J. R. R. Tolkien and the art of translating English into English

Abstract

Translation techniques favoured by Tolkien in rendering Beowulf and other medieval poetry into modern English. J. R. R. Tolkien was a prolific translator, although most of his translation work was not actually published during his lifetime, as occurred with the greater part of his fiction. He never did any serious translation from modern foreign languages into English, but rather devoted himself to the task of turning Old English and Middle English poetry into something that could be readily understood by speakers of the modern idiom. His largest and best-known published translation is of the anonymous 14th Century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was published posthumously with two other translations from Middle English in the volume Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (Allen & Unwin 1975). The translation of Middle English texts constitutes the bulk of his output in this field, both in the above volume and in the fragments that appear in his lectures and essays. However, his heart really lay in the older, pre-Norman form of the language, and particularly in the greatest piece of literature to come down to us from the Old English period, the epic poem Beowulf.