The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 3: Reader’s Guide PART 2

1 Statutory Lecturer. Language.

*1 Lecturer. Literature. [Lord David Cecil].

*1 Lecturer. Mediaeval English. [Dorothy Whitelock]

(* These last two have only recently been established. For most of the intervening period the School has been deprived of the equivalent of 2 of the Readerships with which it started its independent existence.)

The only increase has been the recent appointment of Mr Ker as Reader in Palaeography. His services, mainly in the graduate (‘postgraduate’) department, are shared with History.

A Readership in Ancient Icelandic was established in 1940 (by a legacy) and attached to the English School. This has been of assistance to the professor of Anglo-Saxon, whose work has very greatly increased since 1926; but Scandinavian studies are a separate subject, of which the English School has become the caretaker.

In addition to the general growth of the School, in scope and numbers, there has been a considerable growth in the department of advanced (‘post-graduate’) studies. For the last twenty years this department has had the services, at small cost, of Mr S.R. Gibson. If the bibliographical work is to be maintained, the loss of his services will have to be replaced.

Since 1926 a few of the men’s colleges have assisted the School by tutorial fellowships and lectureships (other than those held by Readers and Lecturers). There has recently been (balanced against losses) some slight increase in this assistance. It is still inadequate, even on the tutorial side, and there appears to be small prospect of any substantial increase. A large part of the tuition, lecturing, and supervision, will still have to be provided by the School independently …. [Oxford University Archives FA 4/5/2/8]

The Board asked for the Goldsmiths’ Readership to be upgraded to a second chair of English Literature, and for two additional lecturerships in English Literature and one in Old and Middle English, and a readership or lecturership in Textual Criticism.

Raymond Edwards in Tolkien (2014) comments that Tolkien’s standing in the English Faculty at Leeds ‘had meant real authority over all who taught his subject in the University, and the capacity, funds permitting, to hire and fire staff’, but at Oxford ‘the faculties were comparatively insignificent, particularly in their responsibility for personnel other than the handful of professors and readers. Tutorial fellows were hired by, responsible to, and under the authority of, their colleges above all, and the colleges were jealous of their autonomy.’ At the same time, the shortage of teaching staff ‘had a significant effect on Tolkien’s scholarly productivity’, as he was overworked as a lecturer and in setting and marking examinations (p. 135). Under Oxford’s collegiate structure,

the vast majority of tenured staff are hired not by the University (as Tolkien was) but by individual colleges according to an almost infinitely variable, and unpredictable, schedule of their own private priorities. Thus, if a particular college had a fellow who was able and willing to teach undergraduates a particular part of the English course, he might be able (and willing) to do so only for undergraduates from his own college, or for his own and one other; and should he die or retire or become incapacitated, there was no guarantee or even likelihood that his position would be filled by a man similarly qualified …. Few if any of the tutorial fellows at individual colleges made any effective contribution to teaching the philological basics of the course; which meant that the burden of teaching the subject fell on to Tolkien and his salaried collegues, who were obliged to do so by lectures and classes, rather than the more effective individual tutorials that remain the foundation of Oxford undergraduate teaching. One immediate consequence of all this, in turn, was that many candidates did not learn much philology, and the examiners noticed. For the next twenty years, Tolkien and his allies made repeated efforts to persuade the University to hire more people to teach linguistic subjects, but with very limited success. If a subject is both compulsory and, for whatever reason, not very well taught (and it was a frequent complaint that Tolkien did not lecture well, or at least audibly), it is likely to become unpopular, certainly when compared with flashy and less demanding topics; and this, undeniably, is what happened to the philological side of the Oxford course. An exception to this was the women’s colleges, which, for historical reasons, were all well provided with English dons … and so they were usually able to give their undergraduates a good foundation in the technical side of the course in the more congenial, and more effective, environment of the college tutorial, allowing them to take from the professorial lectures the broader and more synthetic knowledge they were designed to impart, rather than attending lectures by world authorities so as to mug up the basics of sound-changes. [pp. 135–7]

TOLKIEN AND THE OXFORD ENGLISH SCHOOL

The Statuta Universitatis Oxoniensis (1925 edn.) defines the general duties of a professor as ‘to give instruction to Students, assist the pursuit of knowledge and contribute to the advancement of it, and aid generally the work of the University’. It further states that the lectures he gives must conform to the Regulations specific to his Chair, and ‘it shall be his duty to give to Students attending his Ordinary Lectures assistance in their studies by advice, informal instruction, by occasional or periodical examination, and otherwise, as he may judge to be expedient. For receiving Students who desire such assistance he shall appoint stated times in every week in which he lectures’ (p. 61). Most professors were required to reside within the University for at least six months in each academic year, between the first day of September and the following first day of July, and to lecture in each term (by 1945 this span had become between 1 October and the following 1 August). The Vice-Chancellor of the University could grant dispensation from this requirement for a short time for reasons of health or some other urgent cause. Any leave of absence or dispensation from statutory duties, whether for ill-health or travel for the purpose of research, had to be approved by the Visitatorial Board.

