Someone found a lost manuscript made by Tolkien!!

[Keverzwijn]

Ok, I know this the wrong place for posting this but otherwise no-one will read it. Apperantly an American has discovered a lost manuscript in Oxford. It is the translation of and comment on a poem about Beowulf. It's over 2000 pages long and will be published in the summer of 2003. Can't wait for it!!

[Mirkgirl]

Well sorry, but this goes to "Tolkiens' Other Works "... I'm sure the title will draw enough attention hehe

mmm that sounds interesting.... I've heard about his work over Beowulf before, but nothing specific, I'm almost sure that he has a book about Beowulf published but maybe that's something new.... do you have any link to more info about this?

[Keverzwijn]

pfft, I send the news to this site before Torn posted it on their site but now ofcourse they're on it. Here's the link to their News. Unless you want to wait on our newsforum..
http://www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/8/1041182146

[Keverzwijn]

Here's someting from the sunday times about it.

Tolkien's last great work is discovered
Maurice Chittenden
Sunday Times. 29/12/02

A YELLOWING manuscript by JRR Tolkien discovered in an Oxford library could become one of the publishing sensations of 2003. It could also provide clues to the extraordinary success of the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings.

The 2,000 handwritten pages include Tolkien's translation and appraisal of Beowulf, the epic Anglo-Saxon poem about bravery, friendship and monster-slaying that is thought to have been one of the inspirations for his own tome.
He borrowed from early English verse to concoct the imaginary language spoken by Arwen, played by Liv Tyler, and other elves in the second movie made from the Rings book, The Two Towers, which has become Britain's biggest box office hit this Christmas.

An American academic, Michael Drout, found some of the material, notes bound in board covers, by accident in a box of papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Tolkien, a professor at Oxford, was regarded as one of the greatest Anglo-Saxon scholars of the last century and gave a key lecture about the poem.

In 1936, a year before he published his first fantasy novel, The Hobbit, the precursor to The Lord of the Rings, he spoke on Beowulf at the university urging people to read it as a great poem rather than as a historical document.

Written in Britain about 350 years before the battle of Hastings but set in what is now Denmark and Sweden, the poem recounts Beowulf's separate battles with a man-eating monster called Grendel, Grendel's mother and a gold-hoarding dragon that breathes fire.

The oldest-surviving copy, from about 1000, sits behind glass in a controlled environment in the British Museum. The intervening millennium has so altered the language that only scholars can understand it.

Drout, assistant professor of English at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, had travelled to Oxford by train while on a family visit to London. A self-confessed Tolkien "nut", Drout, 34, had grown up with a map of Middle-earth over his bed.

He was researching Anglo-Saxon scholarship and after looking through the catalogue of the library's Tolkien collection, he asked to see an entry file entitled "Carbon typescripts of Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics", the title of Tolkien's 1936 lecture. It was brought to him in the reading room in large box file.
Drout, who reads Anglo-Saxon prose to his two-year-old daughter at bedtime, said last week: "I was sitting there going through the transcripts when I saw these four bound volumes at the bottom of the box.

"I started looking through and realised I had found an entire book of material that had never seen the light of day. As I turned the page, there was Tolkien's fingerprint in a smudge of ink.

"My heart was racing as I was writing things down. It was only when I went out to meet my wife that I was running down Catte Street going, 'Oh my God, I have found an unpublished Tolkien manuscript'.

"Then I panicked that there was some other, more worthy researcher working on it. Luckily, it turned out not to be true."

After obtaining permission from the Tolkien estate, Drout published Beowulf and the Critics, an extended version of Tolkien's 1936 lecture, in America earlier this month. Even more exciting will be Tolkien's translation of the poem and his line-by-line interpretation of its meaning, which will be published next summer.

Tolkien's name on the cover is likely to make the translation a bestseller, following the version by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, which beat Frodo Baggins's cinematic rival Harry Potter to the 1999 Whitbread prize.

Drout says Tolkien found inspiration for many of his own storylines and characters in Beowulf. The Anglo-Saxon hero's friendship with Wiglaf is mirrored in the relationship between Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings.

Elves, Orcs and Ents, the latter a type of giant that becomes a walking, talking tree in Tolkien's work, are all mentioned in Beowulf.

This weekend scholars hailed the forthcoming publication of the translation as an important addition to Tolkien's canon.

