Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary is a prose translation of the early medieval epic poem "Beowulf" from Old English to modern English language. Translated by J. R. R. Tolkien from 1920 to 1926, it was edited by Tolkien's son Christopher and published posthumously in May 2014 by HarperCollins. In the poem, Beowulf, a hero of the Geats in Scandinavia, comes to the aid of Hroðgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall Heorot has been under attack by a monster known as Grendel. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother attacks the hall and is
Beowulf was made early on by Guðbrandur Vigfússon (1878). "Grettis saga" is a family saga, and a story about , a great-grandson of an Icelandic settler, cannot be comparably as old as "Beowulf". Axel Olrik (1903) claimed that on the contrary, this saga was a reworking of "Beowulf", and others had followed suit. However, (1910) wrote a thesis in which both "Beowulf" and "Grettis saga" drew from a common folkloric source, and this encouraged even a detractor such W. W. Lawrence to reposition his view, and entertain the possibility that certain elements in the saga (such as the waterfall in place