The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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at length with Stanley Bennett to encourage the election of *C.S. Lewis as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge.
Bennett, Jack Arthur Walter (1911–1981). After reading English at Auckland University College, New Zealand, in 1933 J.A.W. Bennet matriculated at Merton College, *Oxford, where he studied philology and medieval literature. He attended Tolkien’s lectures, and later would lend his notes on those of 1934–5 to *Alan Bliss for his edition of *Finn and Hengest (1982). In 1938 Bennett was awarded a D.Phil. for his thesis The History of Old English and Old Norse Studies in England from the Time of Junius till the End of the Eighteenth Century, examined by Tolkien and *David Nichol Smith. Also in that year he was elected to a junior research fellowship by Queen’s College, Oxford, but could not take it up until after the Second World War. In 1947 he was elected a fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took over the teaching of Old and Middle English from *C.S. Lewis, and in the early 1960s was instrumental in the creation of the B.Phil. (later M.Phil.) in English studies. In 1964 he succeeded Lewis as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge.
Bennett wrote widely on Middle English literature, most notably on *Chaucer (The Parlement of Foules (1957), Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge (1974), etc.), and was an editor of medieval and Tudor texts. With *G.V. Smithers he was co-editor of Early Middle English Verse and Prose (1966; 2nd edn. 1968). Twice the Oxford University Press (*Publishers) considered him a candidate to take over the long-delayed ‘Clarendon Chaucer’ (*Geoffrey Chaucer) from Tolkien: in the first instance, Tolkien was given another chance to complete the work, and in the second it was decided to delay the Chaucer until Tolkien had retired from his professorship, to avoid embarrassing him.
For many years Bennett was assistant or chief editor of Medium Ævum, the journal of the Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature (*Societies and clubs). He also served, with Tolkien, on the Council of the Early English Text Society (*Societies and clubs). He contributed an essay, ‘Climates of Opinions’ (a history of the word climate), to the Festschrift *English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (1962), and another, ‘Nosce te ipsum: Some Medieval Interpretations’, to J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam, ed. *Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell (1979).
On 15 August 1946 Tolkien brought Bennett to one of the regular Thursday evening meetings of the *Inklings. A week later Bennett showed up on his own, and soon became associated with the group despite initial misgivings by some of its members. *W.H. Lewis recorded in his diary that he found Bennett ‘a dull dog’ (Brothers and Friends, p. 193), and that *Hugo Dyson objected to Bennett because he was a Roman Catholic. In fact, Bennett was not received into the Catholic Church until more than a decade later, though he was inclined towards that faith and especially interested in the history of the liturgy.
A collection of J.A.W. Bennett’s essays, The Humane Medievalist and Other Essays in English Literature and Learning, from Chaucer to Eliot, was published in 1982. See further, P.L. Heyworth, ‘A List of the Published Writings of J.A.W. Bennett’, in Medieval Studies for J.A.W. Bennett, ed. Heyworth (1981).
Beowulf. The longest and most important surviving Old English poem, the work of a Christian of uncertain date, its earliest extant manuscript (part of Cotton Vitellius A.xv in the British Library) was written around the year 1000.
Briefly summarized – to say nothing of its richness as poetry – Beowulf concerns the exploits of the eponymous hero, a warrior of the Geats (a tribe of southern Sweden), endowed by God with superhuman strength. With his men he sails to Denmark, where a monster named Grendel is killing the warriors of the king, Hrothgar, in his hall, Heorot. Beowulf slays Grendel in terrible combat. When Grendel’s mother attacks the hall in revenge and carries off one of Hrothgar’s thanes, Beowulf follows her to the bottom of a lake in the midst of a fen and slays her as well. He then returns home, and after many years becomes king of his people. His fame as a warrior keeps his country free from invasion, and he increases its prosperity and happiness. After fifty years, however, a dragon appears, having been drawn from its hoard by the theft of a cup; although the beast wreaks havoc on the countryside, no warrior dares risk his life to confront it. The aged king takes up his sword and shield and, with the aid only of his retainer Wiglaf (his other companions having fled), defeats the dragon, but at the cost of his own life.
As an undergraduate at *Oxford Tolkien took classes on Beowulf taught by *Kenneth Sisam and attended lectures on the work by *A.S. Napier.
LECTURES ON BEOWULF
Tolkien himself lectured on Beowulf from autumn 1920, when he began to teach at the University of *Leeds, through Trinity Term 1946 while the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, and again in Michaelmas Term 1962 as a substitute for his successor in the Anglo-Saxon chair, *C.L. Wrenn. The most complimentary of his students praised his lectures as entertaining as well as informative, and his reading of Beowulf like that of a bard in a mead hall (see the subsection ‘Tolkien and the Oxford English School’ in the article *Oxford English School).
From one set of his Oxford lectures Tolkien derived *Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, the landmark work he delivered to the British Academy in November 1936. Brief extracts from these and other lectures were published in *The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987), pp. 93–6. Later thoughts by Tolkien on the poem, relative to the Old English *Battle of Maldon, appear in the third part (‘Ofermod’) of his *Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son (1953).
A selection of extracts from Tolkien’s Oxford lectures on Beowulf was made by *Christopher Tolkien for *Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary Together with Sellic Spell (2014), pp. 137–353. Published as ‘the commentary’, these represent only a fraction of the materials on Beowulf, including drafts and working scripts, held in the Tolkien Papers in the Bodleian Library (*Libraries and archives), and were drawn largely from a set of lectures for the ‘general course’ for undergraduates in the Oxford English School, who were required in the final examination to read just over half of Beowulf in the original language, from the beginning to line 1650, and to translate passages. The later part of the commentary, Christopher Tolkien explains, is derived from yet ‘another set of lectures, addressed to the “philologists”, clearly written and lengthy discussions of major problems in the interpretation of the text of Beowulf’ (p. 132).
In addition to his university lectures, in January 1938 Tolkien gave a thirteen-minute talk on Beowulf and other Old English poetry, Anglo-Saxon Verse, in the BBC radio series Poetry Will Out.
TRANSLATING BEOWULF
In 1940 Tolkien completed a long preface for a new edition of John R. Clark Hall’s Modern English translation (1901, 1911) Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment. His essay, entitled *Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of ‘Beowulf’ (reprinted in *The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays as On Translating Beowulf), is divided into two parts, ‘On Translation and Words’ and ‘On Metre’. Tolkien warns that although Clark Hall’s text is a ‘competent translation’ of Beowulf it is no substitute for reading the poem itself – a great poem whose ‘specially poetic qualities’ cannot be caught in prose, and which in Modern English may lose the shades of meaning present in the original Old English. Clark Hall’s translation ‘is not offered as a means of judging the original, or as a substitute for reading the poem itself. The proper purpose of a prose translation is to provide an aid to study’ (The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 49). Moreover, the prospective translator is advised against the use of ‘colloquialism and false modernity’. ‘If you wish to translate, not re-write, Beowulf,’ he says, ‘your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day that the poem was made.’ But ‘words should not be used merely because they are “old” or obsolete’ (p. 54).
Some twenty years later, the American