Tolkien’s Beowulf is a mixed work, both in readability and nature, for reasons which a quick tour through Tolkien’s publication history helps make clear. Although a visit to a good bookstore will often reveal shelves and indeed cases of works by J.R.R. Tolkien, within his own lifetime, the Oxford professor was renowned for not publishing. The Silmarillion, the epic cycle of myths alternately rich and austere, grave and high-spirited, which was the womb of twentieth-century classics The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, remained a mass of variant versions and deficient drafts. These have been brought to publication by his son Christopher Tolkien, in a series of books beginning with the thoroughly edited Silmarillion, and continuing through the expansive 12-volume History of Mid