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· What was Tolkien's issue?
0:00 · In 2014, Christopher Tolken published
0:02 · his father's translation of Beayolf,
0:05 · accompanied by commentary on the poem
0:07 · that Professor Tolken presumably gave to
0:09 · his students while teaching. The
0:11 · translation being written in 1926, when
0:14 · Tolken was only 34 and still had the
0:17 · majority of his Beaywolf scholarship
0:18 · ahead of him, is pretty shaky. The
0:21 · commentary, however, was written much
0:23 · later during his two decades as
0:25 · Rollinsson and Bosworth Professor of
0:26 · Anglo-Saxon at Oxford at the height of
0:29 · his academic prowess.
0:31 · It's interesting to find then that one
0:33 · of his first comments is completely at
0:35 · odds with essentially every Beaywolf
0:37 · translation ever written. He is
0:40 · primarily concerned with the old English
0:42 · kenning
0:44 · in line 10A which usually gets
0:46 · translated to his sugarin as whale road.
0:49 · Why did Tolken disagree with this so
0:51 · much? Why has nobody followed his
0:54 · advice? And who at the end of the day is
0:56 · right? Stay tuned.
1:03 · This is the opening to Beayolf in Tom
1:05 · Shippy's recent translation, which is in
1:07 · my opinion the best. I'll have the link
1:09 · to that in the description if you're
1:11 · interested. Here is our word randrod
1:14 · right there in the 10th line of one of
1:16 · the most famous poems ever composed.
1:18 · Shippy's translation philosophy is
1:20 · usually to give general translations for
1:22 · these poetic compounds, which is
1:24 · probably most accurate for how the
1:26 · native listener and the poet would have
1:28 · understood them. For the literal
1:30 · meaning, we can consult two dictionaries
1:32 · from Tolken's time. The Bosworth Taller
1:34 · dictionary of Oxford and the Clark Hall
1:36 · dictionary of Cambridge. Both
1:38 · dictionaries give whale road from the
1:40 · two constituents Ron and Rod.
· Tolkien's comment on 'ofer hronrade'
1:44 · Now, in his commentary, Tolken has an
1:46 · extended note on this word, which begins
1:48 · simply by explaining the old English
1:50 · usage of the poetic compound, but
1:53 · devolves into something of a rant on
1:55 · common translations. Here's what he has
1:57 · to say. It is quite incorrect to
2:01 · translate it, as it is all too
2:03 · frequently translated whale. It is
2:06 · incorrect stylistically since compounds
2:08 · of this sort sound in themselves clumsy
2:11 · or bizarre in modern English even when
2:14 · their components are correctly selected.
2:16 · In this particular instance, the
2:18 · unfortunate sound association with
2:20 · railroad increases the ineptitude. It is
2:23 · incorrect. In fact, rod is the ancestor
2:27 · of our modern word road, but it does not
2:29 · mean road. Etmology is not a safe guide
2:33 · to sense. Rod is the noun of action to
2:36 · rean ride and means riding i.e. riding
2:40 · on horseback moving as a horse does or a
2:43 · chariot or as a ship does at anchor and
2:46 · hence a journey on horseback or more
2:49 · seldom by ship. A course however
2:51 · vagrant. It does not mean the actual
2:54 · track still less the hard paved
2:57 · permanent and more or less straight
2:59 · tracks that we associate with the road.
3:02 · Also, hon is a word peculiar to old
3:04 · English. It means some kind of a whale,
3:07 · that is of the family of fish-like
3:09 · mammals. What precisely is not known,
3:12 · but it was something of the porpus or
3:13 · dolphin kind, probably at any rate, less
3:16 · than a real hu. There is a statement in
3:19 · old English that a was about seven times
3:22 · the size of a seal and a hu about seven
3:25 · times the size of a hon. The word as
3:28 · kenning therefore means dolphins riding
3:31 · i.e. in full the watery fields where you
3:34 · can see dolphins and lesser members of
3:36 · the whale tribe playing or seeming to
3:38 · gallop like a line of riders on the
3:40 · plains. That is the picture in
3:42 · comparison the Kenning was meant to
3:44 · evoke. It is not evoked by whale road
3:48 · which suggests a sort of semiubmarine
3:51 · steam engine running along submerged
3:53 · metal rails over the Atlantic.
