The Monsters and the Critics

CONTENTS

Title Page

Foreword

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics

On Translating Beowulf

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

On Fairy-Stories

English and Welsh

A Secret Vice

Valedictory Address to the University Of Oxford

Footnotes

Also by J.R.R. Tolkien

Copyright

About the Publisher

With one exception, all the ‘essays’ by J. R. R. Tolkien collected together in this book were in fact lectures, delivered on special occasions; and while all were on specific topics, literary or linguistic, the whole audience on those occasions could in no case (save perhaps that of the Valedictory Address) be presumed to have more than a general knowledge of or interest in the subject^>fn1 – and the one piece in this collection that was not a lecture, On Translating Beowulf, was not addressed to experts in the study of the poem. It is this common quality that is the basis of this book (other published writings of my father’s deriving from his studies in early English were articles, not lectures, and were written with a specialized readership in mind); but indeed I think it will be found that all seven papers, though covering a period of nearly thirty years, and on quite different subjects, nonetheless constitute a unity.

In addition to the five pieces that have been previously published I have ventured to include two that have not, though both were publicly delivered. One of these, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, was my father’s principal pronouncement on the poem to which he devoted so much thought and study. The other, A Secret Vice, is unique, in that only on this one occasion, as it seems, did the ‘invented world’ appear publicly and in its own right in the ‘academic world’ – and that was some six years before the publication of The Hobbit and nearly a quarter of a century before that of The Lord of the Rings. It is of great interest in the history of the invented languages, and this seems a good opportunity and a suitable context for its publication: for it touches on themes developed in later essays in this book.

The first piece in this collection, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, was the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture to the British Academy, read on 25 November 1936, and was published in volume XXII of the Proceedings of the Academy (from which copies of the lecture are available). I acknowledge with thanks the permission of the British Academy, owners of the copyright, to reprint it here; and also permission to use the title of the lecture in the title of this book.

On Translating Beowulf was contributed, as ‘Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of “Beowulf”’, to a new edition (1940) by Professor C. L. Wrenn of Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment, A Translation into Modern English Prose, by John R. Clark Hall (1911).

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was the W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture in the University of Glasgow, delivered on 15 April 1953. Of this there seems to exist now only one text, a typescript made after the delivery of the lecture (which possibly suggests an intention to publish it), as appears from the statement (See here) ‘Here the temptation-scenes were read aloud in translation.’ My father’s translation of Sir Gawain into alliterative verse in modern English had then been very recently completed. This translation was broadcast in dramatized form by the BBC in December 1953 (repeated in the following year), and the introduction to the poem which I included in the volume of translations (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, 1975) was taken from the radio talk which followed the broadcasts: this, though very brief, is closely related to the lecture printed here.

There are some minor matters concerning its presentation which must be mentioned. Despite my father’s statement (See here) that ‘where quotation is essential I will use a translation which I have just completed’, he did not in fact do so throughout, several substantial quotations being given in the original. There does not seem to be any significance in this, however, and I have therefore substituted the translation in such cases. Moreover the translation at that time differed in many details of wording from the revised form published in 1975; and in all such differences I have substituted the latter. I have not inserted the ‘temptation scenes’ at the point where my father recited them when delivering the lecture, because if these are given in full they run to some 350 lines, and there is no indication in the text of how he reduced them. And lastly, since some readers may wish to refer to the translation rather than to the original poem (edited by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, second edition revised by N. Davis, Oxford 1967), but the former gives only stanza-numbers and the latter only line-numbers, I have given both: thus 40.970 means that line 970 is found in the 40th stanza.

The fourth essay, On Fairy-Stories, was originally an Andrew Lang lecture given at the University of St Andrews on 8 March 1939.