The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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the poem on its own terms, according to aesthetic guidelines discoverable in the work itself, thus opening the way to the formalist principles that played such a vital role in the subsequent development of Beowulf scholarship. But Tolkien’s study is not just a pilgrims’ stop on the road to holier shrines: his explanation of the poem’s larger structure, though frequently disputed, has never been bettered, and the methodology inherent in his practice of basing claims about the macrostructural level on patterns everyone discerns in the microstructure remains a model for emulation. His view of the poet as an artist of an antiquarian bent remains enormously influential (and a major obstacle to dating the poem); and although the issue of the appropriateness of the monsters is not as pressing as it was in 1936, it is not superfluous in the context of some subsequent criticism. … [pp. xi–xii]
Peter S. Baker, editor of Beowulf: Basic Readings (1995), more directly counts Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics among those works ‘that have long been part of the standard reading list for a Beowulf course’ which ‘continue to be influential and are still worth the student’s attention’ (p. xi).
Significant comment on the lecture has also been made in the ‘Scholars Forum’ of The Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza by Michael D.C. Drout (‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics: The Brilliant Essay that Broke Beowulf Studies’, 25 April 2010) and Tom Shippey (‘Tolkien’s Two Views of Beowulf: One Hailed, One Ignored. But Did We Get This Right?’ 25 July 2010). Shippey repeats the usual praise of Tolkien’s lecture as one which ‘altered the current of Beowulf scholarship, which is only slowly starting to look for new channels’. Tolkien’s success, he argues, was partly due to his rhetorical skill: ‘he could make a shaky case look rock-solid, and several times did, and the results have not always been totally fortunate. … 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. … 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 opinions’ of critics such as R.W. Chambers and W.P. Ker. After the Second World War ‘a whole industry grew up of books and essays which demonstrated that Beowulf was a work of great “organic unity” … and that all the many bits which had been taken as “digressions” or insertions actually played an important part in the poet’s conception. … Seeing the poem as a fantasy perhaps did not catch on quite so much.’
Drout on his part observed that Tolkien attacked the view ‘that Beowulf is most valuable not as literature, but as documentation about the history and culture of the pre-literate Germanic world’, a view which gave study of the work validity despite ‘the establishment view that Beowulf was ill-shaped and inferior’. Instead, Tolkien argued that ‘critics could justify their studying Beowulf on aesthetic grounds alone and that they did not need the additional buttressing of historical interest’. He himself did not say or think ‘that the historical and quasi-historical thoughts mentioned in Beowulf were unimportant. Nevertheless subsequent critics, seeing that they were free to discuss the poem as literature only, began to abandon historical scholarship that had figured so significantly in Beowulf studies.’ Shippey agrees, stating that ‘something got lost, which I think Tolkien would have regretted. … The effect of what Tolkien wrote has been to terminate interest in Beowulf as a guide to history.’ Yet Beowulf also contains allusions to ‘lost tales’, hints of unexplained actions, elements Tolkien introduced into his own writings. More significantly, his *Finn and Hengest (1982) makes it clear that Tolkien thought that the Old English Finnsburg Fragment and the account in Beowulf of ‘the fight at Finnsburg’ refer to an actual event. Both Drout and Shippey point out that more recent archaeological discoveries of a series of great halls in the area which best fits the site for Heorot indicated in the poem suggest that Beowulf does preserve some true historical memories.
Tolkien had written in his lecture that he accepted ‘without argument throughout the attribution of Beowulf to the “age of Bede” – one of the firmer conclusions of a department of research most clearly serviceable to criticism: inquiry into the probable date of the effective composition of the poem as we have it’ (The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 20). But this, Shippey comments, came to be rejected, ‘often savagely … by a majority of Anglo-Saxonists, their view entrenched in a thoroughly one-sided “conference” (it was really more of a party rally)’, the conference on the dating of Beowulf held in Toronto in 1980, and expressed in The Dating of Beowulf, edited by Colin Chase (1981). From that point scholars began to write of a later date for Beowulf (with its poet imitating an earlier style, an idea enabled by Tolkien’s portrayal of him as an antiquarian), or that the poem was in effect undateable. Shippey notes, however, that ‘the balance is now beginning to turn again’ to the earlier date championed by Tolkien, ‘on grounds of metrical linguistics, palaeography, and onomastics’.
The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment, edited by Leonard Neidorf (2014), revisits this issue with numerous references to Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (but not entered in the index). Its essays by Tom Shippey, ‘Names in Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon England’, and by Michael D.C. Drout with Phoebe Boyd and Emily Bowman, ‘“Give the People What They Want”: Historiography and Rhetorical History of the Dating of Beowulf Controversy’, revisit some of Shippey and Drout’s points in their online essays.
See further, Drout’s long review of the lecture (‘not just the most important single essay written on Beowulf, but also one of the most influential and widely quoted literary essays of the twentieth century’, p. 134), as well as its criticism, in ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and Its Significance’, Tolkien Studies 4 (2007); and his ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics: Seventy-Five Years Later’, Mythlore 30, nos. 1/2, whole nos. 115/116 (Fall/Winter 2011).
‘Of Beren and Lúthien’. The nineteenth chapter of the *‘Quenta Silmarillion’, published in *The Silmarillion (1977), pp. 162–87.
SYNOPSIS
Barahir of the House of Bëor and a small band of men live as outlaws in their former homeland of Dorthonion, which was seized by Morgoth in the Battle of Sudden Flame. They are hunted until only Barahir, his son Beren, and eleven others remain. One of these, Gorlim, while visiting his ruined home is ensnared by a vision of his missing wife and captured by the enemy. Deceived by Sauron, he reveals his comrades’ hiding place and is put to death. But Gorlim’s shade appears to Beren, who is alone on an errand, and declares his treachery and death. Beren finds the others of his band slain, pursues their killers, and recovers from them the ring they had taken from his father, given by Felagund of Nargothrond with a promise of aid in need to Barahir who had rescued him from foes.
After four years Beren leaves Dorthonion and undertakes a terrible journey through Ered Gorgoroth and the region where the spider offspring of Ungoliant dwell. Eventually he comes to Doriath, ‘and he passed through the mazes that Melian wove about the kingdom of Thingol, even as she had foretold; for a great doom lay upon him’ (pp. 164–5). One summer evening he sees Lúthien, daughter of Thingol and Melian, ‘the most beautiful of all the Children of Ilúvatar’, dancing on the grass, and is enchanted by her. She disappears, and for long Beren seeks her. At last, near springtime, he hears her song which ‘released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed’ (p. 165). He calls her Tinúviel, nightingale, and as she looks on him she loves him, but once more vanishes from sight. ‘Thus he began the payment of anguish for the fate that was laid on him; and in his fate Lúthien was caught, and being immortal she shared his mortality, and being free received his chain …’ (pp. 165–6). But she returns, and they meet secretly through the summer.
They are betrayed to Thingol by Daeron the minstrel, who also loves Lúthien. Lúthien refuses to tell her father anything unless he first promises not to slay Beren or imprison him. She then leads Beren before her father, who scornfully asks him what he seeks in Doriath. Beren, feeling almost as if the words are put into his mouth, says that Lúthien is the treasure