JRR Tolkien Translation Of Beowulf To Be Published After 90-Year Wait

In this edition of the 11th-century poem, “his son Christopher Tolkien says sees his father “enter[ing] into the imagined past” of the heroes.”

Telling of how the Geatish prince Beowulf comes to the aid of Danish king Hroðgar, slaying the monster Grendel and his mother before – spoiler alert – being mortally wounded by a dragon years later, Beowulf is is the longest epic poem in Old English, and is dated to the early 11th century. It survives in a single manuscript, housed at the British Library, and has inspired countless retellings of the myth – recently and famously by the late Seamus Heaney, whose translation won him the Whitbread book of year award in 1999.

Tolkien himself called the story “laden with history, leading back into the dark heathen ages beyond the memory of song, but not beyond the reach of imagination”, saying that “the whole thing is sombre, tragic, sinister, curiously real”.

By: Cheston Catalano

Cheston Catalano is a Kentucky-based journalist whose work has been featured in the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the Clarksville Leaf Chronicle. He is a long-time contributor to Liberaland.