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: The Monsters and the Critics in the symbolic value of such preternatural representations of sheer evil." Weinreich added that ""Beowulf," like other ancient legends, served to nourish Tolkien's imagination." John Garth, writing in "The Guardian", describes the paper as "still well worth reading, not only as an introduction to the poem, but also because it decisively changed the direction and emphasis of Beowulf scholarship. Up to that point it had been used as a quarry of linguistic, historical and archaeological detail". Garth notes that Tolkien's paper was praised by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in the introduction to his critically acclaimed translation of "Beowulf". He