The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays

 

By J.R.R. Tolkien
Edited by Christopher Tolkien
Paperback £9.99
HarperCollins Publishers, London, 1997

Tolkien wrote certain lectures for non-specialist audiences on otherwise highly technical subjects: the Old and Middle English poems Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the importance and significance of fairy stories; the study of languages other than one's own for linguistic insight - and the creation of new languages simply for pleasure.

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics

Read to the British Academy in 1936, The Monsters and the Critics (Tolkien was clear which he preferred) became a landmark in the study of Beowulf. Typically, Tolkien blames the authorities for dismissing the story provided by the poet and treating it merely as a quarry for bits of data on history, archaeology, folklore or what-have-you. Beowulf, he says, is not a second-rate Homeric-type epic with too many monsters and insufficient plot, but a heroic celebration of the lives of mortal men in a dangerous and transient world.

Though a self-confessed Romantic, Tolkien was too wise to believe that old poems were built purely from primal myth, and understood their literary nature very well: "the author draws upon tradition at will for his own purposes, as a poet of later times might draw upon history or the classics and expect his allusions to be understood ..." Also here is evidence that Tolkien did not despise allegory in its rightful place: his beautiful allegory of the tower built to look out upon the sea. The shorter On Translating Beowulf, written for a 1940 edition of Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment (J R Clark Hall, ed. CL Wrenn) is likely to appeal most to those who are fascinated by historic English.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

In this W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture, read to the University of Glasgow, 1953, the reality of Gawain's confession and absolution, often treated as an unresolved and insignificant point of order by critics, is defended fiercely by Tolkien. Much analysis is devoted to the issue that threatening sin and the rules of a social game are on different moral levels. Whatever the author's intention (only to be guessed) it is clear that at the denouement Gawain is cleanly confessed of any sin, and yet is still deeply embarrassed by Bertilak's rebuke. We can imagine the 14th century audience deep in the night when soberness had set in, lying wakeful and "working it out to see if it added up to a compliment" - a thought-provoking after-effect of a gay but serious poem, one of the most beautiful and accessible of all English medieval long poems.

On Fairy-Stories

On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien's best-known non-fictional work, was given as an Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St. Andrews in 1939 and later published with "Leaf by Niggle" as Tree and Leaf in 1964. That version appears here. This is Tolkien's central work explaining and presenting his beliefs on the nature of fairy tale, its significance and origins and the extent to which it is misunderstood by modern critics. He covers much ground on the development of fairy stories (and fairies) in human understanding; the difference between fairy and folk tales; the "cauldron of soup" in which tales develop and re-develop; the misconception that fairy tales are mainly for children; the creation of secondary worlds; Escape, Recovery and Consolation and the reflection in sub-creation of the "Great Eucatastrophe", the resurrection of Christ, which for Tolkien as a devoted Christian was the happy ending that transcended and hallowed all mythic dreams of happy ending. Yet the bit we humans remember most often is the gift of transformation: "The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead to yellow gold and the still rock into swift water ... in such 'fantasy' as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins."

English and Welsh

This paper was read in Oxford on 21 October 1955, the day after the publication of the long-awaited Return of the King, Tolkien's "large 'work' ... which contains, in the way of presentation that I find most natural, much of what I personally have received from the study of things Celtic." Much of the lecture is about the mutual influence of the English/Germanic language and the British/Welsh languages on place names and personal names, and on some of the intimate details of verb-formation. And here is the good tale of how the ancient Keltoi of the Greeks accidentally acquired a special relationship with the letter C thanks to the scholar William Salesbury, compiler of A Dictionary in Englyshe and Welshe for King Harry VIII. Tolkien also relates his personal response to languages and the special place among them of Welsh, his inspiration for Sindarin. "It is the native language," he says, "to which in unexplored desire we would still go home."

A Secret Vice

In this early essay (1931) Tolkien readers will recognise the combination of ready self-deprecation and unrepentant enthusiasm, to the degree of including substantial extracts of his elvish poetry (much earlier than those of The Lord of the Rings). The author capable of building towering mythologies on the foundations of his invented languages was clear-sighted and humorous enough to name one of his early creations Nevbosh - "new nonsense". Anyone who doubts the strength of his obsession with the beauty and mystery of word-sounds or the extent of its influence on his world-creation should read this and discover that it was more than a "mere pastime" but a need as profound as the need for music.

Valedictory Address

At Merton College, Oxford, in 1959, "I am now about 34 years behind", wrote Tolkien, of his (yet undelivered) Oxford inaugural lecture. " ... and I still have nothing special to say." True to form he delivers 16 pages illuminated by those 34 years on the importance of philology, the much-regretted split between the study of literature and language, and his long and devoted efforts to close that gap in his academic career. ("There was knifework, axe-work, out there between the barbed wire of Lang and Lit in days not so far back.") Hands up ex-students who recognise this: "Some take the chance of using much of their time in reading what they wish, with little reference to their supposed task ..." And loath to leave without a good quote, he gives us the lines from Anglo-Saxon Wanderer that lie behind the song of the Rohirrim: "Hwaer cwom mearh, hwaer cwom mago? ... genap under niht-helm, swa heo no waere!"

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Taken from http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/good_books_0.html#monsters