· Line 10a in Beowulf translations
3:57 · So that's what Tolken thought. Who
4:00 · agrees with him? Well, the first ever
4:03 · translation of Beaywolf written in Latin
4:05 · in 1815 by Cremier Tolkin gives ctorum
4:09 · wh that is the roads of the whales. So
4:14 · not toolin. We can see from Tolken's
4:17 · frustrations and the two dictionaries
4:19 · that this was a normal translation in
4:21 · his time. So what about afterwards?
4:24 · 4 years after Tolken dies, Howell
4:27 · Chering publishes a translation and
4:29 · gives Whalero, so not Chering. In 2000,
4:34 · Sheamus Haney's famous translation gets
4:36 · published and again gives Whale Road, so
4:39 · not Haney. I actually realized as I was
4:41 · making this video that right next to me
4:43 · on my desk are two really important
4:45 · editions of Beaywolf that I can just
4:47 · show you. This is Clay's Baywolf fourth
4:50 · edition, otherwise known as the Clayber
4:51 · 4. um probably the most important thing
4:54 · ever written on Beaowolf. It is the
4:57 · current definitive scholarly edition.
4:59 · Even 15 years after its publication, it
5:01 · still holds up. Um and if we go to the
5:04 · glossery in the back on page 400 and
5:08 · find the word ronrod, we get whailroad.
5:12 · Now much of the work on the clay four
5:15 · was done by the scholar RD Fulk who this
5:18 · is no exaggeration might be one of the
5:20 · greatest scholars of all time really uh
5:23 · a titan of academia and he has his own
5:26 · translation written about 2 years later
5:29 · and if we go to the first page of that
5:31 · translation page 87 of this book we get
5:35 · whailroad
5:36 · now this is all before 2014 when
5:39 · Tolken's commentary is published surely
5:42 · Later translations reflect the new
5:44 · reading. Nope. In 2020, Maria Hedley
5:47 · actually quotes Tolken's commentary
5:49 · multiple times and gives whale road. And
5:53 · the regularly updated online Toronto
5:55 · dictionary of old English gives, you
5:57 · guessed it, whale road. So, who agrees
6:00 · with Tolken? Basically, no one. But is
6:03 · he wrong? Let's look at the evidence. At
· Who's right and who's wrong?
6:07 · least concerning the word rod, Tolken is
6:10 · factually correct. The word just doesn't
6:13 · mean road. And most dictionaries will
6:15 · actually agree with him on this until it
6:17 · gets put into a compound. And that's
6:20 · probably just because it's easier to say
6:22 · the swan road than the riding place of
6:24 · the swan, regardless of the fact that
6:27 · the latter is more accurate. Even Tom
6:29 · Shippy, arguably one of the greatest
6:31 · philologists and Tolken scholars of all
6:33 · time, uses the word road in his
6:36 · translation just for the sake of
6:37 · brevity. The trickier constituent is
6:40 · Hon. No one agrees with Tolken on Hon.
6:44 · The dictionaries all say whale. The
6:46 · translations all say whale. The
6:48 · additions all say whale. At first
6:50 · glance, Tolken seems to be a little
6:52 · crazy with this complaint. And you know
6:54 · what? I actually think he's right about
6:57 · this, too. One thing I want to point out
6:59 · before I get into the meaning of pur. If
7:01 · you'll actually check out the
7:02 · translation Tolken wrote himself, you'll
7:05 · find the word whale used in this
7:06 · position. That's because this
7:08 · translation was written in 1926. He was
7:10 · still only 34 years old. The commentary
7:12 · was written several decades later. So,
7:14 · it's not that he's like betraying
7:16 · himself. It's more so that he didn't
7:18 · realize yet what the word meant. Now, a
· Reading the gloss to Psalm 73
7:21 · huge problem pops out at us when we try
7:23 · to translate as whale in modern English.
7:27 · And that is the same thing that Tolken
7:29 · said. We have a sentence in old English
7:31 · that refers to Halas as being seven
7:33 · times Ronos. What does seven times mean?
