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Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, in Oxford from 1925 to 1945. In 1936 he delivered this lecture about Beowulf to the British Academy.
Before his lecture people read Beowulf not as a piece of art or literature but as a source to discover information about the pagan Germanic culture. Which makes him the first person who analyzed the poem as a poem, as a piece of literature.
Critics have been criticized beacuse of the importance they gave to the monsters in Beowulf – Grendel, his mother and the dragon. Literary critics up to Tolkien’s day preferred stories which dealt with purely mortal men and sounded a lot like the classical tragedies they all did in Classics at school. For these critics, Beowulf poet left all this adult tragedies aside and placed at the centre of the poem a series of the childish folk tales, dealing with creatures out of fairy story or nursery rhyme.
As an answer for that Tolkien quotes the great critic WP Ker: "The great beauty, the real value, of Beowulf is in its dignity of style.(...) The thing itself is cheap; the moral and the spirit of it can only be matched among the noblest authors."
What he means by that is that how the author managed to do from something very simple -a man who kills monsters- a literary work which is worth reading.
In Tolkien's view, the poem is essentially about a "man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time." The underlying tragedy is man's brief mortal life. What had happened is that Northern courage, exultant, defiant in the face of inevitable defeat by "Chaos and Unreason" (Tolkien cites Ker's words), fuses with a Christian faith and outlook. The Beowulf poet uses both what he knew to be the old heroic tradition, darkened by distance in time, along with the newly acquired Christian tradition. The Christian, Tolkien notes, is "hemmed in a hostile world"
He argues that the Icelandic myth must have had a similar attitude to monsters, men and gods. The Northern gods, like men, are doomed to die. The Southern (Roman and Greek) pagan gods were immortal, so to Tolkien (a Christian), the Southern religion "must go forward to philosophy or relapse into anarchy": death and the monsters are peripheral. But the Northern myths, and Beowulf, put the monsters, mortality and death in the centre. Tolkien is therefore very interested in the contact of Northern and Christian thought in the poem, where the scriptural Cain is linked to eotenas (giants) and ylfe (elves), not through confusion but "an indication of the precise point at which an imagination, pondering old and new, was kindled." The poem is, Tolkien states, "an historical poem about the pagan past, or an attempt at one"
The general structure of the poem is then clear, writes Tolkien. "It is essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death." Part A (youth) is lines 1 to 2199; part B (age) is lines 2200 to 3182 (the end).
The poem's metre is also founded on a balance of two halves to each line, "more like masonry than music". Tolkien argues that the poem is not meant to be an exciting narrative, nor a romantic story, but a word-picture, "a method and structure that approaches rather to sculpture or painting. It is a composition not a tune."Far from being weakly structured, it "is curiously strong".
Beowulf: "the Monsters and the Critics"