Sellic Spell

Sellic Spell is a short prose text written by J.R.R. Tolkien in a creative attempt to reconstruct the folktale underlying the narrative in the first two thousand lines of the Old English poem Beowulf. Among other things, it seeks to offer plausible origins for blind motifs and unexplained narrative details in the early medieval poem. The resulting text is a loose variant of the Skilful Companions type of folktale, in which each of several characters (two or three in Tolkien's text, depending on the redaction) has a valuable but specific skill. Unlike folktales of that type, however, the skills of Tolkien's characters do not supplement each other in the resolution of the narrative problem.

Dating and Composition

The text's editor, Christopher Tolkien, dates much of the composition and revision of the tale to the early 1940s. In a note discovered among his papers, J.R.R. Tolkien claims to have "[put] it first into Old English". However, Christopher Tolkien observes that this sequence of events is inconsistent with the textual evidence, since the earliest manuscript of the Modern English text was revised into a form that corresponds in several places to the Old English text. The Old English version furthermore remains incomplete, ending before either of the two companions faces Grendel. The Modern English text exists in three manuscripts and two typescripts; Christopher Tolkien published the text of the later typescript along with the Old English translation and a discussion of the tale's revision in 2014.