By 1945 a change in the Statuta included among the duties of a professor ‘original work by the Professor himself and the general supervision of research and advanced work in his subject and department’ (p. 41).

According to the 1925 Statuta the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon – thus Tolkien between 1925 and 1945 – was required to ‘lecture and give instruction on the Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, and on the other Old Germanic Languages, especially Gothic and Old Icelandic … [to] lecture and give instruction for six hours in each week, and for a period not less in any Term than six weeks, nor less in the whole year than twenty-one weeks’ (pp. 117–18): a minimum of 126 hours per academic year. The announcement of the forthcoming election to the chair on 12 June 1925 in the Oxford University Gazette (following the resignation of W.A. Craigie) said that the successful candidate would be required to ‘give not less than forty-two lectures in the course of the academical year; six at least of such lectures shall be given in each of the three University Terms, and in two at least of the University Terms he shall lecture during seven weeks not less than twice a week’ (supplement, p. 745). Presumably the remaining hours required of him were devoted to instruction and the supervision of post-graduate students. According to the Oxford University Gazette, in the second year after his election (when he was fully resident in Oxford and had no duties at *Leeds) Tolkien was scheduled to give seven lectures and classes each week in Michaelmas Term 1926 and Hilary Term 1927, and three each week in Trinity Term 1927 (see Chronology).

By 1945, when Tolkien left the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair (while continuing to teach Old English until his successor was named), the requirement had been reduced to only thirty-six lectures or classes per academic year, of which at least twenty-eight had to be lectures. The same requirement applied to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, to which Tolkien was elected in 1945 and which he held until 1959. The Merton Professor of English Language and Literature was required to lecture and give instruction in the History of the English Language, and in the History of English Literature through the period of Chaucer.

Opinions about Tolkien as a lecturer vary. He himself said in his 1959 *Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford that he had not given an inaugural address on his election to the Merton chair, because ‘my ineffectiveness as a lecturer was already well known, and well-wishers had made sure (by letter or otherwise) that I should know it too; so I thought it unnecessary to give a special exhibition of this unfortunate defect’ (*The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 224). But in a letter to his son *Michael in October 1968 he wrote: ‘I have only since I retired learned that I was a successful professor. I had no idea that my lectures had such an effect – and, if I had, they might have been better. My “friends” among dons were chiefly pleased to tell me that I spoke too fast and might have been interesting if I could be heard. True often: due in part to having too much to say in too little time, in larger part to diffidence, which such comments increased’ (Letters, p. 396).

At least one of his students at Leeds retained pleasant memories of Tolkien’s lectures. On 22 December 1937 K.M. Kilbride, to whom he had sent a copy of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, wrote that in reading it she was pleased to find the sense of humour that she recalled from Tolkien’s language lectures, which had made them entertaining as well as informative. *Roger Lancelyn Green, who matriculated at Oxford in 1937, described the first lecture by Tolkien that he attended in 1938:

He strode to the rostrum, his gown wrapped tightly round him, his cap pulled low over his brows, scowling fiercely. After taking off his cap and bowing slightly to us, he barked out: ‘Take notes. I will give you the headings of what I propose to deal with this term.’

Accordingly we took down twelve headings of aspects of Beowulf, and he finished: ‘And that’s what I intend to discuss’. Then suddenly his face broke into the utterly charming smile which we were soon to know so well, and he added, in a burst of confidence: ‘But I don’t suppose we’ll get through half of it!’ … Nor did we, as he was for ever wandering off into side issues – usually more entertaining than the rather philological-slanted study of the epic itself.

