May 05, · Three major factors of Tolkien’s personality and environment combined to shape the theory of fantasy underlying his novels, as first enunciated in the essay “On Fairy-Stories” () This category is for essays, lectures, studies, letters and other short works of non-fiction by J. R. R. Tolkien. Pages in category "Essays by J. R. R. Tolkien" The following 13 pages are in Oct 20, · Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories” (PDF) The Tolkien Estate website provides a brief overview of “On Fairy Stories,” summarizing the origin and content of the essay. There is also a paragraph on “eucatastrophe,” Tolkien’s word for a “good catastrophe” such as the sudden and favorable resolution of a conflict in a blogger.comted Reading Time: 3 mins
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics - Wikipedia
Tolkien on literary criticism on the Old English heroic epic poem Beowulf. It was first published as a paper in the Proceedings of the British Academyand has since been reprinted in many collections. Tolkien argues that the original poem has almost been lost under the weight of the scholarship on it; that Beowulf must be seen as a poem, not just as a historical document; and that the quality of its verse and its structure give it a powerful effect. He rebuts suggestions that the poem is an epic or exciting narrative, likening it instead to a strong masonry structure built of blocks that fit together.
He points out that the poem's theme is a serious one, mortality, and that the poem is in two parts: the first on Beowulf as a young man, defeating Grendel and his mother; the second on Beowulf in old age, going to his death fighting the dragon.
The work has been praised by critics including the poet and Beowulf translator Seamus Heaney. Michael D. Drout called it the most important article ever written about the poem.
Tolkien 's essay " Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics", initially delivered as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy inand first published as a paper in the Proceedings of the British Academy that same year, jrr tolkien essays, is regarded as a formative work in modern Beowulf studies. Tolkien argues that rather than being merely extraneous, these elements are key to the narrative and should be the focus of study.
In doing so he drew attention to jrr tolkien essays previously neglected literary qualities of the poem and argued that it should be studied as a work of artnot just as a historical document. The essay is a redacted version of a series of lectures that Tolkien delivered to Oxford undergraduates in the s.
Drout ; these offer some insight into the development of Tolkien's thinking on the poem, especially his much-quoted metaphor of the material of the poem as a tower, jrr tolkien essays. Tolkien begins by noting that the jrr tolkien essays book has almost been lost under the extensive "literature" [11] he uses scare quotes on the subject, jrr tolkien essays. He explains that Beowulf had mainly been quarried as "an historical document", jrr tolkien essays, [12] and that most of the praise and censure of the poem was due to beliefs that it was "something that it was not — for example, primitive, pagan, Teutonic, an allegory political or mythicaljrr tolkien essays, or most often, an epic;" [13] or because the scholar would have liked it to be something else, such as "a heathen heroic laya history of Sweden, a manual of Germanic antiquities, or a Nordic Summa Theologica.
He builds a tower with some of it, but jrr tolkien essays people find the stones are older than the tower, they pull it down "to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions". Tolkien quotes at length what the scholar W. Ker thought of Beowulfnamely that "there is nothing much in the story", and that "the great beauty, the real value, of Beowulf is in its dignity of style". Tolkien notes that Ker's opinion had been a powerful influence in favour of a paradoxical contrast between the poem's supposed defect in speaking of monsters, jrr tolkien essays, and in Tolkien's words its agreed "dignity, loftiness in converse, and well-wrought finish".
Tolkien finds it improbable that "a mind lofty and thoughtful", as evidenced by jrr tolkien essays quality of the poetry, "would write more than three thousand lines wrought to a high finish on matter that is really not worth serious attention". In Tolkien's view, the poem is essentially about a "man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time". The underlying tragedy is man's brief mortal life. Grendel and the dragon are identified as enemies of a Christian Jrr tolkien essays, unlike the monsters encountered by Odysseus on his travels, jrr tolkien essays.
The Christian, Tolkien notes, is "hemmed in a hostile world", and the monsters are evil spirits: but as the transition was incomplete in the poem, the monsters remain real and the focus remains "an ancient theme: that man, each man and all men, jrr tolkien essays, and all their works shall die". Tolkien returns to the monsters, and regrets we know so little about pre-Christian English mythology ; he resorts instead to Icelandic mythwhich he argues must have had a similar attitude to monsters, men and gods.
The Northern gods, like men, are doomed to die. The Southern Roman and Greek pagan gods were immortal, so to Tolkien a Christianthe Southern religion "must go forward to philosophy or relapse into anarchy": [22] death and the monsters are peripheral. But the Northern myths, and Beowulfput the monsters, mortality and death in the centre. Tolkien is therefore very interested in the contact of Northern and Christian thought in the poem, where the scriptural Cain is linked to eotenas giants and ylfe elvesnot through confusion but "an indication of the precise point at which an imagination, pondering old and new, was kindled".
