J.R.R. Tolkien translated and commented on the Old English poem Beowulf in a work published posthumously in 2014.
Tolkien was a leading scholar of Old English literature, and Beowulf was central to his academic work. He delivered his influential lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” in 1936, arguing that the poem should be valued as a unified work of art rather than treated mainly as historical evidence.
His own prose translation was completed in the 1920s, but it was not published during his lifetime. Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, edited by Christopher Tolkien, also included Tolkien’s lecture “Sellic Spell” and related material. The book appeared in 2014, decades after Tolkien’s death.
Beowulf is sometimes confused with The Battle of Maldon or other Old English poems Tolkien studied. Unlike those shorter works, Beowulf is the long heroic poem about the warrior Beowulf, Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon.