Skip to main content

Sellic Spell (Tolkien's Beowulf): The Platypus Reads Part CCLXII

As and addendum to my post on Tolkien's translation of Beowulf, I'll add a note about his Sellic Spell.  A "sellic spell" as defined by Tolkien is a "wonder tale" or "fairy tale" and appears to have constituted a genre of Anglo-Saxon oral tales of which we have no attested examples.  The word "syllic/sellic spell" comes from a description of the various entertainments in Hrothgar's hall in Beowulf.  Tolkien theorized that a lost "sellic spell" might account for some of the "fairy-tale" elements in Beowulf (ie his great strength, comparisons with a bear, his odd follower Handshoe and opponents sea monsters, Unpeace and the ogre).  Tolkien worked out this theory in the way you'd expect: he wrote his own version of the lost "sellic spell" about Bee-Wulf the bearish hero, his three friends, and the Ogre -in Old English.  Both the Old English version of this fairy story and its Modern English translation are included in Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary.  My wife has yet to set to work on the Old English version, but we read the Modern English version together and found it highly enjoyable.

Aside from its enjoyment value, Sellic Spell is also a valuable insight into Tolkien's scholarly mind.  Much of the source material of Tolkien's area of study, much more so than in the cases of Greece and Rome, was lost to the ravages of time.  As he says of the origins of the dragon's horde in Beowulf, it is beyond the reach of song -but not of imagination.  Taking this as his rallying cry, Tolkien was willing to use imagination where source material failed.  Indeed, much of his legendarium was an attempt to recover the lost mythologies and cultures of the ancient Northern peoples through imaginative reconstruction.  If that idea interests you, I'd recommend taking a look at Tom Shippey's excellent study The Road to Middle Earth.  If you want to see a great example of Tolkien welding together scholarship and imagination, I'd recommend that you pick up Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary and read Sellic Spell.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...

Tolkien's Dark Tower: The Platypus Reads Part CLXXXVI

Tom Shippey points out in his Road to Middle Earth that the germ of Barad Dur, Sauron's Stronghold, comes from a scrap of Chaucer where the poet makes an offhand reference to a knight and his approach to "the dark tower."  Chaucer expected that everyone knew that story, but somehow in the intervening centuries it has become lost.  Using his imagination, Tolkien tried to delve back into the mine of story and imagine what this Dark Tower might have been.  We see several tries at this image, or several "accounts" in Tolkien's corpus.  The first is Thangorodrim, Morgoth's "dark tower," where he sits "on hate enthroned."  The second, and like unto it, is Sauron's original keep at Tol Sirion.  This is the dark tower before which Luthien, in all her frailty, stands and lays the deepest pits bare with her song (an image oddly reminiscent of protestant poets like Spenser, Bunyan, and Wesley).  Building on these two images, Tolkien constru...

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....