Sweet was made Reader in Phonetics (another, but more junior, salaried post) in 1901 as a belated and inadequate compensation for his earlier failure. He died in 1912, aged sixty-seven; there is no reason to suppose he and Tolkien ever met, although it is possible. Sweet does however illustrate the vigour and diversity of English philology at Oxford in these years.
It fell to Napier to try to establish a proper School of English, rather than a series of unconnected lectures with no corresponding syllabus, ability to award degrees, or indeed undergraduates to take them. He had strictly limited success; a Final Honour School of Modern Languages was established in 1894, with English as one of its branches, but no preliminary course, meaning that anyone coming up ‘to read English’ would have to follow another course for Honour Moderations, or read for the less prestigious Pass Moderations, and only thereafter transfer into the School proper.
Napier was in time a pluralist: he was elected to the Anglo-Saxon chair on Earle’s death, but mostly so the emoluments attached to the job could pay for another Merton chair, provided for by statute but not funded. This was given to Walter Raleigh, a ‘literary’ scholar par excellence, who soon brought in his former assistant, David Nichol Smith, as Reader. Napier allowed Raleigh some leeway in designing a syllabus; from the start, then, the School’s character as a home of pure philology was compromised. From 1908, at Raleigh’s suggestion, the syllabus was divided into literary and linguistic options, with medieval literature largely identified with the second of these. This was in part Napier’s fault: he, and his predecessors, treated early texts as documents illustrative of linguistic forms and developments, rather than things written, and designed to be read, for pleasure and instruction. This was to make an effective split in the primary sense of ‘philology’, which now became shorthand for purely technical study rather than the apprehension of texts as a whole.
Napier was a fiercely diligent and accurate scholar, whose energies were devoted to lecturing, supervising graduate students and (unusually for Oxford at that time) running classes for interested undergraduates; ill-health marked his last years in post, and this, together with his teaching load and an obstinate perfectionism (in which he was encouraged by Henry Bradley of the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED), prevented him from completing, and certainly from publishing, much of his own research. He was also firmly convinced that his own competence as Anglo-Saxon Professor should be confined to technical matters of philology, establishing the texts of older works, examining their language and explaining their plain meaning; the question of integrating this technical philology with literary studies Napier did not consider any of his business, and would refer his students, if they were curious about such things, to (usually) W.P. Ker.
Ker, a polyglossic Scot of formidable reading and comparatively sparse publication (although he did issue several semi-popularized works of enduring value), was, for most of his working life, Quain Professor at University College London; but he also kept a fellowship at All Souls’, and was invariably in Oxford at weekends and on odd days. His books Epic and Romance and The Dark Ages can still be read with profit after the space of a century; they were almost unique, in English at least, as assuming the primary value of early texts to be unquestionably literary; but it was literary judgement backed by profound knowledge of the texts’ numerous languages. Their breadth of sympathetic analysis, and fine and accurate insight into a remarkable range of texts in dozens of languages, are still wondrous, and can stand unashamed even after generations of further scholarship; for their day, they were prodigious.
The Dark Ages, in particular, is almost a primer of some of the themes that Tolkien was to develop in years to come, and a handbook of the sources on which he drew: the ‘northern theory of courage’, whose classic formulation (‘defeat is no refutation’) is in this book; the Letter of Alexander, which I shall suggest as a hidden source for at least one element of Tolkien’s writing; the whale Fastitocolon, on which he was to write a poem; riddles. Of course, Tolkien will in many cases have known, also, the sources on which Ker in his turn had drawn, so we should be wary of naming him as spiritual father to any of Tolkien’s enthusiasms; but what made Ker unusual, unique even, amongst writers on his subject in English was the lyrical and evocative character of his prose, which bears a perduring resonance of great matters unspoken, at the edge of sight or knowledge. Consider this passage, for instance:
Boethius was fortunate in the time of his life and death, and in the choice of his theme. No other writer commands so much of the past and future. Between the worlds of ancient Greece and modern Europe, he understands not merely their points of contact, the immediate and contemporary turmoil of Germany and Rome; he remembers the early thought of Greece, long before the Stoic and Epicurean professors whom he disliked, and he finds the response to his signals not in the near future only but far off in the distant centuries: it is commonplace, no doubt, but of a sort that finds its way into some of the noblest passages of literature. Boethius is remembered and his words are quoted by Dante in the meeting with Francesca, and again in the closing phrase of the Paradiso … Boethius has been traced in English literature from Beowulf to Hamlet and Lycidas …20
We cannot be certain Tolkien read The Dark Ages in this period, but it seems very probable.21 Another likely influence, Ker’s Epic and Romance (first published in 1896, based on lectures given in the early 1890s), is in great part concerned with the northern heroic temper, especially in its Icelandic exercise; it is a moving and deeply humane effort to synthesize and give context to vastly impressive reading and sympathy. One of Ker’s pupils, and later his successor in the London chair, R.W. Chambers, was also to have a great influence on Tolkien.
