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such as *The Seafarer, *The Battle of Maldon, and *The Wanderer. In this Raffel briefly discusses reasons for translating Old English poetry (‘too many centuries, too many lost ideas, separate the Old English poet from his modern audience’, p. xviii). and methods of translation:
The translator’s only hope is to re-create something roughly equivalent in the new language [i.e. the translator’s language], something that is itself good poetry and that at the same time carries a reasonable measure of the force and flavor of the original. …
How close to the original must the translation be? Not so much in outward form, metre and rhyme, even line length, for in these respects reasonable freedom is of course necessary. But in fidelity to the precise content and tone of the original, its exact working out of images, its succession of ideas. [pp. xxvi–xxvii]
He argues that a translation of an Old English poem must, in the end, be freely ‘a poem in its own right, … a poem meaningful in its own language and at the same time suggestive of the accents and the culture of another’ (p. xxviii).
Tolkien disagreed with Raffel’s philosophy in his private papers. One improves his understanding of a language through translation, he said, though this may not be evident in the result; and a translation may be used to impart the nature of a language through its hearing – not reading, ‘for reading suggests close and silent study, the pondering of words, the solution of a series of puzzles, but hearing should mean receiving, with the speed of a familiar tongue, the immediate impact of sound and sense together’. ‘In all real language’, sound and sense ‘are wedded’. ‘A translator may hope (or rashly aspire) to heal the divorce, as far as is possible’, but he must achieve ‘absolute allegiance to the thing translated: to its meaning, its style, technique, and form’. ‘Fortunately’, he continues, ‘modern (modern literary, not present-day colloquial) English is an instrument of very great capacity and resources, it has long experience not yet forgotten, and deep roots in the past not yet all pulled up’ (‘Thoughts on Translation: Beowulf’, Tolkien Estate website).
TRANSLATIONS BY TOLKIEN
At Leeds Tolkien began, but abandoned after 594 lines, an alliterative verse translation of Beowulf into Modern English. This remains unpublished, though Tolkien included a few lines in his Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of ‘Beowulf’ (see below).
He also worked on a Modern English prose translation, which likewise was never finished to his satisfaction. Given the heavy demands on his time in the final months of 1925 and the first part of 1926 (see Chronology), it seems certain that at least the beginning of the prose translation as well was made during Tolkien’s time at Leeds. It was completed, though not all to Tolkien’s liking, by the end of April 1926, when Tolkien described it as such in a letter to *Kenneth Sisam at Oxford University Press (*Publishers), and was willing to put it in order if Sisam liked it. Its earliest typescript extends as far as line 1773, followed by a manuscript which takes up at the point where the typescript ends. A further typescript, made by Christopher Tolkien, can be dated to c. 1940–2. Tolkien heavily emended the initial typescript, notably in passages concerned with Grendel’s coming to Heorot and his fight with Beowulf, less so later in the text; and he lent it to *C.S. Lewis (thus after they met at Oxford in May 1926), who added his own queries. The manuscript was also emended, for the most part at the time of writing, and the final typescript received Tolkien’s corrections and further changes.
Michael D.C. Drout suggests in his review of *Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell in Tolkien Studies 12 (2015) that Tolkien’s purpose in making the prose translation is conveyed in a manuscript in the Bodleian Library, in which Tolkien writes of his intention to read his translation to Beowulf students in one sitting, supplemented with extracts from his verse translation, to help them grasp the poem before they themselves discuss and translate the Old English text.
On 25 October 1932 Tolkien suggested to R.W. Chapman that his prose translation might be published by Oxford University Press, but that it should be preceded by introductory matter on the diction of Old English verse, its metre, and so forth – much, presumably, as he later wrote in his preface to the Clark Hall volume – and that it should include notes concerning particularly difficult problems in the text. On 18 December 1932 Tolkien wrote to Kenneth Sisam that he hoped soon to complete his work on the Clarendon Chaucer (*Geoffrey Chaucer), and then to publish his Beowulf translation, ‘but life is short, & so is the day. I am obliged to examine Oxford (complete new syllabus), Manchester and Reading, for the meeting of ends, the coming year; and probably P. Mods [Pass Moderations] at the end of it. Also there are lectures & B.Litts and goodness knows what’ (Oxford University Press archives).
Tolkien’s prose translation was published at last in 2014 as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell. In a preface to this volume, Christopher Tolkien explains that his father made many changes to the translation, often in accord with discussion of textual points in his Oxford lectures, though sometimes he made points in his lectures which were not then reflected in a change to the translation. See further, entry for the 2014 volume below.
In ‘Tolkien’s Technique of Translation in His Prose Beowulf: Literalism and Literariness’, Mallorn 55 (Winter 2014), pp. 23–5, Britton Brooks notes Tolkien’s effort to preserve the Old English word order whenever possible, which sometimes inverts the syntax, though the translation ‘is not slavish’ to the original language, ‘and his attempt at balance with literary prose often leads to sentences in a recognizably modern syntax’ (p. 23). Tolkien ‘goes to great lengths to translate each word into acceptably literary equivalents, though not often via cognates’, while applying deliberate archaisms, and he consistently resolves Old English compounds into phrases (such as sundwudu > ‘the watery timbers’ = wooden boat). His translation adheres closely to the methodology he discussed in his Prefatory Remarks, ‘including his attempt at balancing literalism with literariness, but also is directly tied to his own maturation as a scholar, where through the resolution of compounds he seeks to explore their full imaginative potential, so that when the original Old English is reread, the text is further illuminated’ (p. 25).
Among lengthy comments about the translation in his Tolkien Studies review, Michael D.C. Drout notes that it is ‘consistently rhythmic. This rhythm is roughly trochaic and closer to a whole-line meter rather than the half-line metrics of the Old English text. Both stressed and unstressed syllables are less frequently stacked together than is the case in standard Modern English prose, but the thythm never becomes as obvious as Shakespearean pentameter’ (p. 156). ‘In content’, Drout continues,
the translation presents few surprises to the reader who already knows Beowulf in Old English. Tolkien does not incorporate much of his own interpretation but instead presents what would be the consensus view of the 1920s through 1940s on most of the cruces and ambiguities. That the translation contains little that most scholars (both contemporary and of Tolkien’s day) would find unusual is, to me, further evidence that the text was intended to give students a basic understanding of the poem, as an ‘aid to study’ that would not put them very far out of the mainstream of Beowulf criticism. [pp. 156–7]
Drout finds Tolkien’s translation the equal of any previous translation of Beowulf into prose (‘not a particularly high standard’), accurate, and with ‘some of the high formality and serious tone that Beowulf has in Old English’. But he doubts that it will replace the verse translation by Seamus Heaney ‘as the text most introductory students encounter’ (p. 157).
See also the subsection ‘Criticism’ in the article *Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell.
INFLUENCE ON TOLKIEN’S WORKS
Beowulf was an important influence on Tolkien’s own poetry and prose fiction. Probably at the end of 1922 he wrote the poem Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden, later revised as *The Hoard, which was inspired by line 3052 in Beowulf, ‘the gold of men long ago enmeshed in enchantment’. His poem *The Fall of Arthur is in the Beowulf metre. In *The Hobbit Bilbo’s theft of a cup from Smaug’s