This audiobook makes it quite clear that heroic tales were meant to be heard rather than read. The combination of the lilting verse and the audio medium bringing the absolutely right feel to the presentation. Jones, is well equipped to flesh out the characters and voices of Tolkien’s texts. Tolkien regarding the translation and preservation of the anonymous fourteenth-century poems upon which these stories are based.īest known for his work with Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Terry Jones lends his signature voice and style to these two wonderful translations by J.R.R. Two introduction and background essays by the master himself, J.R.R. The moving story of a love so strong it was Sir Orfeo, a Celtic version of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, complete with a twist happy ending. Worn out by his grief, he falls asleep and has a glorious vision of another, symbolically bejeweled, world, in which he meets his daughter again and discovers what has happened to her. It tells the story of a man who goes into a graveyard to mourn the death of his baby daughter, whom he has lost like a pearl that slipped through his fingers into the grass. Pearl, the longer of the two stories in this collection, is an elegy for the poet’s baby daughter, told in alliterative verse.

Tolkein trainslation of pearl