If you are primarily interested in Tolkien as the author of The Lord of the Rings, you may take fright at the prospect of a chapter that discusses ‘Tolkien the scholar and the teacher’. Expressed in that fashion, it certainly sounds very dull. So the first thing to be said is that it is not dull. There were not two Tolkiens, one an academic and the other a writer. They were the same man, and the two sides of him overlapped so that they were indistinguishable – or rather they were not two sides at all, but different expressions of the same mind, the same imagination. So if we are going to understand anything about his work as a writer we had better spend a short time examining his scholarship.
The first thing to understand is why he liked languages. We know a good deal about this from the account of his childhood. The fact that he was excited by the Welsh names on coal-trucks, by the ‘surface glitter’ of Greek, by the strange forms of the Gothic words in the book he acquired by accident, and by the Finnish of the Kalevala, shows that he had a most unusual sensitivity to the sound and appearance of words. They filled for him the place that music has in many people’s lives. Indeed the response that words awakened in him was almost entirely emotional.
But why should he choose to specialise in early English? Someone so fond of strange words would be more likely to have concentrated his attention on foreign languages. The answer is again to be found in his capacity for excitement.
We know already of his emotional response to Finnish, Welsh, and Gothic, and we ought to understand that something equally exciting happened when he first realised that a large proportion of the poetry and prose of Anglo-Saxon and early medieval England was written in the dialect that had been spoken by his mother’s ancestors. In other words it was remote, but at the same time intensely personal to him.
We already know that he was deeply attached to the West Midlands because of their associations with his mother. Her family had come from the town of Evesham, and he believed that this West Midland borough and its surrounding county of Worcestershire had been the home of that family, the Suffields, for countless generations. He himself had also spent much of his childhood at Sarehole, a West Midland hamlet. That part of the English countryside had in consequence a strong emotional attraction for him; and as a result so did its language.
He once wrote to W. H. Auden: ‘I am a West-midlander by blood, and took to early West-midland Middle English as to a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it.’ A known tongue: something that already seemed familiar to him. One might dismiss this as a ludicrous exaggeration, for how could he ‘recognise’ a language that was seven hundred and fifty years old? Yet this was what he really believed, that he had inherited some faint ancestral memory of the tongue spoken by distant generations of Suffields. And once this idea had occurred to him, it was inevitable that he should study the language closely and make it the centre of his life’s work as a scholar.
This is not to say that he only studied the early English of the West Midlands. He became well versed in all dialects of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English and (as we have seen) he also read widely in Icelandic. Moreover during 1919 and 1920 when he was working on the Oxford Dictionary he made himself acquainted with a number of other early Germanic languages. In consequence by the time he began work at Leeds University in 1920 he had a remarkably wide range of linguistic knowledge.
At Leeds and later at Oxford he proved to be a good teacher. He was not at his best in the lecture room, where his quick speech and indistinct articulation meant that pupils had to concentrate hard in order to hear him. Nor was he always very good at explaining himself in the clearest terms, for he found it difficult to scale down his own knowledge of the subject so that his pupils could understand everything he was saying. But he invariably brought the subject alive and showed that it mattered to him.
The most celebrated example of this, remembered by everyone who was taught by him, was the opening of his series of lectures on Beowulf. He would come silently into the room, fix the audience with his gaze, and suddenly begin to declaim in a resounding voice the opening lines of the poem in the original Anglo-Saxon, commencing with a great cry of ‘Hwœt!’ (the first word of this and several other Old English poems), which some undergraduates took to be ‘Quiet!’ It was not so much a recitation as a dramatic performance, an impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it impressed generations of students because it brought home to them that Beowulf was not just a set text to be read for the purposes of an examination but a powerful piece of dramatic poetry. As one former pupil, the writer J. I. M. Stewart, expressed it: ‘He could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.’ Another who sat in the audience at these lectures was W. H. Auden, who wrote to Tolkien many years later: ‘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.’
