![]() Tolkien was the University of Oxford Merton professor of English Language and Literature when Hall was a Rhodes scholar in the 1950s. Hall’s autobiography, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands, describes a white South African gatekeeper. At the 2018 Belle da Costa Greene conference, Kathy Lavezzo highlighted Tolkien’s role in shutting the Jamaican-born, Black British academic Stuart Hall out of medieval studies. It also extends to the ideal medieval literature scholars. Tolkien’s investment in whiteness does not just apply to his ideal readers of medieval literature. Thus Tolkien’s view on which bodies, fluent in this “native” English tongue, can read Beowulf, also offers a window into the politics of who gets to and how to read and write about the medieval past. ![]() Learning Old English is on par with learning a foreign language. Yet it is in fact written in a language that after many centuries has still essential kinship with our own, it was made in this land, and moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must ever call with a profound appeal-until the dragon comes.īeowulf-which is written in Old English-was produced over a millennium ago and is set in Denmark. ![]() He uses Grendel and the dragon to discuss an aesthetic, non-politicized, close reading of monsters, asking critics to read it as a poem, a work of linguistic art: Tolkien’s “ Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” Yes, before and while writing The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was an Oxford medieval professor who interpreted Beowulf for a white English audience. The foundational article on Beowulf and monsters is J.R.R. Yet critics have always read it through the white gaze and a preserve of white English heritage. Indeed, Beowulf is a story about monsters, race, and political violence. Crucially, Grendel is never clearly described, but is named a “grim demon,” “god-cursed brute,” a “prowler through the dark,” a part of “Cain’s clan.” Years later, Beowulf deals with a dragon who is devastating his kingdom and dies while he and his thane, Wiglaf, are slaying the dragon. Beowulf, a warrior, lands in Hrothgar’s kingdom and kills Grendel but then must contend with Grendel’s mother who comes to enact revenge for her son’s murder. Grendel, the ghastly uninvited guest, kills King Hrothgar’s men at a feast in Heorot. Most readers of Beowulf understand it as a white, male hero story-tellingly, it’s named for the hero, not the monster-who slays a monster and the monster’s mother.
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