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I'm reading The Monsters and the Critics and other essays. Tolkein's scholarship is just collosal. The result is a distillation of the experience of a man in lo

I'm reading The Monsters and the Critics and other essays. Tolkein's scholarship is just collosal. The result is a distillation of the experience of a man in love with language, the peoples who spoke them, and a true appreciation of time, culture, and the loss of both. We have virtually no knowledge of these people, and the millions of other peoples who met the same fate. There is simply nothing left of them. And as their descendents became us, so too shall we pass on into the unknown.

jfengel 5y ago
You should look at his translation of Beowulf. Not because it's an especially good translation (it isn't), but because it's really just a framework for a series of mini-essays on how much you can learn about the culture from that poem (and supporting material). He examines the poem on a nearly word-by-word basis, and each one teaches something about how they thought about the world. That requires an absolutely encyclopedic grasp of every single fragment of knowledge we have: archeology, sagas, descendant languages, religion, etc. You really read it for the footnotes rather than the (unremarkable) prose. Having read it gives you a much greater appreciation for other translations, and the way they translate the 6th century for today.