J.R.R. Tolkien's Beowulf Translation to Be Published in May

After 88 years of waiting, The Hobbit creator J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of the 11th Century poem Beowulf, which his son Christopher Tolkien says sees his father "enter[ing] into the imagined past" of the heroes, will finally be published, reports The Guardian. The translation survives in a single manuscript, housed at the British Library, and has inspired numerous retellings of the myth, including by the late Seamus Heaney, whose translation won him the Whitbread Book of Year award in 1999. The younger Tolkien, who will oversee the printing, said that his father's translation rebuts the notion that Beowulf is a simple treasure story, or just another dragon tale. "He turns to the lines that tell of the burying of the golden things long ago, and observes that it is 'the feeling for the treasure itself, this sad history' that raises it to another level," said Christopher Tolkien.

, including the translations, a series of lectures given about the poem, and a "marvelous tale" written by Tolkien, will be released on May 22 through HarperCollins.