page_title: Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics
section_title: Translator
hierarchical_section_title: Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics / Reception / Translator
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture of the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney at the University College Dublin, February 11, 2009.
context_page_description: "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" was a 1936 lecture given by J. R. R. Tolkien on literary criticism on the Old English heroic epic poem Beowulf. It was first published as a paper in that year in the Proceedings of the British Academy, and has since been reprinted in many collections.
  Tolkien argues that the original poem has almost been lost under the weight of the scholarship on it; that Beowulf must be seen as a poem, not just as a historical document; and that the quality of its verse and its structure give it a powerful effect. He rebuts suggestions that the poem is an epic or exciting narrative, likening it instead to a strong masonry structure built of blocks that fit together. He points out that the poem's theme is a serious one, mortality, and that the poem is in two parts: the first on Beowulf as a young man, defeating Grendel and his mother; the second on Beowulf in old age, going to his death fighting the dragon.
  The work has been praised by critics including the poet and Beowulf translator Seamus Heaney. Michael D. C. Drout called it the most important article ever written about the poem.
context_section_description: Tolkien's paper was praised by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in the introduction to his critically acclaimed translation of Beowulf. He wrote that the "epoch-making paper" stood out in considering Beowulf as literature. Heaney argued that Tolkien "took for granted the poem's integrity and distinction as a work of art", and showed how the poem achieved that status:
  Tolkien assumed that the poet had felt his way through the inherited material - the fabulous elements and the traditional accounts of a heroic past - and by a combination of creative intuition and conscious structuring had arrived at a unity of effect and a balanced order. He assumed, in other words, that the Beowulf poet was an imaginative writer rather than some kind of back-formation derived from nineteenth-century folklore and philology.
  Heaney called the paper's literary treatment  "brilliant". He suggested that it had changed the way that Beowulf was valued, and that it had started "a new era of appreciation" of the poem.
caption: The poet and Beowulf translator Seamus Heaney praised The Monsters and the Critics.
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