One reason for Tolkien’s effectiveness as a teacher was that besides being a philologist he was a writer and poet, a man who not only studied words but who used them for poetic means. He could find poetry in the sound of the words themselves, as he had done since childhood; but he also had a poet’s understanding of how language is used. This was expressed in a memorable phrase in The Times obituary of him (undoubtedly written by C. S. Lewis long before Tolkien’s death) which talks of his ‘unique insight at once into the language of poetry and into the poetry of language’. In practical terms this meant that he could show a pupil not just what the words meant, but why the author had chosen that particular form of expression and how it fitted into his scheme of imagery. He thus encouraged students of early texts to treat them not as mere exemplars of a developing language but as literature deserving serious appreciation and criticism.
Even when dealing solely with the technical matters of language, Tolkien was a vivid teacher. Lewis suggests in the obituary that this was in part the product of the long attention to private languages, the fact that he had been not merely a student of languages but a linguistic inventor: ‘Strange as it may seem, it was undoubtedly the source of that unparalleled richness and concreteness which later distinguished him from all other philologists. He had been inside language.’
‘Distinguished him from all other philologists’ sounds like a sweeping statement, but it is entirely true. Comparative philology grew up in nineteenth-century Germany, and although its practitioners were painstaking in their accuracy their writing was almost unredeemed in its dullness. Tolkien’s own mentor Joseph Wright had been trained in Germany, and while his books are invaluable for their contribution to the science of language they reflect almost nothing of Wright’s vigorous personality. Much as he loved his old teacher, Tolkien was perhaps thinking partly of Wright when he wrote of ‘the bespectacled philologist, English but trained in Germany, where he lost his literary soul’.
Tolkien never lost his literary soul. His philological writings invariably reflect the richness of his mind. He brought to even the most intricate aspects of his subject a grace of expression and a sense of the larger significance of the matter. Nowhere is this demonstrated to better advantage than in his article (published in 1929) on the Ancrene Wisse, a medieval book of instruction for a group of anchorites, which probably originated in the West Midlands. By a remarkable and subtle piece of scholarship, Tolkien showed that the language of two important manuscripts of the text (one in a Cambridge college, the other in the Bodleian Library at Oxford) was no mere unpolished dialect, but a literary language, with an unbroken literary tradition going back to before the Conquest. He expressed this conclusion in vivid terms – and it should be appreciated that he is here really talking about his beloved West Midland dialect as a whole:
‘It is not a language long relegated to the “uplands” struggling once more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters or out of compassion for the lewd, but rather one that has never fallen back into “lewdness”, and has contrived in troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman. It has traditions and some acquaintance with books and the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living speech – a soil somewhere in England.’
This kind of writing, forceful in its imagery, characterised all his articles and lectures, however abstruse or unpromising the subject might seem. In this respect he almost founded a new school of philology; certainly there had been no one before him who brought such humanity, one might say such emotion, to the subject; and it was an approach which influenced many of his most able pupils who themselves became philologists of distinction.
It ought also to be said that he was immensely painstaking. Broad and powerful statements such as that quoted above may have characterised his work, yet they were no mere assertions, but the product of countless hours of research into the minutiae of the subject. Even by the usual scrupulous standards of comparative philology, Tolkien was extraordinary in this respect. His concern for accuracy cannot be overemphasised, and it was doubly valuable because it was coupled with a flair for detecting patterns and relations. ‘Detecting’ is a good word, for it is not too great a flight of fancy to picture him as a linguistic Sherlock Holmes, presenting himself with an apparently disconnected series of facts and deducing from them the truth about some major matter. He also demonstrated his ability to ‘detect’ on a simpler level, for when discussing a word or phrase with a pupil he would cite a wide range of comparable forms and expressions in other languages. Similarly in casual conversation he delighted in producing unexpected remarks about names, such as his observation that the name ‘Waugh’ is historically the singular of ‘Wales’.
