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Originally Posted by Marileangorifurnimaluim
Actually I haven't read it. In fact, I've been looking for Tolkien's essay On Fairy Stories everywhere (translation: I looked for at least an hour on the internet a couple months ago). Where can I find it?
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It's published in
The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (HarperCollins, 1997) and in
Tree and Leaf (George Allan and Unwin, 1964, 1975, 1988; HarperCollins, 2001). It's good to see you back by the way, Maril.
The Monsters and the Critics is quite rightly seen as a watershed in the study of
Beowulf, and is still a set text on many university courses. Seamus Heaney gave Tolkien's essay a special mention in the foreword to his own
Beowulf translation, published in 1999. He described
The Monsters and the Critics as "an epoch-making paper" and that is indeed what it was. Before Tolkien
Beowulf was an anthropological curiosity, valuable for what it could tell us about the Germanic world; after Tolkien it was a work of literature, to be studied, translated and appreciated as such. Tolkien studied and taught the poem almost constantly throughout his career, and it was a subject into which he had some very deep insights. His is not the last word, however, and his essay was only a beginning. Even some of Tolkien's most insightful work on
Beowulf is not included within the 1936 lecture and many, many others have made equally valuable contributions since. The point is, though, that he held open the door and many scholars walked through it. Nowadays it is taken for granted that
Beowulf is a literary work, not to mention an easy and obvious source for Old-English translation exercises. Among others, Tolkien has turned the unheard of into the obvious, which is a criterion of genius. This is almost certainly one of the major contributing factors in both his honourary doctorate of letters and his C.B.E.