[Child of the 7th Age]

The historian and librarian in me wants to be able to access those additional letters and/or the diary. I don't feel it's "greedy" since since so often a scrap overlooked by one generation turns out to have enormous interpretive value. Garth's recent publication of Tolkien's experiences in WWI relied heavily on just such early personal correspondence that wasn't available before. His study suggests how important such overlooked items can be. However, when it comes to personal materials, it's often a question of "when" rather than "if". It may not be feasible to release some of the later papers now since so many of the people mentioned in them are still alive. I think we will eventually see them, though perhaps not in my life.

But I totally agree with Bêthberry on Beowulf. I can't understand witholding an academic text when there are qualified scholars politely asking to work with it. The one justification for not making the text public might be that it's very rough and does not warrant publication. However, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Tolkien wrote a partial verse translation of Beowulf, a complete prose translation, plus reams of notes and a line-by-line analysis. These documents are in the Bodleian with very limited scholarly access. The original plan was to have Professor Drout edit the translations and hundreds of pages of Tolkien's notes into a two-volume edition. This is the same professor who published Beowulf and the Critics (an extended version of the 1936 lecture) with the estate's blessing. He is a specialist in early medieval texts and has written a great deal in that area. Plus he is on the board of the new Tolkien Studies .

Both Drout and the other Anglo-Saxon scholars who have seen the Beowulf manuscripts are full of glowing praise. 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. Tolkien’s work breathes the same world as the Anglo-Saxon poems and the Norse myths. It is umbilically linked.” In Drout's estimation, Tolkien's translation is "better" than all others currently available and much truer to the spirit of the original.

OK, so I am a "Beowulf junkie". But when I read comments like this, I find myself drooling! There was a previous post by Squatter about this same text. He indicated that, at a recent conference his professor attended, many Anglo-Saxon scholars were concerned that the estate withdrew the permission because they wanted to secure a more lucrative deal. I have never heard that anywhere else. Comments from Professor Drout suggest that the estate was upset at the way the press jumped on the story and printed incorrect information. I just hope that someday, someway, these manuscripts are released for solid, responsible Anglo-Saxon specialists to work with them. Everything suggests that these texts would be a real and deserved capstone for Tolkien the medievalist.