Review of the New Vic 'Hoard' Festival

Review:  "Unearthed" and "The Gift" at the New Vic Theatre's 'Hoard' Festival

Over the past few months we have been excited to follow the development of the Hoard festival at Staffordshire’s New Vic Theatre; a national-theatre and Arts Council funded project which began with a modest aim to tell the story of the famous Staffordshire Hoard and has since snowballed into the most ambitious project the theater has undertaken to date.

The festival has grown to include four stage plays ‘in the round’, a pair of studio-plays, a series of table-plays designed to entertain visitors in the theatre’s atrium and bar areas, and ‘400 pieces’; an unusual project involving volunteers and taking the drama out into the community.

During the later stages of development of the festival, the Thegns have been involved, in a small way, in advising the props, costume and set-design teams, helping the team develop a ‘look’ and ‘feel’ for those plays set at the time of the Hoard based on material-culture represented in archaeology from the time. We were highly honoured to be given front-row seats for the press-night during launch-week for the first set of plays; ‘Unearthed’ by Theresa Heskins, and ‘The Gift’ by Jemma Kennedy, and as the team had been keen not to spoil or leak any of the content of these plays to us save for the technical details, it is fair to say we sat down in the impressive theatre-in-the-round, feet quite literally on the stage, unsure of what to expect…

Tolkien's Beowulf translation - review

Cover (reproduced under fair-dealing; criticism and review)

“Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary by J.R.R. Tolkien” 

A Review by Dr A.J. Thompson

This book (available here) has been eagerly awaited by both Tolkien fans and Anglo-Saxonists alike. For the most part it was written in the 1920’s but was never intended for publication; In fact the scholarly and obsessively perfectionist professor later wrote to a friend lamenting the fact that the translation was ‘in much, hardly to my liking’. It has taken much work by Christopher Tolkien to get it into a state where it was fit to be published. 

Given the importance of the Beowulf text to our understanding of the language, beliefs, culture and worldview of the early English, and given Tolkien's almost legendary reputation as a scholar of Old English, the publishing of this book is an important milestone, and the text itself is very much worth examining and discussing. 

Having recently received a copy of the newly published book I thought I might jot down some thoughts on my impression of it, which hopefully may be useful to anyone unsure about whether to buy it. Please do note that the opinions expressed here are my own...