What was J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic translation of the Old English epic Beowulf called?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic translation was published as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary.

The book, edited by Christopher Tolkien, appeared posthumously in 2014. It contains Tolkien’s prose translation of the Old English epic Beowulf, along with extensive commentary and related material. Tolkien worked on the translation during the 1920s and 1930s, but it was not published during his lifetime.

Tolkien was a major Beowulf scholar. His influential 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” argued that the poem’s monsters were central to its artistic design rather than distractions from historical content. That lecture helped reshape modern academic approaches to the poem.

The translation is different from Tolkien’s earlier scholarly essay and from his poem “The Lay of Beowulf.” The title’s full wording is important because several works by Tolkien discuss Beowulf without being translations of the complete poem.