Posted on 03/21/2014 4:28:36 PM PDT by Perdogg
Almost 90 years after JRR Tolkien translated the 11th-century poem Beowulf, The Lord of the Rings author's version of the epic story is to be published for the first time in an edition which his son Christopher Tolkien says sees his father "enter[ing] into the imagined past" of the heroes.
Telling of how the Geatish prince Beowulf comes to the aid of Danish king Hroðgar, slaying the monster Grendel and his mother before - spoiler alert - being mortally wounded by a dragon years later, Beowulf is is the longest epic poem in Old English, and is dated to the early 11th century. It survives in a single manuscript, housed at the British Library, and has inspired countless retellings of the myth - recently and famously by the late Seamus Heaney, whose translation won him the Whitbread book of year award in 1999.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
ping
Is Peter Jackson making a movie of it?
Will it have a parallel original text? That would be most helpful for seeing how Tolkien interpreted the poem, and which way he went on the ambiguous passages.
Thanks Perdogg. He had tremendous trouble getting LOTR published, seems strange now, eh?
I want to see the Children of Huron or The Silmarillion
Thanks for posting this.
Did you know he could not type, so he wrote in pencil and made edits with a pen?
Wouldn't be much good without an Old English translator.
I love the Howard Shore soundtrack, I bought the book on the LOTR trilogy.
Somebody should make a movie of it. The story is simple, short and bloody, and would make a great movie.
That said, you can see that it was Tolkien’s inspiration for many things in the LOTR.
It will be interesting to see his translation.
I'm sure it will be a 4-part epic, and the fight with Grendels' mother will take up two of the movies. You just can't get too much of a good action scene. 5 or 6 hours ought to be sufficient for that particular part of the story.
I remember in his foreword that he retyped the manuscript by the hunt and peck method, because he couldn’t afford “the ten-fingered” (a drolly amusing reference to Beren and Frodo).
With music by Howard Shore.
There have been several movies of Beowulf. Most suck because they try to better the text.
Modern translation:
“And so, Beowulf was all, like, “Grendel, you know, like, that wasn’t cool” and then Grendel was all, so, like “Talk to the hand” and ... “
You forgot the OMG.
Here’s an academic who did all this work and didn’t think to publish it. What a different world he lived in.
Today the ONLY reason an academic does ANYTHING is to be able to publish something.
a Christian white male who was an academic.
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