Talk:Beowulf and Middle-earth

Tone
hi - random reader here, this article made Front Page of Wikipedia-EN today.. Is it me or does the tone of this article seem hostile, or at the least "expose" .. like "shocking truth revealed. Tolkien copied ancient themes and names to sound IMPORTANT" .. I am a Tolkien fan, and a student of real mythology.. overlapping themes, and over long periods of time, even proper names, is ordinary! not "shocking truth revealed" .. I hope this article evolves to a more fair stance, first impression right now is that it is not that. 75.101.48.113 (talk) 19:33, 25 February 2022 (UTC)


 * Hi, I've no idea what gave you the feeling that there is any such tone here; I certainly don't have any feeling of it, and didn't when writing it. The article is carefully researched and reports quietly what scholars have written on the Beowulf connection. Tolkien was well-known as a Beowulf scholar and it would have been no surprise to anyone in his lifetime to hear that his fiction was related to that poem. Hope this helps a little. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:15, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Fails to mention other sources used by Tolkien
Great piece and accurately titled as the influence of Beowulf on Tolkien, but it seemed to me to over dramatize Beowulf, straining to implicate it on minor points, as if it is somehow the sole ancient literary source, by failing to mention and provide a link to, say, the Elder Edda, a heavily used Norse source. The reader is left dumber than before, by not receiving this and other literary pointers. 74.98.214.223 (talk) 05:47, 2 March 2022 (UTC)


 * Many thanks for your thoughts. There is no such implication; the Middle-earth navbox shows a large number of articles about Middle-earth, including a major article "J. R. R. Tolkien's influences" which both tours the many kinds of influence on Tolkien and links the other key articles on the various kinds of influence; I've linked "other influences" for you at the top of the article.


 * The article has had no need to strain to find scholarly materials on Beowulf's influence on Middle-earth, as the many scholars cited have written extensively on the matter. As for "minor points", the article is divided into named sections such as "Gollum" and "Impression of depth", and I can state with confidence that all of these are important in Tolkien's approach.


 * The job of a subsidiary article ("XYZ and Middle-earth") is necessarily to give an account of one aspect of the larger picture. Its reliably-cited description of the Beowulf aspect is not in any way a denial of the rest of the story. As for "the reader" becoming less well-informed, I'd point out that the first sentence of the article links the top-level articles J. R. R. Tolkien and Middle-earth, which tour the biographical and fantasy world aspects. You cannot expect each subsidiary article to repeat all the top-level information. The topic is well-structured and highly navigable with bluelinks in the text, "main article" and "further information" links at the tops of many sections, and navboxes at the ends of all the Middle-earth articles. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:12, 2 March 2022 (UTC)