The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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the volume was comparatively clean.
In 2011 Drout published a revised edition of Beowulf and the Critics, in which he not only corrected errors but made changes to take account of developments in Beowulf and Tolkien studies. New additions to the text include a nearly complete identification of the scholars to whom Tolkien alludes in the lecture as ‘the Babel of Voices’, and the notes Tolkien made in preparing the second, longer text.
CRITICISM
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics changed the course of Beowulf studies. *Kenneth Sisam wrote in his study The Structure of Beowulf (1965; corrected 1966) that Tolkien’s lecture ‘brought fresh ideas and has influenced all later writers’ on the poem. ‘Knowing well the detailed problems that occupy critics, he has withdrawn from them to give a general view of Beowulf as poetry, with a fineness of perception and elegance of expression that are rare in this field’ (p. 20). T.A. Shippey has said that ‘two of the qualities that made [the lecture] so influential are its aggression and its humour. In one allegory after another, Tolkien presents the poem as Cinderella taken over by a series of domineering fairy godmothers, as a victim of “the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research,” and as a tower looking out on the sea. … The major achievement of Tolkien’s essay was to insist on the poem’s autonomy and its author’s right to create freely, regardless of critical canons’ (‘Structure and Unity’, in A Beowulf Handbook (1997), pp. 162–3).
Reviews of the published lecture had little to say against it. R.W. Chambers, for instance, wrote in Modern Language Review 33, no. 2 (April 1938) that ‘towards the study of Beowulf as a work of art, Professor Tolkien has made a contribution of the utmost importance.’ However, ‘instead of weaving them into his discourse’ Tolkien ‘has hidden away all too many of his good things in appendices and notes’ (pp. 272, 273). T.A. Shippey, in a useful brief overview of the critical response to Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, notes that Tolkien’s ‘defence of the poem as something existing in its own right … was seized on eagerly, even gratefully, by generations of critics’ (‘Structure and Unity’, p. 163).
One of these was his former B.Litt. student Joan Blomfield (*Joan Elizabeth Turville-Petre), who built on his remarks on the structure of Beowulf in an essay for the Review of English Studies (‘The Style and Structure of Beowulf’, 1938). Another was the Swiss scholar Adrien Bonjour, who in his monograph The Digressions in Beowulf (1950) stated unequivocally that he followed Tolkien concerning the general structure of the poem:
Professor Tolkien’s interpretation seems to us indeed by far the most satisfactory dramatically as well as artistically. It is, at the same time, perfectly objective: it considerably heightens our appreciation of the poem by showing the grand simplicity of its original design, its real perspective, its structural force and permanent human element – and all this on a quite solid basis, all the more solid that it is devoid of the speculative element inherent in so many other tentative explanations. [p. 70]
The first major criticism of Tolkien’s lecture did not appear until 1952. T.M. Gang, in his ‘Approaches to Beowulf’, Review of English Studies n.s. 3 (1952), disputed Tolkien’s view that
the dragon-fight symbolizes the tragedy of the human struggle against the forces of evil. … That Grendel, who is maddened by the sound of harps, should represent the outer darkness in all its active malevolence is plausible; but dragons were, after all, the natural guardians of treasures … unpleasant though they were, they were not accomplices of hell. Nor, for that matter, were they “things made by the imagination” for any purpose whatsoever; they were solid enough fact for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle [pp. 7–8]
Gang argued that Tolkien ‘never exactly claims that the poet’s original audience would have interpreted it as he does’, and that his ‘reconstruction of the Anglo-Saxon view of the world, leaning heavily as it does on the extremely doubtful evidence of Norse poetry (of a later date than Beowulf and suggestive of a very different outlook on life) can hardly be accepted as objective, unbiased, or altogether convincing’ (p. 11). This was answered by Adrien Bonjour, in defence of Tolkien, in ‘Monsters Crouching and Critics Rampant: or The Beowulf Dragon Debated’, PMLA 68 (March 1953). But Gang’s views were echoed by J.C. van Meurs in ‘Beowulf and Literary Criticism’, Neophilologus 39 (1955): he found it ‘difficult to believe that the poem contains as much implicit symbolism as Tolkien ascribes to it’ (p. 118), and worried that Tolkien’s theory was so attractive ‘that it is in danger of being taken as dogmatic truth by present-day Beowulf scholars’ (p. 115).
A more concerted disagreement was put forth by Kenneth Sisam in The Structure of Beowulf. He took issue with Tolkien’s ‘explanation of the architecture of Beowulf as an artistic balance between the first two-thirds … and the last part’ of the poem, and with ‘his view that the central theme is the battle, hopeless in this world, of man against evil’ (p. 21). According to Sisam,
if the two parts of the poem are to be solidly bound together by the opposition of youth and age, it is not enough that the hero should be young in the one part and old in the other. The change in his age must be shown to change his ability to fight monsters, since these fights make the main plot. Instead, Beowulf is represented from beginning to end as the scourge of monsters, always seeking them out and destroying them by the shortest way. [p. 24]
Whereas for Tolkien the unifying theme of the poem is ‘man at war with the hostile world and his inevitable overthrow in Time’, in Sisam’s view ‘the monsters Beowulf kills are inevitably evil and hostile because a reputation for heroism is not made by killing creatures that are believed to be harmless or beneficent – sheep for instance.’ The idea ‘that Beowulf was defeated, that “within Time the monsters would win”’ must be read into the text. ‘There is no word of his defeat in the poem … according to the poet, the Dragon Fight was “his last victory” (2710). On the other hand, all the monsters are utterly defeated’ (p. 25).
George Clark in his Beowulf (1990), while agreeing with certain aspects of Tolkien’s lecture and acknowledging its significance in the history of Beowulf studies, found fault with it for having marginalized Grendel’s mother and trivialized the dragon ‘into an emblem of malice, blaming the monster for being too symbolic, for not being “dragon enough,” then graciously relenting with the comment “But for Beowulf, the poem, that is as it should be.” But it is not so’ (p. 10). He also rejected Tolkien’s view of the Beowulf-poet, in part because ‘the membrane separating Tolkien’s critical and creative faculties was permeable in both directions’ (p. 12) – that is, in Clark’s opinion, Tolkien the writer of fiction influenced Tolkien the scholar: ‘we have no evidence for an Anglo-Saxon poet like Tolkien’s, indeed like Tolkien himself, a nostalgic re-creator of lost worlds, of pastiche’ (p. 16). In response, one could argue that a scholar who is also a storyteller may have an advantage in understanding the work of a ‘mighty predecessor and kindred spirit’, to quote T.A. Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth (2nd edn. 1992). No one, Shippey wrote, ‘had understood Beowulf but Tolkien. The work had always been something personal, even freakish, and it took someone with the same instincts to explain it. Sympathy furthermore depended on being a descendant, on living in the same country and beneath the same sky, on speaking the same language …’ (p. 44).
Although Clark would place ‘Tolkien’s critical paradigm’ firmly among ‘the literary, moral, and political convictions’ of the period following the First World War (p. 9), the influence of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics is still to be felt in Beowulf studies. Its lively prose remains effective despite the passage of decades – untouched by the obfuscation that infects so much writing on literary subjects today. Its advanced age, however, seems to have led R.D. Fulk, editor of the anthology Interpretations of Beowulf (1991), to apologize for including Tolkien’s lecture in that book. ‘Any editor worth his salt’, he says in a preface,
and with an adequate understanding of the changing critical winds in the profession, would no doubt remark … that Tolkien’s lecture … has become the object of mindless veneration, is over-anthologized, hopelessly