Annotation: J.R.R. Tolkien - "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"

It is no exaggeration to say that Tolkien's "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" is the single most significant and influential essay in the history of Beowulf studies. It marks a sea change in how the poem is studied, as prior to this essay the primary mode of study applied to Beowulf (aside from efforts to date the poem or to study its language through philology) was to mine it for historical data about pre-Christian Germanic society. Since this essay, Beowulf criticism has shifted significantly on the balance. There are still many philological assessments being made, and dating the poem remains a significant endeavor. But there now exists a greater proportion of literary studies of Beowulf than existed in Tolkien's day. And that is the legacy of this essay: that Beowulf should be treated as a literary text, subject to critical analysis as a poem/narrative/etc. and up for interpretation, is something we take for granted nowadays.

As for my project, however influential Tolkien is on Beowulf studies, he is nearly useless when it comes to discussion of Grendel's Mother. The commentary and notes in his translation of the poem skip over her entirely. This essay nearly does so, but for two very brief mentions in the appendix. It seems significant to me that although Tolkien reads her as monstrous, he refuses to grant her significance as one of the poem's monsters. He names Grendel and the dragon as the monsters of the poem, and they form the bulk of his focus when he does write about the poem itself. There's no way to read Tolkien as prefiguring modern readings of Grendel's Mother as not monstrous through the exclusion, however, due to the appendix. Ultimately, Tolkien just seems not to have thought about her much at all.

The below annotation is about twice as long as I normally would make it. But when the text is so foundational to the study of Beowulf, I think it merits a bit extra, even if little of the actual material is useful to my present needs. If I were so incluned, the bulk of the annotation could be boiled down to saying that Tolkien argues we should read Beowulf as a poem, not history. That really is the long and the short of the essay, but there are interesting points within that argument worth taking note of, and that effort forms the bulk of my annotation.

So here is the annotation:

Tolkien, J.R.R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, edited by Lewis E. Nicholson. University of Notre Dame Press, 1963. 51-104.

In many respects, this essay remains the foundation of modern Beowulf studies, as Tolkien calls for the poem to be examined as a poem, rather than a historical document. He cites then-recent work that shows the nature of the prevailing mode of scholarship: Beowulf is seen as a window through which the “picture of a whole civilization, of the Germania which Tacitus describes” can be viewed (quoting Archibald Strong, 53). Before I cover the rest of the essay, a brief comment about Grendel’s Mother in it: Tolkien names what he sees as the two “monsters” the poem has: Grendel and the Dragon (52). Grendel’s Mother does not figure in, which says a lot about how marginalized she was in the discourse about the poem at the time. Tolkien talks at length about how the general trend, whenever scholars have spoken about the poem and its narrative, is to think of the poem as having put front and center irrelevant things and to wish the poet would have focused on other topics instead. He also discusses the genres the poem does not fall into (including simple folklore, allegory, and the epic), and instead offers Beowulf as mythic, heroic legend. Among the key concepts Tolkien brings forth is that Beowulf “is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy” (68). Tragedy is Beowulf’s bread and butter, the transitory qualities of life and happiness expressed throughout the poem, and the monsters are essential to building this idea. Tolkien compares the function of the monsters to those found in Classical epics, and a key difference is that the monsters are foes of God in Beowulf, whereas Polyphemus (and other Classical monsters) is “god-begotten” and indeed harming him is an offense to Poseidon (75). Indeed, this is a factor in both Beowulf and Norse myth as opposed to the Classical myths: the gods do not, even when the monsters are their own children as with Fenris Wolf, recognize any bond of kinship with the monsters, nor do humans, and they are just as doomed as humanity (76). Tolkien expounds on how the poet was learned and blended Christian poetics with an interest in and knowledge of traditional pre-Christian poetics, waxing nostalgic about a heroic but doomed age through his Christian lens, and he often reminds us that the poet makes no efforts to accurately represent the past (79-80). As he moves to conclude, Tolkien stresses key points: Beowulf is not a “narrative poem” that simply tells a tale or even intends to tell a tale in sequence, but rather a poem of balance and opposing ends with beginnings. Here Tolkien refers to the two parts he identifies in the poem: the Grendel business of Beowulf’s early life and the dragon business of his death, and that the poem’s fundamental structure is about putting these moments in contrast with one another (81). Evidently a common critique was that the poem has too many monsters, and Tolkien thinks having Grendel and the dragon is the right amount: starting Beowulf against men rather than Grendel makes the dragon preposterous, and having him defeat Grendel only to fall to men would flatten and weaken the story and its message (86). There is an appendix, and it is there in the discussion of the terms used to describe Grendel that his mother receives her only acknowledgement. She too is called deofla, and Tolkien concludes the first part of his appendix with a brief paragraph which glosses some of her terms and translates monster into aglæc wif (“monster of a woman”) and grundwyrgen (“accursed she-monster of the deep”) (89-91).