Tolkien for granted

Tolkienโ€™s translation of Beowulf is better than Heaneyโ€™s as it is more like the original poem; which is also why people claim that Tolkien is a bad writer. That is to say, that Tolkien mostly wrote even his original works as if they were Old English literature translated as faithfully as possible into modern English.

Iโ€™ve read all of Heaneyโ€™s translation, and some of Tolkienโ€™s, and Tolkienโ€™s feels foreign, meaning that it feels spawned by far different consciousnesses, living in a different world. Which of course is exactly how in my view it should feel. Those who wrote Beowulf were very, very different from us.