A Sense of History: The Rock Garden

This month's A Sense of History continues Simon J. Cook's series on Tolkien's renowned lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Roundly considered to be a watershed moment in Beowulf studies, Tolkien uses an extended metaphor of a tower, some stones, and coterie of friends and neighbors to comment on the state of Beowulf criticism in 1936.

What often goes overlooked is that the people in the tower analogy were in fact real people: Tolkien's colleagues and fellow scholars, whose ideas about Beowulf he harbored various feelings about. In this month's column, Simon looks at an old draft of "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," which presents a simplified version of the tower analogy and sheds some light on whom the various figures in the metaphor represent.

You can read Simon J. Cook's "The Rock Garden" here.

Posted on 8 September 2023 (updated 7 December 2023) by SWG Moderators