I read “Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics” last night, and wanted to share some thoughts.  First of all, it was interesting to see Tolkien defending Beowulf as literature, just as modern authors like Shipley are now defending Tolkien as literature.  The prevailing feeling seems to have been that Beowulf was interesting primarily as a source of history and folklore, but not very good literature in itself.  He defends it as poetry.  Unfortunately for me, when he offers quotes in support of his statements, he quotes it in the original Anglo-Saxon.  (He also quotes Virgil in the original Latin when he makes comparisons to it.)

Tolkien says that Beowulf’s structure is a comparison between the young hero’s entry into his adult life, with the slaying of Grendel and Grendel’s mother, and the old king’s heroic departure from life, with the slaying of the dragon.  The critics of the time thought the emphasis was backward:  the monsters have primary place, and the interactions with other quasi-historical figures are secondary.  Tolkien says that emphasis is correct; Beowulf is not meant to be a historical recounting of events, but a juxtoposition of two powerful times in the hero’s life.   He says that by making the monsters inhuman but still physical, he gives them a mythological depth.

I thought of Curious’ assessment of orcs as monsters as I was reading this.  Curious, if you haven’t read this essay, I know you would enjoy it a lot, and you would have more interesting things to say about it than I do.

Tolkien says the author of Beowulf was clearly Christian, but he was trying to represent a pagan time.  So when he’s speaking as a narrator, there are Christian references, but when Beowulf himself is speaking, he doesn’t use those references.  The monsters seem to borrow from both kinds of thoughts. They’re demonic, but they represent a physical threat, not a spiritual one.

I’ve said before that the Essay of Fairy Stories is probably my second favorite piece of Tolkien’s writing (after LoTR).  I love his rich, convoluted prose and his dry humor.  This essay was also a treat.  You have to read it slowly because the sentences are so luxurious.  Here’s an example: 

“When new, Beowulf was already antiquarian, in a good sense, and it now produces a singular effect.  For it is now to us as itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote.  If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo.  There is not much poetry in the world like this…”

In another place, he quotes someone named Chambers as saying, “But in this conflict between plighted troth and the duty of revenge we have a situation which the old heroic poets loved, and would not have sold for a wilderness of dragons.”

Tolkien replies:

“As for the poem, one dragon, however hot, does not make a summer, or a host; and a man might well exchange for one good dragon what he would not sell for a wilderness… He [the author of Beowluf] esteemed dragons, as rare as they are dire, as some do still.  He liked them—as a poet, not as a sober zoologist; and he had good reason.”

Here he compares the Norse gods to the Greek gods: 

“The ruling [Greek] gods are not besieged, not in ever-present peril or under future doom.  Their offspring on earth may be heroes or fair women; it may also be the other creatures hostile to men.  The gods are not the allies of men in their war against these or other monsters….The Norse, at any rate, are gods within Time, doomed with their allies to death.  Their battle is with the monsters and the outer darkness.  They gather heroes for the last defense.”

Here he mocks the scholars who study Beowulf but don’t read it for pleasure: 

“Correct and sober taste may refuse to admit that there can be an interest for us—the proud ‘we’ that includes all intelligent living people—in ogres and dragons; we then perceive its puzzlement in the face of the odd fact that it has derived great pleasure from a poem that is actually about these unfashionable creatures.”

And one more passage.  This one had me laughing out loud:

“For it is of their nature that the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to another.  Noble animals, whose bubrling is on occasion good to hear; but though their eyes of flame may sometimes prove searchlights, their range is short.”

They don’t write ‘em like that anymore.