Pour le coup, j'ai retrouve la source de l'information: The Sunday Times
December 29, 2002
"A yellowing manuscript by JRR Tolkien discovered in an Oxford library...
The 2,000 handwritten pages include Tolkien’s translation and appraisal of Beowulf, the epic Anglo-Saxon poem about bravery, friendship and monster-slaying that is thought to have been one of the inspirations for his own tome.
An American academic, Michael Drout, found some of the material, notes bound in board covers, by accident in a box of papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Tolkien, a professor at Oxford, was regarded as one of the greatest Anglo-Saxon scholars of the last century and gave a key lecture about the poem.
In 1936... he spoke on Beowulf at the university urging people to read it as a great poem rather than as a historical document.
Written in Britain about 350 years before the battle of Hastings... The oldest-surviving copy, from about 1000, sits behind glass in a controlled environment in the British Museum. The intervening millennium has so altered the language that only scholars can understand it.
Drout, assistant professor of English at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, had travelled to Oxford by train while on a family visit to London. A self-confessed Tolkien “nut”, Drout, 34, had grown up with a map of Middle-earth over his bed.
He was researching Anglo-Saxon scholarship and after looking through the catalogue of the library’s Tolkien collection, he asked to see an entry file entitled “Carbon typescripts of Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics”, the title of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture. It was brought to him in the reading room in large box file.
Drout, who reads Anglo-Saxon prose to his two-year-old daughter at bedtime, said last week: “I was sitting there going through the transcripts when I saw these four bound volumes at the bottom of the box.
“I started looking through and realised I had found an entire book of material that had never seen the light of day. As I turned the page, there was Tolkien’s fingerprint in a smudge of ink.
“My heart was racing as I was writing things down. It was only when I went out to meet my wife that I was running down Catte Street going, ‘Oh my God, I have found an unpublished Tolkien manuscript’. “Then I panicked that there was some other, more worthy researcher working on it. Luckily, it turned out not to be true.”
After obtaining permission from the Tolkien estate, Drout published Beowulf and the Critics, an extended version of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture, in America earlier this month.
Even more exciting will be Tolkien’s translation of the poem and his line-by-line interpretation of its meaning, which will be published next summer.
Drout says Tolkien found inspiration for many of his own storylines and characters in Beowulf. The Anglo-Saxon hero’s friendship with Wiglaf is mirrored in the relationship between Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings.
Elves, Orcs and Ents, the latter a type of giant that becomes a walking, talking tree in Tolkien’s work, are all mentioned in Beowulf.
This weekend scholars hailed the forthcoming publication of the translation as an important addition to Tolkien’s canon.
John Carey, the former Merton professor of English literature at Oxford, said: “Beowulf is enormously hard to translate into alliterative verse, but it sounds remarkable. Tolkien is much closer to the Anglo-Saxon form than Heaney.”
Kevin Crossley-Holland, a poet, broadcaster and Anglo-Saxon expert who has published his own translation, said: “It captures the sound of big waves crashing on a shingle beach and the lines die away like water running up a beach.”
He added: “Tolkien’s work breathes the same world as the Anglo-Saxon poems and the Norse myths. It is umbilically linked.”
Heaney said yesterday: “I look forward to reading it very much, but I don’t want to compare them. I wouldn’t like anyone to pick two lines out of mine and say, ‘What do you think?’” Merlin Unwin, son of Tolkien’s original publisher and who as a boy took afternoon tea with the author, said: “Beowulf is a wonderful story and if you put Tolkien’s name to it, it would probably be a great commercial success.”
http://www.tolkienbooks.net/html/manuscript_found.htm
desolee pour l'anglais, je n'ai pas le temps de traduire :\
FdN