Very interesting, although I didn't always get the technical terms used in philology. But I did enjoy the thoughts and ideas of language, the use and sound of words.
There are several different essays included in this and each one is a different focus, but I did like them all. Quite a few interesting tidbits and development of words revealed.

This is a collection of essays and lectures by Tolkien including Beowulf, On Translating Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and on Fairy-Stories, among others.

While more academic, it is noted that most of these were addressed to audiences who did not have advanced backgrounds in the field.

I found them intriguing and yet another window into how Tolkien understood and observed these works and the impact they had on his own writing.

As always, Tolkien's writing is majestic. This book is especially good for those who like being detailed critics of the books they read.

I already loved LOTR, and this book made me love that series even more. My favorite essay out of the collection was "On Fairy Stories." Whether you're a writer or a reader, it's definitely worth investing some time into. You'll walk away from it with a new appreciation for the significance of stories in our lives.

Prior to the delivery and publication of these lectures in 1936 the poem of Beowulf was mined by scholars looking to find information on Germanic antiquities, some for nationalistic reasons and others out of a genuine interest in the past, but few explored the poem for its own literary merits.

Major publications on the poem included works by Axel Olrik and R.W. Chambers, while both books made vast explorations into the origin of the legends and comparisons between Scandinavian material, neither attempted any analysis of the poems poetic value. In defence of probably the greatest Beowulf scholar ever, Frederich Klaeber in his major edition of the poem did include three sections in the introduction to the text that focused on the literary aspects of the poem.

In this groundbreaking lecture, Tolkien criticised scholars who ignored the fantastical episodes like the dragon fight, the encounters between Grendal and his mother and also skipped over the poetic value of the poem, in favour of looking for sources on the Germanic past. Instead Tolkien called for scholars to explore the poem for its own literary value. The whole essay seems to foretell the direction that Germanic studies would take in the aftermath of World War Two.

The challenge laid down by Tolkien was immediately taken up by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur in his Art of Beowulf. This was followed by numerous publications that analysed the literary merits of beowulf, most notably three volumes by Edward Irving. The whole trend reached a stunning high point in Fred C. Robinson's Beowulf and the Appositive Style in the 1980s.

With the birth of the Neo Traditionalist school in recent years, the search for parallel material, combined with Tolkien's call for literary analysis, seems to have made a comeback. With publications from Theodore M. Anderson, Helen Damico, Andy Orchard, Richard North and Christine Ruaer, Beowulf studies seem to be heading in interesting directions once more.

While I'm not a huge reader of modern fantasy literature and have only had one quick read of Tolkien's fantasy novels, mainly out of a strange curiosity and people constantly asking me irritating questions involving medieval studies and Tolkien's novels. This leads me to wonder if we should be reading Beowulf and other medieval literary works in the same way that someone would read a modern fantasy work like Lord of The Rings or a Harry Potter novel? Did the audience that listened to the poem in say the Tenth century hear this poem in the same way that we read the Hobbit or watch Star Wars?

I think Tolkien might have been a medievalist??

Good for me, not really a Tolkien fan but it was cool hearing about how he structured his stories on what was essentially the good ole days

Took me a long while to finish, but not for lack of interest or enjoyment. At first glance these essays seemed more or less unrelated to each other, but despite their different subject matters, they share some key ideas. The main one I took from them is Tolkien's belief, which I wholeheartedly share, that stories should be enjoyed for their own sake and not only studied for the sake of history. Someone who reads Beowulf for example only for the sake of identifying the bits of true history or story elements that can be traced through time is engaged in a noble pursuit, but is also missing the point of the story. To reiterate a metaphor Tolkien uses, that person is like someone who encounters a new building made from old material and who takes it apart to see where the stones came from. He says something more or less similar about languages as well, namely that language can be enjoyed and loved for its own sake and not just for the sake of study. Though some of the more strictly philological bits in the later essays were of little interest to me to the extent that I could even understand it, the overall message was well received.

And now I haven't even yet mentioned the brilliance of 'On Fairy Stories' as a defence of fantasy. I underlined so many parts of that essay, I might as well not have bothered. Here's just two quotes:

"When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power - upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our mind awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane. We may put a deadly green upon a man's face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in all such 'fantasy', as it is called, a new form is made; Faërie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator."

"Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker."

Amen to that!

Somewhere in the middle of picking up an MA in literature, I felt sudden pang of self-inflicted doubt about what exactly I was studying. Many times, I felt overwhelmed with the subjects ranging from eco-feminist perspectives to Baudrillard's theory on Simulacra and Simulation. Needless to say, my mind was swirling. Although I got through it, I still needed something substantial to reinforce the direction of my learning. In short, I felt muddled and J.R.R. Tolkien's collection of literary essays was a refreshing reminder of why I chose my MA path to begin with.