7:37 · We'll get into that in a second. It took
7:38 · me a very long time to find what Tolken
7:41 · was talking about though. Eventually I
7:43 · did. Let's do some manuscript reading
7:45 · together. This is Vatican Palatinus
7:47 · Latinos 68. It is a commentary on Psalm
7:52 · 73 in the Vulgate counting. And here it
7:55 · says about the Leviathan at
7:59 · septum minoribus satures
8:04 · that is and they say that seven with
8:07 · seven of the smaller ones the greater
8:11 · ones are satiated or sort of filled. And
8:14 · then it explains that in old English
8:17 · here
8:19 · fiscu
8:22 · this is early North Umbrean. So uh some
8:25 · we get some strange forms like civu
8:27 · instead of seven
8:29 · but um here it says seven fish
8:34 · it sort of fill a seal is what I'll
8:38 · translate this as. Now fill here could
8:41 · mean fill as in food as in a seal eats
8:44 · seven fish. That's pretty plausible. It
8:47 · also could theoretically mean that the
8:49 · physical shape of a seal is filled with
8:52 · seven fish. That is a seal is seven
8:54 · times bigger than a fish. That's also
8:57 · plausible. I tend to lean towards the
8:59 · former interpretation, but really either
9:01 · of them for our purposes works.
9:05 · Here it continues
9:10 · filu that is seven seals fill a. Now,
9:15 · this tells us that a hon is at least
9:18 · larger than a seal, either in the sense
9:19 · that it could eat seven seals or that it
9:22 · could be filled physically by seven
9:24 · seals. So, sounds like something around
9:26 · the size of a large dolphin.
9:30 · Ceuas
9:32 · fu sevens
9:35 · fill a whale. Again, placing it
9:37 · somewhere around the size of a large
9:39 · dolphin. Either way, how could you say
9:42 · that aon is a whale if here we have a
9:45 · sentence saying, let's translate it as
9:48 · whale, that seven whales fill a whale.
9:50 · It just doesn't make sense. Translating
9:52 · hon is really difficult, at least in
9:55 · this context. If you look at every
· The case for "hron" as a large delphinid
9:58 · instance of the word hon, it clearly
10:00 · refers to an aquatic animal of some
10:02 · kind, but never a large one. Trust me, I
10:05 · actually did look at every single
10:07 · occurrence of this word hon. And if you
10:10 · want to as well, you can read this paper
10:12 · I wrote on it last year. Be warned, it's
10:14 · pretty boring. The main takeaway is,
10:17 · however, exactly as Tolken said, when
10:19 · speakers of old English wanted to talk
10:21 · about what we would call a whale in
10:23 · modern English, they used the word. When
10:26 · they wanted to talk about something more
10:27 · the size of a large dolphin, they used
10:30 · the word. And here we run into a problem
10:33 · with modern English. We call this animal
10:35 · a false killer whale, but the average
10:38 · person watching from the beach would
10:39 · probably see this animal and call it a
10:41 · large dolphin. They wouldn't be totally
10:44 · wrong either because the false killer
10:46 · whale is actually classified as a
10:48 · dolphin. But they probably wouldn't know
10:50 · that the vernacular name is whale unless
10:52 · they were educated in marine biology.
10:54 · Because when you say the word whale, the
10:56 · median English speaker thinks of
10:58 · something that looks like this, not
11:00 · this. But we can demonstrate pretty well
11:03 · that the old English word meant
11:06 · something like this, a big dolphin. Now,
11:09 · how should we translate it? If you had
11:11 · to pick one word to describe this
11:13 · animal, do you think whale or dolphin is
11:16 · more accurate? You can let me know in
11:18 · the comments if you disagree, but I
11:21 · personally side with Tolken on this one.
11:23 · I think the wordrod meant the riding of
11:26 · the dolphins and the playground of
11:28 · mysterious legendary creatures. Thanks a
11:31 · lot for watching. If you like this
11:33 · content, check out the rest of the
11:35 · channel. Kindly consider subscribing or
11:36 · becoming a supporter on Patreon. And
11:38 · until next time, you Sunday.

--> YouTube-Generated Transcript <--
	·	What was Tolkien's issue?
