Beowulf: The monsters and their critics

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (German: The monsters and their critics ) was a lecture given by JRR Tolkien in 1936 on the literary criticism of the old English heroic epic Beowulf . The manuscript was first published in the same year in the Proceedings of the British Academy and has since been reproduced many times in various collections, including The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays , a collection of Tolkien's scholarly essays published by Christopher Tolkien in 1983 .

The essay is considered a seminal work in modern Beowulf exploration. In his lecture, Tolkien speaks out against the critics who downplay the fantastic elements of the poem (such as Grendel and the dragon ) so that they can regard Beowulf alone as the source text for Anglo-Saxon historical research. Tolkien argues that these fictional elements are by no means trivial, but rather serve as key elements of the narrative and should therefore be the focus of research. He thereby generated increased attention to the previously neglected literary qualities of the epic and also stated that it should be understood as a work of art , not as a historical document. Later literary critics, who agreed with Tolkien on this point, routinely quoted him to reinforce their own positions.

The essay is still a common source code for students and scholars researching Beowulf , and was praised by Seamus Heaney in the introduction to his translation of the poem. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson call it in their Beowulf, An Edition (1998) "the most influential literary criticism of the poem ever written". The paper also sheds light on many of Tolkien's ideas about literature and serves as a source for those who study his writings more intensively.

The lecture was part of a longer series that exists in two manuscript versions that were published together as Beowulf and the Critics by Michael DC Drout in 2002 .

Expenses (selection)

• JRR Tolkien: Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. In: Proceedings of the British Academy , Volume 22, 1936, pp. 245-295 ( online ( memento of October 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive )).
• JRR Tolkien: The Monsters and the Critics . Edited by Christopher Tolkien. George Allen & Unwin, London 1983, ISBN 0-0480-9019-0 .
• Lewis E. Nicholson (Ed.): An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism . University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame 1963, ISBN 0-268-00006-9 .
• JRR Tolkien: Beowulf: The Monsters and Their Critics . In: JRR Tolkien: Good dragons are rare. Three essays . Translated from the English by Wolfgang Krege . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-608-93064-7 , pp. 141-214.

Web links

• Helmut W. Pesch : The hobbits and the critics on helmutwpesch.de