PLOT
It is as if J.R.R. Tolkien entered into the imagined past: standing beside Beowulf and his men shaking out their mail-shirts as they beached their ship on the coast of Denmark, listening to the rising anger of Beowulf at the taunting of Unferth, or looking up in amazement at Grendel’s terrible hand set under the roof of Heorot.
The translation of Beowulf by J.R.R. Tolkien was an early work, very distinctive in its mode, completed in 1926. This edition is twofold in the written form of a series of lectures given at Oxford in the 1930s ; and from these lectures a substantial selection has been made, to form also a commentary on the translation in this book.
Sellic Spell is a story written by Tolkien suggesting what might have been the form and style of an Old English folk-tale of Beowulf, in which there was no association with the ‘historical legends’ of the Northern kingdoms.