0:00	·	In 2014, Christopher Tolken published
0:02	·	his father's translation of Beayolf,
0:05	·	accompanied by commentary on the poem
0:07	·	that Professor Tolken presumably gave to
0:09	·	his students while teaching. The
0:11	·	translation being written in 1926, when
0:14	·	Tolken was only 34 and still had the
0:17	·	majority of his Beaywolf scholarship
0:18	·	ahead of him, is pretty shaky. The
0:21	·	commentary, however, was written much
0:23	·	later during his two decades as
0:25	·	Rollinsson and Bosworth Professor of
0:26	·	Anglo-Saxon at Oxford at the height of
0:29	·	his academic prowess.
0:31	·	It's interesting to find then that one
0:33	·	of his first comments is completely at
0:35	·	odds with essentially every Beaywolf
0:37	·	translation ever written. He is
0:40	·	primarily concerned with the old English
0:42	·	kenning
0:44	·	in line 10A which usually gets
0:46	·	translated to his sugarin as whale road.
0:49	·	Why did Tolken disagree with this so
0:51	·	much? Why has nobody followed his
0:54	·	advice? And who at the end of the day is
0:56	·	right? Stay tuned.
1:03	·	This is the opening to Beayolf in Tom
1:05	·	Shippy's recent translation, which is in
1:07	·	my opinion the best. I'll have the link
1:09	·	to that in the description if you're
1:11	·	interested. Here is our word randrod
1:14	·	right there in the 10th line of one of
1:16	·	the most famous poems ever composed.
1:18	·	Shippy's translation philosophy is
1:20	·	usually to give general translations for
1:22	·	these poetic compounds, which is
1:24	·	probably most accurate for how the
1:26	·	native listener and the poet would have
1:28	·	understood them. For the literal
1:30	·	meaning, we can consult two dictionaries
1:32	·	from Tolken's time. The Bosworth Taller
1:34	·	dictionary of Oxford and the Clark Hall
1:36	·	dictionary of Cambridge. Both
1:38	·	dictionaries give whale road from the
1:40	·	two constituents Ron and Rod.
	·	Tolkien's comment on 'ofer hronrade'
1:44	·	Now, in his commentary, Tolken has an
1:46	·	extended note on this word, which begins
1:48	·	simply by explaining the old English
1:50	·	usage of the poetic compound, but
1:53	·	devolves into something of a rant on
1:55	·	common translations. Here's what he has
1:57	·	to say. It is quite incorrect to
2:01	·	translate it, as it is all too
2:03	·	frequently translated whale. It is
2:06	·	incorrect stylistically since compounds
2:08	·	of this sort sound in themselves clumsy
2:11	·	or bizarre in modern English even when
2:14	·	their components are correctly selected.
2:16	·	In this particular instance, the
2:18	·	unfortunate sound association with
2:20	·	railroad increases the ineptitude. It is
2:23	·	incorrect. In fact, rod is the ancestor
2:27	·	of our modern word road, but it does not
2:29	·	mean road. Etmology is not a safe guide
2:33	·	to sense. Rod is the noun of action to
2:36	·	rean ride and means riding i.e. riding
2:40	·	on horseback moving as a horse does or a
2:43	·	chariot or as a ship does at anchor and
2:46	·	hence a journey on horseback or more
2:49	·	seldom by ship. A course however
2:51	·	vagrant. It does not mean the actual
2:54	·	track still less the hard paved
2:57	·	permanent and more or less straight
2:59	·	tracks that we associate with the road.
3:02	·	Also, hon is a word peculiar to old
3:04	·	English. It means some kind of a whale,
3:07	·	that is of the family of fish-like
3:09	·	mammals. What precisely is not known,
3:12	·	but it was something of the porpus or
3:13	·	dolphin kind, probably at any rate, less
3:16	·	than a real hu. There is a statement in
3:19	·	old English that a was about seven times
3:22	·	the size of a seal and a hu about seven
3:25	·	times the size of a hon. The word as
3:28	·	kenning therefore means dolphins riding
3:31	·	i.e. in full the watery fields where you
3:34	·	can see dolphins and lesser members of
3:36	·	the whale tribe playing or seeming to
3:38	·	gallop like a line of riders on the
3:40	·	plains. That is the picture in
3:42	·	comparison the Kenning was meant to
3:44	·	evoke. It is not evoked by whale road
3:48	·	which suggests a sort of semiubmarine
3:51	·	steam engine running along submerged
3:53	·	metal rails over the Atlantic.