John Carey, the former Merton professor of English literature at Oxford, said: "Beowulf is enormously hard to translate into alliterative verse, but it sounds remarkable. Tolkien is much closer to the Anglo-Saxon form than Heaney."

Kevin Crossley-Holland, a poet, broadcaster and Anglo-Saxon expert who has published his own translation, said: "It captures the sound of big waves crashing on a shingle beach and the lines die away like water running up a beach."

He added: "Tolkien's work breathes the same world as the Anglo-Saxon poems and the Norse myths. It is umbilically linked."

Heaney said yesterday: "I look forward to reading it very much, but I don't want to compare them. I wouldn't like anyone to pick two lines out of mine and say, 'What do you think?'" Merlin Unwin, son of Tolkien's original publisher and who as a boy took afternoon tea with the author, said: "Beowulf is a wonderful story and if you put Tolkien's name to it, it would probably be a great commercial success."

[Sindarin]

I must say this is very good news to be reported. :) I can't wait to read The Professors' new literary work!!! :drool:

For years, "Beowulf" has been one of my all-time favorite stories to read. A published, Tolkien-written critique of this increbible and immense book should be quite interesting. :thumbs:

:read:

[Thorondor of Manwe]

As it has existed, Beowulf has always been a difficult read. It is an Old English narrative that is composed as a poem. Understanding Beowulf has always required familiarity with Norse myths and with the history of Northern Europe. It is written from the perspective of a trader who is visiting Hrothgar's realm - i.e., Denmark - and recounts the events that happened. The importance of Beowulf is that it established Old English as a literary form.

Although the poem is recognized as Anglo-Saxon, the setting of the poem has nothing to do with England. Beowulf is a Geat. The Geats were a Germanic seafaring tribe who lived in southern Sweden. Historically, Beowulf sailed to Denmark to aid Hrothgar. The Geats were later conquered by Swedish tribes and disappeared in the mists of history.

Ents, elves, and orcs are mentioned in a line that refers to Grendel as coming from a line of monsters:

(line 111) Of Cain awoke all that woful breed,
(line 112) Etins and elves and evil-spirits
In Old English, these terms are written as -
Eotenas (Etins)
Ylfe (Elves)
Orcneas (evil-spirits)

Etins or Eotenas, by the way, is a term for Giants.

It is clear that several themes interwoven in Beowulf influenced the creative mind of a young Tolkien. One can also find terms that would eventually find their way into LOTR. For example, when Grendel first experiences Beowulf's strength he exclaims,

"Nowhere on middle-earth, I realize, have I encountered a grip like his." (line -168)

After battling Grendel and Grendel's mother, Beowulf then sets out to slay the dragon. One finds that the dragon is clearly the forerunner of Smaug.

The dragon sequence also provides important link to LOTR. The companionship between Wiglaf and Beowulf is later echoed in the companionship between Sam and Frodo. Indeed, the entire sequence in the dragon's lair strongly reverbates in the sequence of events that befall Sam and Frodo in Mordor in ROTK.

Tolkien's translation will appease only the most hard core LOTR fans. It will not be a "novelization" of the poem. It will be a poem written within the structure of Old English poetry. As such, it really doesn't matter whose translation one reads. The poem always tells the same narrative - the only difference is in the translation, the cadence and rhythm differs.

As far as Middle-Earth races are concerned - Ents, elves and orcs - there is absolutely nothing in Beowulf suggesting that those races existed before LOTR. Some may speculate that Etins led to Ents. However, there is nothing in Beowulf about who the Etins were, other than the fact that they were giants; there is nothing that suggests the tree-shepards that we find in LOTR. Likewise with Orcneas. Orcneas means "Evil-spirits." Again, there is no link between the Orcneas of Beowulf to the Orcs of LOTR.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of pieces here and there in Beowulf that found their way into LOTR. Therefore - and, again, for the hard core LOTR fan - it makes an interesting read.

By the way, Beowulf was translated into a novel by Michael Crichton titled "Eaters of the Dead." It was made into a movie called "The 13th Warrior," starring Antonio Banderas.

[Undomiel]

i knew about this. It was on the news i think. I was quite interested to see it was found in the Bodlein Library-my Gran used to work there. I'm not really surprised though, i mean it's such a huge place and of course Tolkien was a don at Oxford.