Tolkien pokes fun at the Ivory Tower

[sepdet]

I was just reading Tolkien's essay on Beowulf, entitled "The Monsters and the Critics", pointing out how Beowulf scholarship seems bound and determined to examine it as a historical or religious or cultural document and as anything EXCEPT a poem and a work of art, and came across this delightful paragraph:

But it is plainly only in the consideration of Beowulf as a poem, with an inherent poetic significance, that any view or conviction can be reached or steadily held. For it is of their nature that the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to another. Noble animals, whose burbling is on occasion good to hear; but though their eyes of flame may sometimes prove searchlights, their range is short.

Comments

[wired-lizard.livejournal.com]

*is very amused*

[laebeth87.livejournal.com]

*smiles*