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The former, subtitled "Beowulf and Grendel", is a poem or song [5] of seven eight-line stanzas about Beowulf's victory over Grendel. The latter is a poem of fifteen eight-line stanzas on the same theme; several of the stanzas, including the first and the last, are almost identical with the first version.
"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" looks at the critics' understanding of Beowulf, and proposes instead a fresh take on the poem. "On Translating Beowulf " looks at the difficulties in translating the poem from Old English. "On Fairy-Stories", the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture at St Andrew's University, is a defence of the fantasy genre.
It is in the Beowulf manuscript (also known as the Nowell Codex, London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv). [5] It is written in Late West Saxon [6] in a Mercian dialect. [7] Other than Beowulf and The Wonders of the East, the other works in this codex include: The Passion of St. Christopher, Alexander's Letter to Aristotle, and Judith.
Burton Raffel writes in his essay "On Translating Beowulf " that the poet-translator "needs to master the original in order to leave it", meaning that the text must be thoroughly understood, and then boldly departed from. His own effort to do this created what Marijane Osborn calls "the liveliest translation of Beowulf".
Tolkien ends the essay with an analysis of lines 210–228 of Beowulf, providing the original text, marked up with stresses and his metrical patterns for each half-line, as well as a literal translation with poetical words underlined. He notes that there are three words for boat and for wave, five for men, four for sea: in each case some are ...
Tolkien made use of Beowulf, along with other Old English sources, for many aspects of the Riders of Rohan. Their land was the Mark, its name a version of the Mercia where he lived, in Mercian dialect *Marc. Their names are straightforwardly Old English: Éomer and Háma (characters in Beowulf), Éowyn ("Horse-joy"), Théoden ("King").
Beowulf (/ ˈ b eɪ ə w ʊ l f /; [1] Old English: Bēowulf [ˈbeːowuɫf]) is an Old English epic poem in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and most often translated works of Old English literature.
York Notes on Geoffrey Chaucer's "Prologue to the Canterbury Tales" (1999, with Mary Alexander) A History Of English Literature (2000, 2007, 2013) A History of Old English Literature (2002) Mediaevalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (2007) Reading Shakespeare (2013) Poetry. Twelve Poems (1978) Editions. Beowulf: A Glossed Text (1995 ...