J. R. R. Tolkien
Beowulf
After Doré · Tolkienâs translation
- 24 plates
- Gustave Doré
The book
A Geat crosses the sea to a hall that has been emptied for twelve years by a creature that comes at night, and tears its arm off. Then its mother comes. Fifty years later he is a king and a dragon wakes, and this time the fight kills him too. Tolkien's own prose translation, made in 1926 and unpublished for eighty-eight years.
Why Gustave Doré
Doré never touched Norse or Anglo-Saxon material — his medieval work is French and Christian. The gap is the reason: this is the one cycle where the hand has no prior claim on the subject at all, and everything has to come from composition.
What transfers is the hall. Doré's interiors are lit by one source in an enormous dark, with figures small against roof-beams, and Heorot is that room exactly — a lit hall with something outside it.
What to look for
Darkness as an actor. Grendel is barely drawn; the mere is drawn at length. The poem does the same thing and Tolkien's translation keeps it.
