The Monsters and the Critics

    Christopher Tolken’s, The Monsters and the Critics, is a very interesting perspective on the monsters and some of the other aspects of Beowulf through his eyes and different critics. Examples that Tolken provides us with shows that critics plays down important aspects of the poem, like the monsters themselves because it’s been used ‘as a quarry of fact and fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art’.  People looked too much into seeing Beowulf as a historic peace of Anglo-Saxon writing, which takes away from the actual poem itself. He points out that if you’re looking at just the poetry itself it ‘overshadows the historical content’, and also that the author of Beowulf used ‘an instinctive historical sense-a part indeed of the ancient English temper of which Beowulf is a supreme expression; but he has used it with a poetical and not an historical object’. People take the story itself of Beowulf too seriously when trying to view it. Tolken’s main point is that Beowulf has a greater importance when viewed as a poem so it should be enjoyed as one, monsters and all.
   
    I think Christopher Tolken had a lot of valuable arguments especially regarding the critic Ker, a great scholar, who basically called the monsters a childish flaw. He stated that ‘the great beauty, real value of Beowulf is in its dignity of style. He called the construction curiously weak, in a sense preposterous, and the disproportions that put the irrelevances in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges.’ However, if you were to look at Beowulf in the simplest sense you would see that Beowulf’s dignity comes from him fighting the monsters. Another interesting critic, Mr. Girvan doesn’t think Beowulf’s theme fits into the actual poem, and also that the monsters weren’t anything but a bad mistake. Tolken rebutted with the fact that more than one poem in the recent year have been inspired by the dragon of Beowulf, and the ‘high tone, the sense of dignity, alone is evidence in Beowulf of the presence of a mind loft and thoughtful’, proving that the theme that Beowulf has was there for a reason and was well thought out. Plus, ‘such a man would write more than three thousand lines (wrought to a high finish) on matter that is really not worth serious attention; that remains thin and cheap when he has finished with it”, he pretty much sarcastically states that who would put in so much time to write a three thousand line poem and have it mean absolutely nothing.
I find it kind of ironic that the title of this piece is the monsters and the critics. Some people can think of the critics too as monsters who can't simply see the beauty of Beowulf as a poem. If people could just read the poem how it is and not dissect deeper into the poetry of the story, maybe they’d see the beauty of the monsters too.