Beowulf & the Critics

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Beowulf and the Critics (2002), edited by Michael Drout. The book gives transcriptions of two manuscripts, dated by Drout to summers of 1933 and 1935. It now seems clear that the two manuscripts are material for a series of Michelmas Term Oxford lectures titled ‘Beowulf: General Criticism’, which Tolkien delivered in 1933, 1934, and 1936.

The second manuscript expands the first, but does not differ substantially. However, there seems a substantial leap from Manuscripts A and B into 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics', the lecture derived from this material that Tolkien delivered at the British Academy in London in November 1936. Turning from Manuscripts A and B to the London lecture (as we know it from its publication by the British Academy in late 1937) we see two major changes.

Firstly, the allegory is different. What ends up as a tower is in 1933 and 1935 a rock garden made with flowers and the old stones (and there is only a best-friend in place of the descendants).

Secondly, the first part of the Oxford lecture material is cut, or better, boiled down into its barest bones (the kernel of the first half of the earlier material remains, found in the friends of the London allegory and the asperity of tone towards the critics throughout).

Faced with time constraints - a single lecture of one hour - Tolkien cut the discussion of the friends that constitutes the first half of the Oxford material, and discussed only the descendants. Talking to a gathering of the nation's distinguished Professors, Tolkien may have felt that his boiled down asides on the friends, together with their emphasis in the allegory of the tower, was sufficient a nod to the wise. I suspect so, but wonder how many of the wise heads in the room had a clue what the Oxford man was talking about. In any case, we must today work very hard to read the deeper lesson about art and history that is set out with far greater clarity in the Oxford material. We can discover what Tolkien is saying from 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics', but the discussion of Archibald Strong that follows the allegory of the rock garden paints a 'friend' in full splendor, and we see immediately just what he is talking about.

Note that a small amount of material is also cut and reduced from the second half of the Oxford material. E.g. the differentiation of ideas of and attitude to God of Hrothgar and Beowulf, mentioned but not worked through in detail in London.

With regard to the cut and reduced material, I would say that 'Beowulf and the Critics' is an invaluable aid for making sense of 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' but does not qualify as a seperate and distinct argument. In Oxford Tolkien made the same argument, only he made it more slowly and with the aid of a lot more laughing at the stupid friends. But the end point of Oxford and London lectures is the same - the supposedly thin and wild folktale at the center of the poem is revealed as a mythical image of Doom that fuses heathen tradition and new Christian learning

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Which leaves us with the change of allegory told about the making and reception of Beowulf. In the Oxford lectures, Tolkien requests his audience to keep the allegory in mind in what follows. Both allegories provide organizing frames for the material as a whole, and one might reasonably suspect that a change in this organizing frame corresponds to a change in the argument that it frames.

In Oxford, the poem is pictured as a rock garden. In London the old stones are made into a tower. The image of the work of art changes - does that make a difference to the rest of the lecture?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

The allegory of the rock garden is a guide to (all) the lecture material, Oxford and London. The pattern of stones and flowers that is the rock garden gives material realization to Ker's 1904 criticism about irrelevance at the center and serious stuff on the outer edges. This critical sentence, above all others, Tolkien wishes to overturn.

The rock garden should therefore be imagined as a circle, with the stones on the outer edges the heroic legends, such as the tale of Ingeld that Chambers (the disciple of Ker) deems more worthy than a wilderness of dragons. And at the center we have the wilderness of monsters, which Ker and Chambers dismiss as thin folktale and Tolkien demonstrates is a mythological fusion.

The Oxford material begins with Archibald Strong, who dismisses the folktale center and proclaims the stones on the outer edges a glimpse of the whole civilization of the Germania of Tacitus. Strong embodies total critical stupidity. In London with a few sentences, and in Oxford at more length, Tolkien explains Strong as (my terms) caught by the literary spell of the poet. This claim has two components: (a) Strong fails to see that the poem does not descend from the heathen times that it tells of, is rather Anglo-Saxon 'historical fiction'; (b) Strong fails to comprehend that the power that moves him to gush over the history on the outer edges is the poetic center of the poem, which is not a thin folktale as he believes but a potent myth.

