an odd, mildly over-stuffed volume. not my favourite beowulf translation - tolkien renders it so densely that you have to really concentrate on a clause-by-clause level, which meant i kept losing track of what i'd just read, finding myself cut off on an island sentence. which makes it difficult to follow the plot. i also don't care for the fact it's rendered like prose: i missed line breaks.
i actually found the commentary much pleasanter to read, although some of tolkien's key areas of interest (linguistics and historical record) aren't mine. i liked his sellic song and lays a lot more - beowulf explicitly as fairytale? sign me up! could have done without most of christopher tolkien's editorialising notes.
hard to speak on any of the single components in detail, because, as i implied, the book has a lot of other stuff in it.