Quote Originally Posted by dehro View Post
this.. very much this..
I know perfectly well that Tolkien was an authority on Beowulf (did he not already write a book about it that actually got published during his lifetime? I must go look at my stash of books)
That said, I'm starting to be a little aggravated by the notion that Christopher Tolkien still wants us to believe that 40 years after his father's passing, he is still finding untapped material stuffed in the back of a drawer somewhere.
might as well come out and say it clearly that he's been pouring his own scholarly achievements on paper.
I wouldn't hold it against him to have continued in father's footsteps... this whole "tolkien has written a new book from beyond the grave" gimmick is starting to tire me.
He seems pretty forthright in the introduction about how this one got compiled. He typed up his father's old manuscript while he was still alive, and his father went through and corrected it some time before he died. Chris eventually revised the typescript for those corrections and much of the difficulty (and most of the book) lay in determining presentation of the text and scholarly commentary from his father's old lecture notes.