Date: Tue, 27 May 2014 18:50:18 -0400
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: [WSFA] Slaying Monsters =?UTF-8?B?VG9sa2llbuKAmXMg4oCcQmVvd3VsZi7igJ0=?=
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Excerpt:
Why did Tolkien never publish his \342\200\234Beowulf\342\200\235? It could be said that he
didn\342\200\231t have the time. As he was finishing his translation, he got the
appointment at Oxford and had to move his family. Such a disruption can
put a writer off his feed. A few years later, he began \342\200\234The Hobbit,\342\200\235
which, with its three sequels, in \342\200\234The Lord of the Rings,\342\200\235 took up many of
his remaining healthy years. It has also been argued, by Tolkien\342\200\231s very
sympathetic biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, that he was too much of a
perfectionist to let the poem go. Christopher Tolkien, in the introduction
to \342\200\234Beowulf,\342\200\235 says that, in editing, the typescript he worked from\342\200\224and
this was a \342\200\234clean\342\200\235 copy, a retyping from preceding marked-up copies\342\200\224was
full of changes, plus marginal notes as to other, possible changes.
Christopher also supplies a commentary consisting of Tolkien\342\200\231s lectures on
\342\200\234Beowulf\342\200\235 and the notes he wrote to himself before and after the lectures.
This material, which Christopher says he cut substantially, is longer than
the poem: two hundred and seventeen pages, as opposed to ninety-three. So
although Tolkien told his publisher in 1926 that he had finished the
translation, he went on fiddling with it for a long time. When he
published \342\200\234The Hobbit,\342\200\235 in 1937, a number of his colleagues said to him,
\342\200\234Now we know what you have been doing all these years!\342\200\235 But he wasn\342\200\231t just
writing \342\200\234The Hobbit.\342\200\235 He hadn\342\200\231t stopped working on \342\200\234Beowulf.\342\200\235

Was this really due primarily to perfectionism? \342\200\234Beowulf\342\200\235 was by no means
Tolkien\342\200\231s only translation from Old English, and he gave a number of them,
such as \342\200\234Pearl\342\200\235 and \342\200\234Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,\342\200\235 the same treatment
that he gave \342\200\234Beowulf.\342\200\235 Both \342\200\234Pearl\342\200\235 and \342\200\234Sir Gawain\342\200\235 were actually set in
print, but Tolkien could not bring himself to write the introductions, and
so the contracts lapsed. Nor should it be thought that Tolkien\342\200\231s problem
was that he feared criticism from other scholars of Old English. \342\200\234The
Hobbit,\342\200\235 too, though it was not an academic enterprise, was laid aside for
years, until a representative of the publisher George Allen & Unwin went
to Oxford to see Tolkien, borrowed the typescript, read it, and prevailed
upon him to complete it.

Another possible explanation for Tolkien\342\200\231s putting \342\200\234Beowulf\342\200\235 aside\342\200\224a
theory that has been advanced in the case of many unpublished
manuscripts\342\200\224is that the work was so important to him that if he finished
it his life, or the life of his mind, would be over. I think this makes
some sense. \342\200\234Beowulf\342\200\235 was Tolkien\342\200\231s lodestar. Everything he did led up to
or away from it.
--- end excerpt ---

<http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/06/02/140602crbo_books_acocella?currentPage=all>

       mark