	·	Line 10a in Beowulf translations
3:57	·	So that's what Tolken thought. Who
4:00	·	agrees with him? Well, the first ever
4:03	·	translation of Beaywolf written in Latin
4:05	·	in 1815 by Cremier Tolkin gives ctorum
4:09	·	wh that is the roads of the whales. So
4:14	·	not toolin. We can see from Tolken's
4:17	·	frustrations and the two dictionaries
4:19	·	that this was a normal translation in
4:21	·	his time. So what about afterwards?
4:24	·	4 years after Tolken dies, Howell
4:27	·	Chering publishes a translation and
4:29	·	gives Whalero, so not Chering. In 2000,
4:34	·	Sheamus Haney's famous translation gets
4:36	·	published and again gives Whale Road, so
4:39	·	not Haney. I actually realized as I was
4:41	·	making this video that right next to me
4:43	·	on my desk are two really important
4:45	·	editions of Beaywolf that I can just
4:47	·	show you. This is Clay's Baywolf fourth
4:50	·	edition, otherwise known as the Clayber
4:51	·	4. um probably the most important thing
4:54	·	ever written on Beaowolf. It is the
4:57	·	current definitive scholarly edition.
4:59	·	Even 15 years after its publication, it
5:01	·	still holds up. Um and if we go to the
5:04	·	glossery in the back on page 400 and
5:08	·	find the word ronrod, we get whailroad.
5:12	·	Now much of the work on the clay four
5:15	·	was done by the scholar RD Fulk who this
5:18	·	is no exaggeration might be one of the
5:20	·	greatest scholars of all time really uh
5:23	·	a titan of academia and he has his own
5:26	·	translation written about 2 years later
5:29	·	and if we go to the first page of that
5:31	·	translation page 87 of this book we get
5:35	·	whailroad
5:36	·	now this is all before 2014 when
5:39	·	Tolken's commentary is published surely
5:42	·	Later translations reflect the new
5:44	·	reading. Nope. In 2020, Maria Hedley
5:47	·	actually quotes Tolken's commentary
5:49	·	multiple times and gives whale road. And
5:53	·	the regularly updated online Toronto
5:55	·	dictionary of old English gives, you
5:57	·	guessed it, whale road. So, who agrees
6:00	·	with Tolken? Basically, no one. But is
6:03	·	he wrong? Let's look at the evidence. At
	·	Who's right and who's wrong?
6:07	·	least concerning the word rod, Tolken is
6:10	·	factually correct. The word just doesn't
6:13	·	mean road. And most dictionaries will
6:15	·	actually agree with him on this until it
6:17	·	gets put into a compound. And that's
6:20	·	probably just because it's easier to say
6:22	·	the swan road than the riding place of
6:24	·	the swan, regardless of the fact that
6:27	·	the latter is more accurate. Even Tom
6:29	·	Shippy, arguably one of the greatest
6:31	·	philologists and Tolken scholars of all
6:33	·	time, uses the word road in his
6:36	·	translation just for the sake of
6:37	·	brevity. The trickier constituent is
6:40	·	Hon. No one agrees with Tolken on Hon.
6:44	·	The dictionaries all say whale. The
6:46	·	translations all say whale. The
6:48	·	additions all say whale. At first
6:50	·	glance, Tolken seems to be a little
6:52	·	crazy with this complaint. And you know
6:54	·	what? I actually think he's right about
6:57	·	this, too. One thing I want to point out
6:59	·	before I get into the meaning of pur. If
7:01	·	you'll actually check out the
7:02	·	translation Tolken wrote himself, you'll
7:05	·	find the word whale used in this
7:06	·	position. That's because this
7:08	·	translation was written in 1926. He was
7:10	·	still only 34 years old. The commentary
7:12	·	was written several decades later. So,
7:14	·	it's not that he's like betraying
7:16	·	himself. It's more so that he didn't
7:18	·	realize yet what the word meant. Now, a
	·	Reading the gloss to Psalm 73
7:21	·	huge problem pops out at us when we try
7:23	·	to translate as whale in modern English.
7:27	·	And that is the same thing that Tolken
7:29	·	said. We have a sentence in old English
7:31	·	that refers to Halas as being seven
7:33	·	times Ronos. What does seven times mean?