The general structure of the poem is then clear, writes Tolkien. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death.
A secondary division of the jrr tolkien essays occurs, Tolkien writes, at lineafter which all the earlier story is summarized, so a complete account of Beowulf's tragedy is given between and the end, but without the account of the gloomy court of Heorotor of the contrast between the young Beowulf and the old Hrothgar. The poem's metre, jrr tolkien essays, too, is founded on a balance of two halves to each line, "more like masonry than music".
approaches rather to sculpture or painting. It is a composition not a tune. It is not an ' epic ', nor even jrr tolkien essays magnified ' lay '. No terms borrowed from Greek or other literatures exactly fit: there is no reason why they should. Though if we must have a term, we should choose rather ' elegy '. It is an heroic-elegiac poem; and in a sense all its first 3, jrr tolkien essays, lines are the prelude to a dirge.
Tolkien takes a moment to dismiss another criticism, that monsters should not have been made to appear in both halves. He replies he can see the point of no monsters, but not in complaining about their mere numbers; the poet could not, he argues, have balanced Beowulf's rise to fame through a war in Frisiaagainst death by dragon.
Similarly, he dismisses notions that the poem is primitive: it is instead a late poem, using materials left over from a vanished age:. When new Beowulf was already antiquarian, in a good sense, and it now produces a singular effect. For it is now to us 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 jrr tolkien essays funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, jrr tolkien essays, 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; [28], jrr tolkien essays. Tolkien finishes by arguing that Beowulf "has its own individual character, and peculiar solemnity;" [28] and would still be powerful even if it came from some unknown time and place; but that in fact its language, Old English.
has still essential kinship with our own, it was made in this land, and moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must ever call with a profound appeal — until jrr tolkien essays dragon comes. Scholars and critics agree on the work's wide influence.
Tom Shippey wrote that the essay "was seized upon eagerly, even gratefully, by generations of critics". Lee wrote that "Tolkien's manifesto and interpretation have had more influence on readers than any other single study, even though it has been challenged on just about every one of its major points.
The strategies control the fundamental assumptions of Old English scholarship for jrr tolkien essays next fifty years. Fulk commented that "No one denies the historical importance of this lecture. opening the way to the formalist principles that played such a vital role in the subsequent development of further Beowulf scholarship. the methodology remains a model for emulation.
Robinson call it in their Beowulf, An Edition "the most influential literary criticism of the poem ever written", jrr tolkien essays.
The scholar and translator Roy Liuzza commented that Tolkien's essay "is usually credited with re-establishing the fabulous elements and heroic combats at the center of the modern reader's appreciation of the poem. He argues that if myth can condense and hold the deepest sources of tension between self and the social order, and dramatises current ideologies by projecting them into the past, then even the hero Beowulf's mythic fights are at the same time throwing light on society and history.
The historian Patrick Wormald wrote of the essay: "it would be no exaggeration to describe [it] as one of the most influential works of literary criticism jrr tolkien essays that century, and since which nothing in Beowulf studies has been quite the same.
Tolkien argued powerfully that, for the Germanic mentality that gave birth to the myth of Ragnarökthe monsters of the poem were the only appropriate enemies for a great hero, and thus shifted Beowulf from the irrelevant fringes to the very centre of the Anglo-Saxon thought world.
Jrr tolkien essays naturally encouraged a pre-existent tendency to square the poem with what else was known of the 'serious' levels of Anglo-Saxon thought — chiefly the Latin scholarship of the Church. Secondly, Tolkien went far towards vindicating the structure of the poem by arguing that it was a balance of contrasting and interlocking halves. His thesis not only convinced many critics but inspired them to follow his example, with the result that Tolkien's own position has been outflanked.
Whereas previous generations of scholars, Tolkien included, had been quite prepared to explain what they considered structural and stylistic blemishes as interpolations, jrr tolkien essays writers seek evidence of artistic refinement in some of the poem's least promising features. Drout similarly describes the essay's importance and arguments, writing that it. is the most important article ever written about Beowulf Tolkien's shadow looms long over Beowulf scholarship.
Much of this influence is because of the enormous success of [the essay], which is viewed as the beginning of modern Beowulf criticism. Tolkien was so influential because he developed a big-picture reading of the poem that has found favour with jrr tolkien essays generations of critics.
Thus, Tolkien interpreted the theme of Beowulf to be that "man, each man and all men and all their works shall die," a theme consistent with the heathen past but one that "no Christian need despise. The massive influence of " The Homecoming " and " Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics" is in some ways ironic.
The great majority of Tolkien's work on Beowulf was of the sort represented by the textual commentry in Finn and Hengest —detailed, philological, historical, jrr tolkien essays, and infinitely painstaking.
Yet the most influential of Tolkien's discussions of the poem are those in which he makes the greatest unsupported or lightly supported generalizations and in which he discusses the poem in the broadest possible terms. Tolkien would perhaps have seen a fundamental continuity between the detailed and philological and the broader and more interpret[at]ive work, but because of the accidents of publication—and because of Tolkien's great gift for rhetoric—only the latter has shaped the field of Beowulf criticism.
John D. Niles observed that "Bypassing earlier scholarship, critics of the past fifty years have generally traced the current era of Beowulf studies back to ", [2] meaning to Tolkien's essay, which he called "eloquent and incisive".
Niles cited George Clark's observation that Tolkien left Beowulf scholars with the "myth of the poet as brooding intellectual, poised between a dying pagan world and a nascent Christian one. Joan Acocellawriting in The New Yorkercalls it "a paper that many people regard as not just the finest essay on the poem but one of the finest essays on English literature.
Regina Weinreichreviewing The Monsters and the Critics: And Other Essays in The New York Timeswrote that the title essay "revolutionized the study of the early English poem Beowulf, in which a young hero crushes a human-handed monster called Grendel, jrr tolkien essays.
Against the scorn of critics, Tolkien defends the centrality and seriousness of literary monsters, declaring his own belief in the symbolic value of such preternatural representations of sheer evil. John Garthwriting in The Guardiandescribes the paper as "still well worth reading, not only as an introduction to the poem, but also because it decisively changed the direction and emphasis of Beowulf scholarship.
Up to that point it had been used as a quarry of linguistic, historical and archaeological detail". Tolkien pushed the monsters to the forefront, jrr tolkien essays. He argued that they represent the impermanence of human life, jrr tolkien essays mortal enemy that can strike at the heart of everything we hold dear, the force against which we need to muster all our strength — even if ultimately we may lose the fight.
Without the monsters, the peculiarly northern courage of Beowulf and his men is meaningless. Tolkien, veteran of the Sommeknew that it was not. Tolkien's paper was praised by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in the introduction to his critically acclaimed translation of Beowulf. He wrote that the "epoch-making paper" [37] stood out in considering Beowulf as literature.
Heaney argued that Tolkien "took for granted the poem's integrity and distinction as a work of art", [37] and showed how the poem achieved that status:. Tolkien assumed that the poet had felt his way through the inherited material — the fabulous elements and the traditional accounts of a heroic past — and by a combination of creative intuition and conscious structuring had arrived at a unity of jrr tolkien essays and a balanced order.
He assumed, in other words, that the Beowulf poet was an imaginative writer rather than some kind of back-formation derived from nineteenth-century folklore and philology, jrr tolkien essays. Heaney called the paper's literary treatment "brilliant". Tolkien's own jrr tolkien essays translation of Beowulfpublished posthumously in as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentaryhas been linked to the essay.
Tolkien stated, for instance, that Beowulf was not an actual picture of Scandinavia around AD, but was a self-consistent picture with the marks of design and thought. This might leave the reader wondering, commented Shippey, what exactly Tolkien meant by that. Shippey argued that there was evidence from the chronology given in the book, supported by the work of scholars such as the archaeologist Martin Rundkvistthat there was serious trouble among the eastern Geatsjrr tolkien essays, with migration and the taking over of mead-halls by new leaders, at that time, just as portrayed in the poem.
Video Essay #01 Why I Love J.R.R. Tolkien
, time: 16:40Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming in | JRR Tolkien | The Guardian
Oct 29, · Essays Death and funerary practices in Middle-earth, by Pat Reynolds Kortirion among trees the Trees, by Lynn Forest-Hill The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien’s Equestrian Epic, by Lynn Forest-Hill The Celtic Roots of Meriadoc, by Lynn Forest-Hill Tolkien as a Estimated Reading Time: 2 mins Nov 19, · A previously unpublished collection of writings by JRR Tolkien, exploring the world of Middle-earth in essays tackling topics ranging from Elvish reincarnation to Estimated Reading Time: 2 mins By J. R. R. Tolkien On Fairy-stories This essay was originally intended to be one of the Andrew Lang lectures at St. Andrews, and it was, in abbreviated form, delivered there in To be invited to lecture in St. Andrews is a high compliment to any man; to be allowed to speak about fairy-stories is (for an Englishman in Scotland) a perilous honor
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