One does not need to be an academic to enjoy these essays, but it does help to have some grounding on the classics before proceeding with this book. In other words, don't try this expecting another great explanatory appendix to "The Lord of the Rings." Still, I think anyone who wishes to know more about the daytime job of Professor Tolkien will not be disappointed. Often, as I read through this exquisite collection essays, I imagined myself siting in the back of some lecture hall listening to Tolkien deliver his course(s). Please forgive me and correct me if I have misconstrued any of Professor Tolkien's points, but what follows are merely some short musings on the pieces I read. In a collection of this nature, it is natural that there will be some subjects that will interest us than others, but I believe there is little something for everyone.

First we have the title essay: Beowulf: The Monsters & the Critics—a lecture Tolkien delivered to the British Academy. Here Tolkien replies to some short-sighted critics of Beowulf that he describes enchantingly as "the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research [that] burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to another." Wow! If only I could have written similar lines against countless conjecturing critics whose writings were foisted upon me when I could have been studying Beowulf. Tolkien defends what others perceive falsely to be the fairy elements of the story, but of course a closer reading renders a dragon not as that typical beast that must be slain but something more fearful and real that treads our time and space. Tolkien succinctly expresses that "It is just because the main foes in Beowulf are inhuman that the story is larger and more significant than this imaginary poem of a great king's fall" (in reference to what critics thought should lay at the heart of the work).

The second essay On Translating Beowulf was a preface to C.L. Wrenn's new rendition of the poem. As such, the essay is less of a literary critique and more focused on the philological aspects of the poem, language, alliterations, and metre.

The third essay on Sir Gawain & the Green Knight is essential to my Arthurian shelf and expands upon the essay one may find in Tolkien's own translation. It is a fascinating exploration of intersecting elements with the blend of the real and unreal, the permanent and the transient along with the morals and code of honor whose breach can only be unraveled by a crisis point which becomes the crux of the poem.

The fourth essay On Fairy Stories is the icing on the cake in this collection, which consist of an exploration of the misconceptions of what constitutes a fairy story. For example, neither dream sequences that render the perilous fairy elements null, nor stories that have small people like Lilliputians could be considered fairy stories despite such stories being included in fairy tomes. The effect of fairy stories is that "they open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself maybe." This is not escapism in the sense of desertion, as Tolkien explains later but rather more like an escape from prison. I cannot do justice to this essay in a few short lines, but I urge anyone with the remotest interest in fairy stories or fantasy to read and reread it. With this essay, I understood why I have loved the Arthurian legends so.

The fifth essay is of philological import as it explores Welsh and English; the sixth essay will be of interest to Hobbit fandom as Tolkien explores his secret vice—inventing a language and a mythology in which to ground the language in experience. The last essay should be rather eye opening for those who have studied English and have witnessed the changes that have rendered the battle and hostility between literature and language null in light of the onslaught of STEM.

This book has something to interest a little in all of us, whether wee have been drawn to it through Tolkien's Hobbit-lore, our love for Beowulf or the Arthurian legends, or simply English as a path to study.

A collection of talks and presentatins before academic entities, from the mid '30's to the mid '50's, here turned into essays.
I read it for the 2 pieces on Beowulf and the 1 on Gawain. I was surprised at the number of readers of Tolkien who do not know that he came from a scholarly background. That his Midle Earth and LoR writing are informed by his Old and Middle English learning.
The essays are rather dry, especially when he gets into metre. His groundbreaking essay, the title work here, is as much answering critics as deciphering the work. But it was important as one, if not the, first works to treat Beowulf as poetry, rather than as history, theology or anthropology.
For those interested in the scholarly history of the 2 poems, or for Tolkien completists.

"J.R.R. Tolkien, il professore che amava i draghi, filologo insigne ed estroso, subcreatore della Terra di Mezzo e dei suoi miti cosmogonici, conservatore, cattolico tradizionalista, antimoderno a tal punto da preferire i fulmini ai lampioni, i cavalli alle automobili, ha insegnato ormai a diverse generazioni ad amare il Medioevo ed il Fantastico ed a non considerarli entrambi come qualcosa di negativo, di cui vergognarsi o addirittura di “pericoloso”. Tolkien, della Evasione del Prigioniero dal Carcere della Modernità, ne ha fatto un atteggiamento positivo e costruttivo, indispensabile per uscire indenni mentre si superano tutti gli ostacoli che si frappongono alla liberà". Così dice G . de Turris nell’introduzione di questo libro che in alcuni punti può essere un po’ più difficilotto del normale, ma niente che non si possa comprendere con una seconda lettura del brano in questione. Un'opera che ci permette di conoscere il Tolkien professore, facendoci un poco invidiare il fatto di non averlo potuto aspettare seduti in qualche aula universitaria del Merton College.

While some parts of these essays, particularly the second, fifth, and sixth, are not for everyone, those being fairly cerebral at times and hard to understand, even those have some amazing gold nuggets. The title essay on Beowulf, "The Monsters and the Critics" is phenomenal, as is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, On Fairy Stories, and the Valedictory Address. If you are a fan of Tolkien or the English Language, definitely read this book! Terrific!