Hall, J. R. Clark 1855-

John Richard Clark Hall (1855 – 6 August 1931) was a British barrister, writer, and scholar of Old English. In his professional life, Hall worked as a clerk at the Local Government Board in Whitehall. Admitted to Gray's Inn in 1881 and called to the bar in 1896, Hall became principal clerk two years later. Hall's A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary became a widely used work upon its 1894 publication, and after multiple revisions, it remains in print as of 2024. His 1901 prose translation of Beowulf—the tenth in English, known simply as "Clark Hall"—became "the standard trot to Beowulf", and was still the canonical introduction to the poem into the 1960s; several of the later editions included a prefatory essay by J. R. R. Tolkien. Hall's other work on Beowulf included a metrical translation in 1914, and the translation and collection of Knut Stjerna's Swedish papers on the poem into the 1912 work Essays on Questions Connected with the Old English Poem of Beowulf. In the final decade of his life, Hall's writings took to a Christian theme. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge published two of his works at this time: Herbert Tingle, and Especially his Boyhood, a memoir to Hall's lifelong friend that highlighted his early methods of self-education, and Birth-Control and Self-Control, a pamphlet on the ethics of birth control. Hall also wrote Is Our Christianity a Failure?, a 1928 book described by The Spectator as a "layman's attempt to express and defend his religion".