But probably all this sounds like the scholar in his ivory tower. What did he do? What, in practical terms, did it mean to be the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford? The simplest answer is that it meant a good deal of hard work. The statutes called upon Tolkien to give a minimum of thirty-six lectures or classes a year, but he did not consider this to be sufficient to cover the subject, and in the second year after being elected Professor he gave one hundred and thirty-six lectures and classes. This was partly because there were comparatively few other people to lecture on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. Later he managed to get another philologist, an excellent if intimidating teacher named Charles Wrenn, appointed to assist him, and then he was able to set himself a slightly less strenuous programme. But throughout the nineteen-thirties he continued to give at least twice the statutory number of lectures and classes each year, considerably more than most of his colleagues undertook.
So lectures, and the preparation for them, took up a very large proportion of his time. In fact this heavy teaching load was sometimes more than he could manage efficiently, and occasionally he would abandon a course of lectures because of insufficient time to prepare it. Oxford seized gleefully on this sin and bestowed upon him the reputation of not preparing his lectures properly, whereas the truth was that he prepared them too thoroughly. His deep commitment to the subject prevented him from tackling it in anything less than an exhaustive manner, with the result that he often side-tracked himself into the consideration of subsidiary details, and never managed to finish the treatment of the main topic.
His job also required him to supervise post-graduate students, and to examine within the University. In addition he undertook a good deal of ‘freelance’ work as an external examiner to other universities, for with four children to bring up he needed to augment his income. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties he made frequent visits to many of the British universities as an examiner, and spent countless hours marking papers. After the Second World War he restricted this activity to examining regularly for various colleges in Ireland, touring Eire and making many friends there in the process. This was much to his taste. Less attractive, indeed an unredeemed chore, was the marking of School Certificate (the examination then set for British secondary schools) which he undertook annually in the pre-war years to earn extra money. His time would have been better devoted to research or writing, but his concern for the family income made him spend many hours in the summer at this irritating task.
A good deal of his attention was also taken up by administration. It should be understood that an Oxford professor, unlike those in many other universities, is not by virtue of his office necessarily in a position of power in his faculty. He has no authority over the college tutors who in all probability make up the majority of the faculty staff, for they are appointed by their colleges and are not answerable to him. So if he wishes to initiate some major change of policy he must adopt persuasive rather than authoritarian tactics. And, on his return to Oxford in 1925, Tolkien did wish to make a major change: he wanted to reform certain aspects of the Final Honour School of English Language and Literature.
The years since the First World War had widened the old rift between Language and Literature, and each faction in the English School – and they really were factions, with personal as well as academic animosities – delighted to interfere with the syllabus of the other. The ‘Lang.’ side made sure that the ‘Lit.’ students had to spend a good deal of their time studying the obscurer branches of English philology, while the ‘Lit.’ camp insisted that the ‘Lang.’ undergraduates must set aside many hours from their specialisation (Anglo-Saxon and Middle English) to study the works of Milton and Shakespeare. Tolkien believed that this should be remedied. What was even more regrettable to him was that the linguistic courses laid considerable emphasis on the study of theoretical philology without suggesting that undergraduates should read widely in early and medieval literature. His own love of philology had always been based firmly on a knowledge of literature, and he determined that this state of affairs should be changed. He also proposed that Icelandic should be given more prominence in the syllabus; this latter hope was one reason for the formation of the Coalbiters.
His proposals required the consent of the whole faculty, and at first he met with a good deal of opposition. Even C. S. Lewis, not yet a personal friend, was among those who originally voted against him. But as the terms passed, Lewis and many others came over to Tolkien’s side and gave him their active support. By 1931 he had managed (‘beyond my wildest hopes’, he wrote in his diary) to obtain general approval for the majority of his proposals. The revised syllabus was put into operation, and for the first time in the history of the Oxford English School something like a real rapprochement was achieved between ‘Lang.’ and ‘Lit.’.