I think it was on this occasion, while we relaxed with restrained titters over the beautiful timing of his last remarks, that he suddenly shouted out the first words of the poem: ‘HWAET we Gardena ….’ And then remarked ‘That made you jump! Well, that’s what the author intended – so that the skald could suddenly silence his would-be audience as they sat at the end of the feast drinking their beer or mead.’ [‘Recollections’, Amon Hen 44 (May 1980), p. 6]

Another former student, *J.I.M. Stewart, wrote that Tolkien ‘could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests’. And *W.H. Auden wrote to Tolkien many years after hearing him lecture: ‘I don’t think I have ever told you what an unforgettable experience it was for me as an undergraduate, hearing you recite Beowulf. The voice was the voice of Gandalf’ (both quoted in Biography, p. 133).

Helen Tyrrell Wheeler, who read English at Oxford during the war years, recalled that Tolkien’s lectures,

usually held in the Taylorian, were packed out largely because of the extraordinary pressure of excitement that swept over his audience when he broke (as he frequently did) into a Bardic rendering of Beowulf. Where else in the world would one be able to hear the hypnotic rhythms and crashing, criss-crossing alliterations of this poem delivered with such (we thought) impeccable authenticity of inflection? And if it was not impeccably authentic, then it ought to be, for the effect of spellbound attention was never-failing. [‘Two More Women Pupils’, Canadian C.S. Lewis Journal 67 (Summer 1989), p. 5]

Adele Vincent heard Tolkien lecture on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the mid-1950s:

The highlight of each lecture was when Tolkien would move away from his lectern and pace back and forth at the front of the room, his black academic gown billowing round his shoulders, as he recited whole sections of the poem. One sonorous line would follow rapidly after another, now rippling like a running stream, now roaring like a raging torrent. He always spoke quickly, as if there was so much to say that he couldn’t get the words out fast enough. When he was explaining a passage it was something of a strain to follow him, but when he was reciting, it was enough just to sit back and let the sound float over your ears. [‘Tolkien, Master of Fantasy’, Courier-Journal & Times (Louisville, Kentucky), 9 September 1973, reprinted in Authors in the News, vol. 1 (1976), p. 470]

B.S. Benedikz, in ‘Some Family Connections with J.R.R. Tolkien’, Amon Hen 209 (January 2008), recalled that from 1952 to 1954 he

had the privilege of having my study of Middle English livened and made a pleasure by the teaching of the Merton Professor of English [Tolkien] …. My contact began with Tolkien’s lectures on the fourteenth-century poem The Owl and the Nightingale. A fairly select company assembled in one of the middle-sized lecture rooms of the Schools, and a few moments after the advertised hour the Professor came in and put us on the appropriate page of old Joe [Joseph] Hall’s Selections from Early Middle English ….

The lectures took us in a wide sweep through the whole gamut of flyting (exchanges of abusive and insulting language) and mediaeval vulgarity, as well as through some very pertinent textual questions caused by the two variant forms available and concerning why the [manuscripts] differed. We were, I feel sure, vastly informed by them – even when the Professor spent a highly contentious hour inducing us to believe that The Owl and the Nightingale was one of the great humorous poems of European literature. It says much for his persuasiveness that as we left the lecture room quite a few of us were convinced by the argument – until the cold winter winds in the High Street blew common sense back into our minds!

The following term Tolkien took us through Sir Gawaine and the Grene Knight … in a state of great confusion as he kept putting forward comments which directly contradicted those of his and Gordon’s views in the Clarendon Press edition! He often used such phrases as ‘I don’t know what Tolkien and Gordon were thinking about when they said ….’ We were far too hard pressed making sure that it was put down as correctly as possible in out notebooks to be able to follow him much of the time, or to get what he was saying. His technique as a lecturer was at once superb and dreadful. The matter he was imparting was priceless in its helpfulness, but his way of speaking, with his habit of dropping his voice as he approached the end of a sentence or clause and so losing his hearers at the vital moment, was about as unhelpful as could be …. [But notes from his lectures] were to prove invaluable when it came to the final School of English exam. These notes were full of wise pointers to all sorts of valuable help from other sources for the tale and for the vulgar language of the late fourteenth century. Nothing was, however, quite as funny as Tolkien’s reading of the parallel bits of The Feast of Bricriu in [George] Henderson’s unbelievable English translation in the Irish Text Society series. Its parallels with Gawaine suddenly made that a much livelier work in consequence! An audience listening intently for gold nuggets to be used in the examination papers … found itself roaring with laughter again and again as Professor Tolkien solemnly orated the relevant passages about Fatneck and the other shirkers …. Changing his tone, he reminded us that in order to understand an English masterpiece of the Middle Ages we must realise that its basic theme would, as likely as not, have travelled all round Europe in quite a variety of guises. It may even have travelled further, for it was from him that most of us heard the name Mahabharata in connection with The Pardoner’s Tale! [p. 12]

*Robert Burchfield, who came to Oxford in 1949, was another student who enjoyed Tolkien’s lectures, but although he was ‘entranced by the arguments that he presented to largely bewildered audiences of undergraduates in the Examination Schools’, the greater number, ‘many of them doubtless already devoted to hobbitry and all that, were soon driven away by the speed of his delivery and the complexity of his syntax. By the third week of term his small band of true followers remained …’ (‘My Hero: Robert Burchfield on J.R.R. Tolkien’, Independent Magazine, 4 March 1989, p. 50).