7:37	·	We'll get into that in a second. It took
7:38	·	me a very long time to find what Tolken
7:41	·	was talking about though. Eventually I
7:43	·	did. Let's do some manuscript reading
7:45	·	together. This is Vatican Palatinus
7:47	·	Latinos 68. It is a commentary on Psalm
7:52	·	73 in the Vulgate counting. And here it
7:55	·	says about the Leviathan at
7:59	·	septum minoribus satures
8:04	·	that is and they say that seven with
8:07	·	seven of the smaller ones the greater
8:11	·	ones are satiated or sort of filled. And
8:14	·	then it explains that in old English
8:17	·	here
8:19	·	fiscu
8:22	·	this is early North Umbrean. So uh some
8:25	·	we get some strange forms like civu
8:27	·	instead of seven
8:29	·	but um here it says seven fish
8:34	·	it sort of fill a seal is what I'll
8:38	·	translate this as. Now fill here could
8:41	·	mean fill as in food as in a seal eats
8:44	·	seven fish. That's pretty plausible. It
8:47	·	also could theoretically mean that the
8:49	·	physical shape of a seal is filled with
8:52	·	seven fish. That is a seal is seven
8:54	·	times bigger than a fish. That's also
8:57	·	plausible. I tend to lean towards the
8:59	·	former interpretation, but really either
9:01	·	of them for our purposes works.
9:05	·	Here it continues
9:10	·	filu that is seven seals fill a. Now,
9:15	·	this tells us that a hon is at least
9:18	·	larger than a seal, either in the sense
9:19	·	that it could eat seven seals or that it
9:22	·	could be filled physically by seven
9:24	·	seals. So, sounds like something around
9:26	·	the size of a large dolphin.
9:30	·	Ceuas
9:32	·	fu sevens
9:35	·	fill a whale. Again, placing it
9:37	·	somewhere around the size of a large
9:39	·	dolphin. Either way, how could you say
9:42	·	that aon is a whale if here we have a
9:45	·	sentence saying, let's translate it as
9:48	·	whale, that seven whales fill a whale.
9:50	·	It just doesn't make sense. Translating
9:52	·	hon is really difficult, at least in
9:55	·	this context. If you look at every
	·	The case for "hron" as a large delphinid
9:58	·	instance of the word hon, it clearly
10:00	·	refers to an aquatic animal of some
10:02	·	kind, but never a large one. Trust me, I
10:05	·	actually did look at every single
10:07	·	occurrence of this word hon. And if you
10:10	·	want to as well, you can read this paper
10:12	·	I wrote on it last year. Be warned, it's
10:14	·	pretty boring. The main takeaway is,
10:17	·	however, exactly as Tolken said, when
10:19	·	speakers of old English wanted to talk
10:21	·	about what we would call a whale in
10:23	·	modern English, they used the word. When
10:26	·	they wanted to talk about something more
10:27	·	the size of a large dolphin, they used
10:30	·	the word. And here we run into a problem
10:33	·	with modern English. We call this animal
10:35	·	a false killer whale, but the average
10:38	·	person watching from the beach would
10:39	·	probably see this animal and call it a
10:41	·	large dolphin. They wouldn't be totally
10:44	·	wrong either because the false killer
10:46	·	whale is actually classified as a
10:48	·	dolphin. But they probably wouldn't know
10:50	·	that the vernacular name is whale unless
10:52	·	they were educated in marine biology.
10:54	·	Because when you say the word whale, the
10:56	·	median English speaker thinks of
10:58	·	something that looks like this, not
11:00	·	this. But we can demonstrate pretty well
11:03	·	that the old English word meant
11:06	·	something like this, a big dolphin. Now,
11:09	·	how should we translate it? If you had
11:11	·	to pick one word to describe this
11:13	·	animal, do you think whale or dolphin is
11:16	·	more accurate? You can let me know in
11:18	·	the comments if you disagree, but I
11:21	·	personally side with Tolken on this one.
11:23	·	I think the wordrod meant the riding of
11:26	·	the dolphins and the playground of
11:28	·	mysterious legendary creatures. Thanks a
11:31	·	lot for watching. If you like this
11:33	·	content, check out the rest of the
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11:38	·	until next time, you Sunday.