Besides being responsible for teaching and administration, professors at Oxford as elsewhere are expected to devote much of their time to original research. Tolkien’s contemporaries had high hopes of him in this respect, for his glossary to Sisam’s book, his edition with E. V. Gordon of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and his article on the Ancrene Wisse manuscripts demonstrated that he had an unrivalled mastery of the early Middle English of the West Midlands; and it was expected that he would continue to contribute important work in this field. He himself had every intention of doing so: he promised an edition of the Cambridge manuscript of the Ancrene Wisse to the Early English Text Society, and he did a great deal of research into this branch of early medieval English, this language ‘with the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman’ which he loved so much. But the edition was not completed for many years, while the greater part of his research work never reached print.
Lack of time was one cause. He had chosen to devote the major part of his working life at Oxford to teaching, and this in itself limited what he could do in the matter of original research. The marking of examination papers in order to provide necessary money also ate into his time. But besides this there was the matter of his perfectionism.
Tolkien had a passion for perfection in written work of any kind, whether it be philology or stories. This grew from his emotional commitment to his work, which did not permit him to treat it in any manner other than the deeply serious. Nothing was allowed to reach the printer until it had been revised, reconsidered, and polished – in which respect he was the opposite of C. S. Lewis, who sent manuscripts off for publication with scarcely a second glance at them. Lewis, well aware of this difference between them, wrote of Tolkien: ‘His standard of self-criticism was high and the mere suggestion of publication usually set him upon a revision, in the course of which so many new ideas occurred to him that where his friends had hoped for the final text of an old work they actually got the first draft of a new one.’
This is the main reason why Tolkien only allowed a small proportion of his work to reach the printed page. But what he did publish during the nineteen-thirties was a major contribution to scholarship. His paper on the dialects of Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale is required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the regional variations of fourteenth-century English. (It was read to the Philological Society in 1931 but not published until 1934, and then with a typical Tolkien apology for the lack of what the author considered to be a necessary amount of revision and improvement.) And his lecture Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics, delivered to the British Academy on 25 November 1936 and published in the following year, is a landmark in the history of criticism of this great Western Anglo-Saxon poem.
Beowulf, said Tolkien in the lecture, is a poem and not (as other commentators had often suggested) merely a jumble of confused literary traditions, or a text for scholarly examination. And he described, in characteristically imaginative terms, the way that earlier critics had treated the Beowulf poet’s work: ‘A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: “This tower is most interesting.” But they also said (after pushing it over): “What a muddle it is in!” And even the man’s descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: “He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.” But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.’
In his lecture Tolkien pleaded for the rebuilding of that tower. He declared that although Beowulf is about monsters and a dragon, that does not make it negligible as heroic poetry. ‘A dragon is no idle fancy,’ he told his audience. ‘Even today (despite the critics) you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them, who have yet been caught by the fascination of the worm.’
This was Tolkien talking not primarily as a philologist or even a literary critic, but as a storyteller. Just as Lewis said of his philology, ‘He had been inside language’, so it might be remarked that when he talked of the Beowulf dragon he was speaking as the author of The Silmarillion and – by this time – of The Hobbit. He had been into the dragon’s lair.
Since the lecture was first published, many readers of Beowulf have dissented from Tolkien’s view of the poem’s structure. But even one of the severest critics of his interpretation, his old tutor Kenneth Sisam, admitted that the lecture has a ‘fineness of perception and elegance of expression’ which distinguish it from so much else in this field.