In London we skip over Strong and the other friends and begin at once with Chambers, who has dated the poem to the age of Bede and therefore recognizes historical fiction when he reads it - but still fails to get that the thin folktale is actually superbly rendered mythological fusion.

In other words, the image of the rock garden (with center and periphery) pictures the road in all this material, which is to step from periphery to center, where mythical fusion is discovered, and thereby unveil the design of the poem and explain the cretinous antics of the friends.

So the Oxford material is again extremely useful for grasping the argument of 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics', in this case because the allegory of the rock garden actually serves as a (much needed) map of the London lecture.

This leaves us with the question of why the allegory was changed and whether anything is to be made of this change in and of itself?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

This post draws on the account of the allegory and British Academy lecture that I gave this summer in two SWG posts, Straight Road and Doom and Descent.

The allegory of the tower rebuilds the old stones into a tower, yet the argument that follows still pertains to the original image of the poem as a rock garden. To understand the image of the tower, I have suggested, we need to superimpose it on that of the rock garden. The tower appears where was the 'entrance-stone' of the rock garden, the 'exordium-stone' in which we see the ancient myth of the king who comes over the sea, and his ship-funeral. As such, the tower replaces a smudge on the original image of the rock garden, in which all the outer stones are said to be historical legend. With the tower, Tolkien corrects this smudge and in doing so draws to our attention (in his Tolkien-way) that myth is not found only at the center of this poem but also at its beginning.

Superimposing the tower on the rock garden and drawing the Shoreless Sea all around the rock garden, which now becomes our Middle-earth, my SWG posts read the biography of Elendil in 'The Fall of Númenor' as drawing a 'straight road' from outside the western frame of the poem, past the tower near the shore, all the way to Doom at the center. Elendil's journey combines that of Scyld Scefing (sea to shore) and Beowulf (shore to Doom) in the old poem. What this achieves is a revealing of the map of the whole of Tolkien's Beowulf criticism by way of adding his reading of the exordium to the argument that he makes about the center and outer edges of the poem.

As such, the tower allegory provides a vital addition to the lecture material for it gives us a critical vision of the whole poem. However, it does so by way of allegory, myth, and an unspoken reading of the exordium to the poem, and it can hardly be said that many readers have received enlightenment from this new allegory. Possibly the room full of Professors in London was brighter than the collective Tolkien scholars of the last few decades, but I have grave doubts that anyone in the audience that November got the point of the allegory of the tower.

In any case, when the tower is placed in the rock garden and the Straight Road is drawn by way of Elendil's historical biography, all we really end up with, in addition to the initial Straight Road over the sea, is a straight line drawn from the outer edges of the rock garden to the center of the poem - which is precisely the road that has always been walked through the rock garden in these lectures.

So although the new allegory contains vital elements of Tolkien's Beowulf criticism otherwise passed over, in terms of argument I conclude that 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' is merely an enlarged - or rather, not yet reduced - version of 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'.

[VelvetineZone]

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I think I changed my mind. It all depends on criteria. In the posts above Roadrunner aka @VelvetineZone, I was holding up the argument as the be all and end all. And yes, the argument remains the same.

But if one considers the Oxford lectures and the London lecture as performances then the transformation of rock garden into tower really does make the British Academy lecture a composite performance. And I think this holds whether or not one understands the allegory of the tower. Because even when not understood in the least, the imagery is powerful and has an effect on our reading (once: listening to) what follows. Thus, the new allegory generates a 'mythical literary effect' on us as Tolkien suggests that the mythical center of the old poem had on the old critics.

My pre-Roadrunner conclusion came dangerously close to replicating the friends of the allegory - holding up one item (the argument) and failing to see the whole, which is a juxtaposition of allegory with the argument that this odd story frames. The Oxford lecture series is very, very good; as good as you could hope for from an Oxford lecture series (provided one could understand what the speaker was saying). 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' is a work of academic art; here the older Oxford material is gathered into a performance - once a lecture, now an essay - that is pretty close to perfection; as close as I have ever seen the academic art practiced.

So now I say that 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' has a new magic, not present in 'Beowulf: and the Critics'. The spell is new, and more potent.