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Smart Essay about Tolkien’s Monster and the Critics
Michael Drout, he of the almost completed second edition of Beowulf and the Critics, has a short piece on a LOTR forum on “”Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”: The Brilliant Essay that Broke Beowulf Studies.” The essay is, not surprisingly, smart, and well-worth reading. It’s a good background and introduction to Tolkien’s essay, and I suspect even those who haven’t read Tolkien’s essay will read Drout’s piece. I like very much that Drout nods at some more recent Beowulf scholarship in providing a better context for the reactions and reception of Tolkien’s essay. The comments (you can find them here) are worth reading as well, as Drout notes. It…
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Tolkien on Beowulf
There’s a SlashDot story that links to a story about the discovery by Professor Michael Drout (yes, he of the Wormtalk blog) having brought to light an unpublished and hitherto unknown translation of Beowulf by Tolkien. Drout has already edited and published Beowulf and the Critics. I can see, from the SlashDot story and other things I’ve seen on and off line about Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, in part because of the films, that I need to write an FAQ about Tolkien and languages, particularly the Celtic ones. Give me a couple of days, and I will.
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Two More Medievalist Bloggers
Thanks to the joys of referral logs, I can add S. Worthen of Owlfish, a medievalist graduate student, and Michael Drout, an Anglo-Saxonist and professor with a blog, to my list of medievalist bloggers.