The Beowulf lecture and the paper on the Reeve’s Tale were the only major pieces of philological work published by Tolkien in the nineteen-thirties. He planned to do much more: besides his work on the Ancrene Wisse he intended to produce an edition of the Anglo-Saxon poem Exodus, and indeed he nearly completed this task, but it was never finished to his satisfaction. He also planned further joint editions with E. V. Gordon, in particular of Pearl (a natural companion-piece to their Gawain) and of the Anglo-Saxon elegies The Wanderer and The Seafarer. But Gordon and Tolkien were now geographically far apart. In 1931 Gordon, who had been appointed Tolkien’s successor as professor at Leeds, moved from there to take up a chair at Manchester University, and though the two men met and corresponded frequently, collaboration proved technically less easy than when they had been in the same place. Gordon did a great deal of work on all three projects, using Tolkien as a consultant rather than as a full collaborator, but nothing had reached print by 1938. In the summer of that year, Gordon went into hospital for an operation for gall-stones. It seemed to be successful, but his condition suddenly deteriorated, and he died from a previously unsuspected kidney disorder, at the age of forty-two.
Gordon’s death robbed Tolkien not only of a close friend but also of the ideal professional collaborator; and by now it was clear that he needed a collaborator, if only to make him surrender any material to the printer.1 As it happened, he had made the acquaintance of another philologist who proved to be a good working partner. This was Simonne d’Ardenne, a Belgian graduate who studied Middle English with him for an Oxford B.Litt. early in the nineteen-thirties. Tolkien contributed much to her edition of The Life and Passion of St Juliene, a medieval religious work written in the Ancrene Wisse dialect. Indeed the d’Ardenne Juliene paradoxically contains more of his views on early Middle English than anything he ever published under his own name. Mlle d’Ardenne became a professor at Liège, and she and Tolkien planned to collaborate on an edition of Katerine, another Western Middle English text of the same group. But the war intervened and made communication between them impossible for many years, and after 1945 nothing was achieved by them beyond a couple of short articles on topics concerned with the manuscript of the text. Although Tolkien was able to work with Mlle d’Ardenne when he was in Belgium to attend a philological congress in 1951, she realised sadly that collaboration with him was now impossible, for his mind was entirely on his stories.
But even if one is to regard his failure to publish more in his professional field as a matter for regret, one should not fail to take account of his wide influence, for his theories and deductions have been quoted (with or without due acknowledgement) wherever English philology is studied.
Nor should one forget the translations he made of Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Sir Orfeo. The Pearl translation was begun at Leeds in the nineteen-twenties; Tolkien was attracted to the task by the challenge of the poem’s complex metrical and verbal structure. He had finished it by 1926, but he did nothing about publishing it until Basil Blackwell offered to put it into print in the nineteen-forties, in return for a sum to be credited to Tolkien’s heavily overdue account at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. The translation was set into type, but Blackwell waited in vain for Tolkien to write the introduction to the volume, and eventually the project was abandoned. The translation of Gawain, probably begun during the nineteen-thirties or forties, was finished in time for it to be broadcast in dramatised form by the BBC in 1953, Tolkien himself recording a short introduction and a longer concluding talk. Following the success of The Lord of the Rings his publishers Allen & Unwin determined to issue the Gawain and Pearl translations in one volume. With this in view, Tolkien made extensive revisions of both translations, but once again an introduction was required, and he found it extremely difficult to write one, being uncertain as to what ought to be explained to the non-scholarly reader for whom the book was intended. Again the project lapsed, and it was not until after his death that the two translations were published, together with a modern English rendering of a third poem of the same period, Sir Orfeo, which Tolkien had originally translated for a wartime cadets’ course at Oxford. The introduction to the volume was assembled by Christopher Tolkien out of such materials as could be found among his father’s papers.
These translations were in effect Tolkien’s last published philological work, for although they are accompanied by no notes or commentary they are the result of sixty years’ minute study of the poems, and in many places they provide an informed and illuminating interpretation of hard and ambiguous passages in the originals. Most important of all, they bring these poems to an audience that could not have read them in Middle English. For this reason they are a fitting conclusion to the work of a man who believed that the prime function of a linguist is to interpret literature, and that the prime function of literature is to be enjoyed.
1 Tolkien intended to complete the Pearl edition, but he found himself unable to do so (by this time he was absorbed in writing The Lord of the Rings). It was eventually revised and completed for publication by Ida Gordon, the widow of E. V. Gordon, and herself a professional philologist.