According to *George Sayer, Tolkien

was known mainly as, frankly, a very bad lecturer. He muttered and spoke very quietly. He had a very poor speaking voice ….

Very few people went to his lectures, because they couldn’t hear unless they were in the first three rows. The material, which was Old English poetry, was often excellent, especially the footnotes. The things he muttered and added to the typed text. You might often have only twenty people who went to listen to him …. [‘Tales of the Ferrograph’, Minas Tirith Evening-Star 9, no. 2 (January 1980), p. 2]

Harry Blamires, who read English at University College, Oxford in the mid-1930s, told his granddaughter that Tolkien’s lectures were considered so boring that few students attended. Blamires himself attended only Tolkien’s lectures on the ‘Finn and Hengest’ episode in Beowulf twice weekly, which he said he forced himself to do partly out of pity, but also out of curiosity, to have ‘something to talk about at sherry parties’, and because one of his other tutors, C.S. Lewis, recommended it. But the lectures were above his head: ‘Tolkien’s digressions covered the blackboard with learned linguistic connections and derivations, seemingly involving half the world’s languages.’ Later to become an authority on James Joyce, Blamires felt that the compulsory study of Old English was ‘a regrettable necessity’, and therefore Tolkien ‘remained a somewhat remote figure’. Although Blamires ‘was a member of a small tutorial group whom [Tolkien] took for a term through some Old English poems’, he never knew Tolkien well. ‘Yet he was plainly a likeable man, free of pretentiousness, and conveying a vague impression of scholarly unworldliness’ (quoted in Diana Blamires, ‘The Bore of the Rings’, The Times (London), 11 December 2003).

The critic Northrop Frye, who studied at Merton College, Oxford, recalled Tolkien’s lectures on Beowulf, which dealt

with a most insanely complicated problem which involves Anglo-Saxon genealogies, early Danish histories, monkish chronicles in Latin, Icelandic Eddas and Swedish folk-lore. Imagine my delivery at its very worst: top speed, unintelligible burble, great complexity of ideas and endless references to things unknown, mixed in with a lot of Latin and Anglo-Saxon and a lot of difficult proper names which aren’t spelled, and you have Tolkien on Beowulf. [The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939 (1996), vol. 2, pp. 794–5]

Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, who became a prominent novelist and poet respectively, went up to St John’s College, Oxford to read English at the same time in 1941. Amis recalled in his memoirs that ‘all Old English and nearly all Middle English works produced hatred and weariness in nearly everybody who studied them. The former carried the redoubled impediment of having Tolkien, incoherent and often inaudible, lecturing on it’ (Memoirs (1991), p. 53). Elsewhere he wrote that Tolkien ‘spoke unclearly and slurred the important words, and then he’d write them on the blackboard but keep standing between them and us, then wipe them off before he turned round’ (quoted in Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993), p. 41). Amis found Tolkien ‘repulsive but necessary’ and thoroughly disliked philology (as a student; later he decided that ‘philology, however laborious, is a valid subject of academic study, and those post-Chaucerian poems and plays and novels we turned to with such relief are not’, Memoirs, p. 45). Larkin, on his part, objected to Old English as ‘filthy lingo’, even more so as he was (he thought) expected to admire Anglo-Saxon poetry. And yet, for all their complaints, both Larkin and Amis took first class degrees.

In his introduction to A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (1997), p. 2, Derek Brewer recalled, from his time as an Oxford undergraduate in 1946, that Tolkien lectured on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ‘to a small group of devotees, confining himself entirely to textual cruces (often forgetting to tell us which line he was discussing), and doing obscure (to me) battle with some mysterious entity, prophetically as it may now seem, called something like “Gollancz”’ – the Early English Text Society edition of Gawain edited by Sir Israel Gollancz.

