Annotation: Christopher Tolkien - "Introduction to the Translation"

I'll save my thoughts on J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf for another post dedicated to the translation itself. Instead, I want to focus here on the introduction Christopher Tolkien provides for the text. Surely, one might imagine, the introduction to Tolkien's translation will contain a great deal of information about Tolkien's understanding of the poem, about style, about the process of translation. Maybe a paragraph about the decision to go with prose for this translation. A hint of what imagined audience the professor had in mind for the text, or if this was his own private translation which he used for lecture reference.

Unfortunately, the introduction is almost completely devoid of any of that, and rather pointedly focuses on the different typescripts used to compile the translation. Of interest for someone studying Tolkien's process, sure. But this introduction is very nearly vacuous in terms of saying anything worthwhile about how Tolkien translated. Meghan Purvis's translation does not go into great detail on that front, but there is a clarity about her purpose in her introduction that answers the question of how she approached Beowulf. Heaney's introduction remains the gold standard for an introduction to Beowulf in translation. The introduction to the Tolkien translation is only valuable for the scholar concerned with the documents Christopher collated the final version of the text from. And frankly, given the dullness of the translation, that's only going to be a Tolkien scholar who has run out of material to cover from Tolkien's more engaging literary output.

Annotation below, as usual:

Tolkien, Christopher. “Introduction to the Translation,” Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary. Houghton-Mifflin, 2014. 1-11.

Tolkien first describes the history of his father’s translation documents, notably the two typescripts (one of which continues handwritten where it ceases to be typed) it could be collated together from. The second and larger typescript incorporates most of the corrections and emendations made to the earlier one, though not all. Tolkien offers some example passages from the typescripts. This is all rather dull and takes up the majority of the introduction. More interesting is that Tolkien quickly abandoned an alliterative approach and instead settled on prose to best hew, in Christopher's best estimation, “as close as he could to the exact meaning” of the poem (8). Tolkien’s translation does not attend to the alliterative rhythm at all, but it does offer a sort of prose rhythm that fits the rhythm of common and repeated formulae used in Old English versification. Christopher Tolkien offers no more than this brief foray into discussion of rhythm by way of speaking of the text as a literary object.