Tolkien translation of Beowulf

[Dngrsone]

I just found out that a J.R.R. Tolkien translation of the epic, Beowulf has been released.

I look forward to seeing how he treated the text compared to the Gummere translation I have in my ebook library.

... though I may wait for the price to come down a bit...

Beowulf at Amazon

 

[davoid]

I'm not sure it would have that much different to offer tbh, seeing as Tolkien was a historian. Even though Beowulf is a poem, it will probably be as stuffy as his prose in LOTR and The Hobbit.

Although I will qualify that statement by saying it is completely unfair of me to judge the work without having read it...

If you want something different I would maybe check out the translation by the poet Seamus Heaney. In his collection North, he incorporated a number of Norse kennings, and so his Beowulf translation was a natural enough development.

Let us know what you think of the Tolkien version if you get around to reading it though.

 

[Dngrsone]

I don't find Tolkien's prose stuffy at all... well, let me say that I enjoy his prose in LoTR at least. Silmarillion isn't as friendly.

I have heard that Heany kind of 'Irishified' Beowulf in his translation, which brings up an interesting thought... Irish (specifically Gaelic) is a child of the Celtic that also fed the root language of the Angles and in part the Saxons (as I recall), so how much of the poem is Irish in Heany's translation, and how much is Celtic?

For that matter, one has to consider that Heany may have had more data to work with (modern technology enabling scholars to see more letters in the existing codex) doing his translation in 1999 than Tolkien had available in 1926.

 

[davoid]

It's been a while since I read LOTR but I do remember it being stuffy. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it however. I did find his prose stilted, but his storytelling brilliant. Maybe 'quaint' is fairer than stuffy.

And I'm not opposed to reading different styles. I studied English literature, so I'm used to reading a more formal language register. I just assumed that Tolkien's translation would not be as colorful as, say, Heaney's. But again, unfair of me.