An increasingly demanding part of Tolkien’s work was the supervision of B.Litt., and to a lesser extent D.Phil., students, most of whom would have visited him for an hour once per week or once each fortnight. Before the Second World War he generally supervised only one or two students at a time, but after the war he was frequently responsible for six or more. *R.F.W. Fletcher, then chairman of the English Faculty Board, described a B.Litt. supervisor’s duties in a paper dated 15 January 1947 which was circulated to members of the English Faculty:

Students for the B.Litt. course in English are admitted in the first instance as Probationers and are neither expected nor even encouraged to define their thesis at this stage. As Probationers they are expected to attend lectures on such subjects as the History of English Studies, Bibliography, Textual Criticism, &c., and have to pass an examination thereon within a year. Supervision of Probationers involves seeing that they pursue this probationary course, and discussing with them the field for a thesis and the choice of subject for submission for the Board’s approval ….

The supervision of a Full Student, whose subject for a thesis has been approved by the Board, naturally involves more advanced and more technical discussion of research for the approved subject. The discussion must, however, be limited to advice and general guidance (i.e. the supervisor must not shape the thesis or direct it in detail) ….

The amount of supervision needed varies with different students but as a whole it should be enough for the supervisor to see a student once a fortnight in Full Term. Sometimes it will be more convenient to see little of him in term and to concentrate on him in the vacation. [Oxford University Archives FA 4/5/2/8]

Some fifty students supervised by Tolkien are listed in Chronology, over thirty of these in the period 1945–59. In addition, Tolkien generally interviewed all prospective B.Litt. and D.Phil. students wishing to write a thesis on a language or medieval literature subject, and as a member of the Applications Committee he took part in allocating supervisors, approving subjects of theses, and appointing examiners of the completed theses. Each thesis was considered by two examiners, first as a written text and then in a viva (viva voce). Tolkien examined over thirty theses during his time at Oxford. Roger Lancelyn Green wrote that he first met Tolkien

when he and David Nichol Smith were putting me through the oral examination for my B.Litt. Degree, my thesis being on Andrew Lang and the Fairy Tale. The thesis was ‘referred back’ to me – which Nichol Smith, who had been my supervisor, kindly explained was no reflection on its merits, in fact rather the reverse as it was obviously nearly good enough to be the basis of a published book but could be improved; and that I must spend another term over it – with Tolkien as my supervisor.

Accordingly, once a week for that term I made my way to 20 Northmoor Road [*Oxford] for a delightful hour with Tolkien. ‘It was my fault that your thesis was referred back – you must blame me!’ were his first words. ‘But I wanted to know more about the Fairies!’ In consequence of which, besides a good deal of revision, I wrote an additional chapter on the Fairies – of which I treasure the original draft written all over by Tolkien with comments and suggestions. [‘Recollections’, Amon Hen 44 (May 1980), pp. 6–7]

Early in 1946, when John Lawlor returned to Oxford after war service to work on an edition of Julian of Norwich as a B.Litt. thesis, Tolkien was appointed his supervisor. Lawlor wrote that his ‘first and abiding impression’ of Tolkien ‘was one of immediate kindness. Tutored by [C.S.] Lewis I had expected to be tested with a few falls, so to speak. But the gentle creature who sucked his pipe and gazed meditatively along its stem seemed interested only in what he could do to help’ (C.S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections (1998), pp. 30–1). Robert Burchfield began, but did not complete, a D.Phil. on the Ormulum under Tolkien:

I saw Tollers (as he was known) at weekly intervals in the academic years 1951–2 and 1952–3, sometimes in Merton College, sometimes at his home in Holywell. He puffed at his pipe while I told him of my work. He made many acute observations. I followed them all up. He beamed when I made some discoveries. Now and then he mentioned the hobbits, but he didn’t press them on me, spotting that my interest lay in the scraped-out o’s and double consonants of the Ormulum rather than in dwarves … Orcs, and Mr Bilbo Baggins. [‘My Hero: Robert Burchfield on J.R.R. Tolkien’, p. 50]

In a long letter to a Mr Burns on 15 November 1952 Tolkien remarked that he had been able to write at a greater length because of ‘unexpected freedom and exhilaration. I was “cut” by two researchers this morning who normally occupy between them over two hours of every Saturday morning: freedom’ (private collection).

Since Tolkien was a professor employed by the University and not by a college, he did not have to undertake the tutorial work that imposed a heavy burden on members of colleges. He did, however, teach classes, including those established during the Second World War for Navy and Air Force cadets, Anthony Curtis, a Royal Air Force cadet, contrasted Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: