The Monsters and the Linguist

Happy Valentine's Day - and may the odds be ever in your favour! 

... I probably messed that up.

To the matter at hand: I recently acquired a volume called "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics", including said lecture and other essays by professor Tolkien. As an (aspiring) fellow Anglo-Saxon enthusiast, I find his take on Beowulf very intriguing. Tolkien first gave this lecture in Oxford in 1936, just a year before The Hobbit was released. In his lecture, he opposes critics who claim that Beowulf should be used primarily as a source for Anglo-Saxon history and is not worth appreciation for its supernatural elements nor as a work of art. Tolkien says that "correct and sober taste may refuse to admit that there can be an interest for us - the proud we that includes all intelligent living people - in ogres and dragons; we then perceive its puzzlement in face of the odd fact that it has derived great pleasure from a poem that is actually about these unfashionable creatures." (Last emphasis is mine.) 

   I find it interesting that Tolkien, though himself a big admirer of dragons, admits that these creatures are indeed "unfashionable". I wasn't born until 57 years after this statement, but, for as long as I can remember, dragons have been very fashionable indeed. I think it's wrong to claim, as some do, that Tolkien did not "found modern Fantasy". He must certainly count as one of its greatest found fathers, as his impact on it has been so immense. With the release of The Hobbit in 1937, dragons and trolls were once again most fashionable. What I wonder is whether something happened in the time between the works of Carroll and Tolkien - what happened to the vorpal swords and Jabberwocks? Tolkien makes a reference to Carroll when speaking against critics (saying that "the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture", and that "the range [of their eyes of flame] is short"), and in his essay On Faerie Stories, he states that for a story to be a genuine fairy-story it needs to be presented as "true". Being told within a "dream-frame", the Alice stories are, according to Tolkien, not genuine fairy-stories. 

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So what was Tolkien trying to do? Bring fairies out of Carroll's dream-like settings and into our own world? Certainly not fairies as such, as he supposedly disliked both Shakespeare's and Spenser's take on the creatures and subsequent influence - his goal was to restore a dignified English mythology, and his elves have nothing in common with those in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He was not into allegory or romantic literature. He once said: "I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of the readers". What he wanted was for supernatural elements to be respected, and it is not strange at all that he preferred Norse sagas and Arthurian legend to The Faerie Queen. I think one of the most important things he says in his Beowulf lecture is that "the significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning". He once wrote to his friend CS Lewis that he (Tolkien) was not born a critic, and he certainly would not have attempted to "dissect" and analyse the monsters in Beowulf himself. It is not allegory that makes them important, but the power and fascination that they hold over us mortals. I know I have Tolkien to thank for making trolls and dragons part of my childhood. He definitely brought them back into fashion, and they have remained popular ever since. 

I need to stop now, because I could go on forever and make an English Literature Master's thesis out of this, and I have much to do today. There is a lot of interesting reasoning in just this first Beowulf text. If you are a Tolkien and/or Anglo-Saxon enthusiast, you can find "The Monsters and the Critics: and Other Essays" by Tolkien for a very reasonable price.