Harry Potter series, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and others to the
big screen, and the gamble has paid off.

But where did the genre originate? Many have the mistaken idea that the fantasy
genre began with Tolkien. Though Tolkien brought fantasy into the literary spotlight,
fantasy itself has been around for far longer and indeed in some respects dates back
to the very beginnings of literature.

The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s The Illiad and The Odyssey, while set in familiar
realms, contain many of the aspects – heroes, warring gods, monsters, quest-related
adventure – that has become part and parcel of modern fantasy. Much of the fodder
for modern fantasy is taken from early literature, especially myths, legends, and
religion.

Elements of fantasy have appeared throughout the history of literature, whether as

religious facets (ala Dante’s Divine Comedy), allegory (Spenser’s The Faerie Queen),
or in mythology and the various medieval legends of King Arthur and Roland. The
popular Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, full of fantastic elements, became an important
text for many later fantasy writers. Other literary precursors to the fantasy genre
include such notable works as Shakespeare’s Macbeth & The Tempest; Milton’s
Paradise Lost; and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

Modern fantasy literature, as we know it, began with the Victorians, who had a long-
abiding love for fairy tales and the fantastic. There was a great resurgence of interest
in mythology and folklore. Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm traveled throughout their native
Germany, gathering old folktales. Hans Christian Anderson wove bits and pieces of
Scandinavian folklore into his tales. Elias Lönnrot published the Kalevala, an epic poem
compiled from Finnish folktales. Andrew Lang wrote and published a series of color-
coded "Fairy Stories" during the latter part of the nineteenth century.

William Morris – one member of a group of Victorian writers, poets, and artists known
as the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood" – was among the first to write pure "fantasy"
tales, that is, tales set in an entirely invented realm. Morris’s novels, heavily
influenced by his love of northern (particularly Norse) mythology, set the stage for the
fantasy masters of the twentieth century.

J.R.R. Tolkien, arguably the single most influential writer of modern fantasy, took this
idea to the next level. His fictional world of Middle-earth contained all the depth of our
own – a complex history, lovable and detestable characters, gods and heroes,
mountains and rivers, joy and despair. Tolkien never foresaw the mass popularity that
his works gained. He wrote primarily for pleasure and diversion, weaving bits and
pieces of mythology and philology (the study of language) with his own imagination.

Much as his friend and fellow scholar C.S. Lewis did with his Narnia series, Tolkien
drew on his immense knowledge of mythology, language, and literature to build a
fully-developed and internally consistent world. Tolkien’s well-known essay, "On Fairy
Stories", lays out some ground rules for successful fantasy.

Tolkien discounted the idea of "willing suspension of disbelief", noting that:

"What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He

makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is
‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as
it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather
art, has failed." (JRR Tolkien, The Tolkien Reader, pg. 60).

In the years since Tolkien, the genre of fantasy has exploded upon popular culture.
Some very gifted writers – among them Ursula LeGuin, Stephen R. Donaldson, Tad
Williams, Phillip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, and George R.R. Martin - have left (or continue
to make) their mark upon the field of fantasy fiction.

J.K. Rowling, with her immensely successful Harry Potter books, has helped to keep the
genre in the limelight, introducing a whole new generation of readers to the fantasy
genre. Rowling has scoured the depths of mythology and folklore in the pursuit of
material for her created world.

Each individual writer uses these fantastic elements differently. Tolkien captures the
mood and stark beauty of northern mythology. George R.R. Martin, with his
enormously popular Song of Ice and Fire books, uses bits of mythology (dragons,
sorcery) and mixes them with a heady dose of historical details. Rowling uses her
phantasmagoria of mythological creatures and legends almost whimsically.

Varying styles aside, the modern fantasy genre has roots deep in the history of
literature. There is an innate human need for the magical, to rise above the mundane.
It is what drives each culture to create mythology, to look for a meaning higher than
the everyday. It is that curse word of modern literary criticism – "escapism" – but it is
also something more. Mythology (and fantasy) fulfills needs that the everyday world
does not.

This drive, going back to the very beginning of literature, is what still drives millions of
readers to pick up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or The Fellowship of the Ring.

Revered scholar Joseph Campbell once said: "Myths are public dreams, dreams are
private myths."

Fantasy novels are often those dreams given expression.

JRR Tolkien Online
A scholarly look at author JRR Tolkien's life and writings, including an in-depth analysis
of his published works and scholarly pursuits.

By Adam Smith

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/harry-potter-tolkien-and-the-roots-of-fantasy.html
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics
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"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" was a 1936 lecture given by J. R. R. Tolkien on literary
criticism on the Old English heroic epic poem Beowulf. It was first published in that year in
Proceedings of the British Academy, and has since been reprinted in many collections, including in
The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, the 1983 collection of Tolkien's academic papers
edited by Christopher Tolkien.

This paper is regarded as a formative work in modern Beowulf studies. In this talk, Tolkien speaks
against critics who play down the fantastic elements of the poem (such as Grendel and the dragon)
in favour of using Beowulf solely as a source for Anglo-Saxon history. Tolkien argues that rather
than being merely extraneous, these elements are key to the narrative and should be the focus of
study. In doing so he drew attention to the previously neglected literary qualities of the poem and
argued that it should be studied as a work of art, not just as a historical document. Later critics who
agreed with Tolkien on this point have routinely cited him to defend their arguments.

The paper remains a common source for students and scholars studying Beowulf and was praised by
Seamus Heaney in the introduction to his translation of the poem. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C.
Robinson call it in their Beowulf, An Edition (1998) "the most influential literary criticism of the
poem ever written". The paper also sheds light on many of Tolkien's ideas about literature and is a
source for those seeking to understand his writings.

The lecture is based on a longer lecture series, which exists in two manuscript versions published
together as Beowulf and the Critics (2002), edited by Michael D. C. Drout.

Editions (incomplete list)

• "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Proceedings of the British Academy, 22
(1936), 245–95 (online version here)
• Tolkien, J. R. R. The Monsters and the Critics (1983). London: George Allen &
Unwin. ISBN 0-0480-9019-0
• Nicholson, Lewis E. (Ed.) (1963). An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism. Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. ISBN 0-268-00006-9