Arthur Napier was for his last years (from 1905) much supported by a succession of deputies, all former graduate students of his; this was made necessary not just by weak health, but by his simultaneous occupancy of two professorial chairs. This scholarly pluralism, by Ker and Napier both, may seem, to us now, evidence of the dilettantism of Edwardian life, or of a benignly perquisitive view of academic jobs that, today, are fought over by hungry crowds of new-minted doctorands and wild-eyed temporary lecturers, for whom any single tenured post is a prize almost beyond conceiving. But this is to misread the evidence; the truth is that, first, competition for academic jobs was even then fierce, although there were confessedly far fewer people running after them than is now the case; and, second, pluralism most usually happened because one position of itself brought no money, and needed to be backed by the emoluments of another, which however was often not a sinecure. These men worked hard, and often died in harness. We shall see that Tolkien, too, never found his salary adequate to his not extravagant needs.
Lastly, there was Joseph Wright, Professor of Comparative Philology. Wright was the first to come to the job of deputy to Max Müller with an established reputation for scholarship (apart from his extensive doctoral work in Germany, and as a translator of German philological books, he had already begun to publish the series of primers he became best known for – in Middle High German, Old High German and Gothic). Soon after taking the job, he was persuaded to become in addition editor of the proposed English Dialect Dictionary, a mammoth work that appeared in six great volumes between 1896 and 1905. The Oxford University Press (OUP) was shy of funding another dictionary, so Wright raised the money himself (by subscription, and from his savings). Until he was fifteen, Wright had himself spoken only in dialect;22 he was moreover wholly undaunted by a series of financial and administrative obstacles that would have crushed a less robust man. He was without question the perfect man for the job.
This, then, was the School into which Tolkien transferred himself, and which, with some small hiatuses, was to be his professional home for his whole working life. It was utterly unlike what any English School looks like today, even (or especially) at Oxford; indeed, if one of today’s undergraduates in English was, by some convenient maguffin, to switch places with his or her equivalent
from a century ago, it is unlikely that either would recognize the syllabus as having anything in common with what he or she was used to, to a degree that is not true of history, or Classics, or mathematics even.
Tolkien was set to study a range of Old and Middle English texts: Beowulf, Finnesburg, ‘Deor’, Exodus, Elene, some of the shorter poems and all of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader. The other source-book, for Middle English, was the two-volume Specimens of Early English, edited by Walter Skeat and Richard Morris as early as 1872. This was supplemented by longer poems: Havelok, Pearl, The Owl and the Nightingale and the Scots Tale of Rauf Coilyear. There were also compulsory papers in the history of the language, Gothic and Germanic philology and Chaucer. Tolkien took as his special subject Scandinavian Philology, which meant (mostly) Icelandic texts: the Prose Edda, some of the shorter sagas and extracts from Gylfaginning and Völsungasaga.
What may surprise some who assume in Tolkien both a contempt for and an ignorance of any post-medieval writers, is that he was in addition mandated to take compulsory papers in Shakespeare and the history of English literature. Tom Shippey has on internal evidence made a strong argument for Tolkien having read Shakespeare closely and with occasional sympathy.23
Tolkien’s tutor was to be Kenneth Sisam, a New Zealander only four years his senior who although only a postgraduate student (a comparatively rare bird in 1913) had already established a formidable reputation as an Anglo-Saxon philologist and who was, besides, a collaborator and protégé of the great liturgical scholar Edmund Bishop. His formal position was assistant to Arthur Napier.
Sisam had come to England aged twenty-three, as New Zealand’s sole Rhodes Scholar for the year 1910, and since his first degree was in English, he was assigned to Merton College, where Napier held his professorial fellowship. The following year, Sisam began a B.Litt. thesis supervised by Napier; it was an edition of a Latin Psalter with interlinear Old English glosses, Salisbury MS 150. In this connexion, he wrote with a query to Edmund Bishop, at that time unquestioned head of English (and arguably worldwide) liturgical scholarship. Bishop gave a deprecatory and elliptical answer, to which Sisam, unabashed, replied with care and insight enough to intrigue Bishop and prompt a serious response. They stayed in correspondence, on and off, until Bishop’s death aged seventy-one, six years later, by which time Sisam was not just Bishop’s disciple-cum-protégé, but was also entrusted with seeing his great collection Liturgica Historica through the press. This was a scholarly benediction and (as it were) apostolic succession of rare quality, particularly as Bishop was constitutionally (and irrationally) suspicious of Oxford scholarship.
From the Hilary (spring) Term of 1912, Sisam took on some of the teaching and lecturing responsibilities of Napier’s Anglo-Saxon chair. Typically, Sisam would lecture on Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader, Morris and Skeat’s Specimens, Havelok and historical grammar, with regular forays into other areas of the syllabus. He also, as we have seen, acted as tutor to undergraduates reading for English Final Schools (as the final examinations are known). Tolkien recognized him as an accurate scholar and a diligent tutor; Sisam in turn was impressed enough by his pupil to help him find second-hand books for an embryonic scholar’s library, and (as we shall see) several times pointed him towards possible jobs. Their relations began happily at least.
After Sisam finished his B.Litt. in 1915, he worked first for the Oxford English Dictionary, then for the University Press. His health was by then very precarious, and prevented both conventional war service and fulltime work as Napier’s assistant. Instead, from November 1917, he took an office job in London with the Ministry of Food, with eventual responsibility for bacon contracts. The vagaries of the scholarly life were as marked then as now.
Tolkien had much to do and to read, and a tutor whose acumen and intolerance of laxity were even then notorious; but he did not turn wholly from frivolity. On the night of 11 May 1913, after an unspecified fracas, he was briefly arrested by the local police, probably for town-and-gown rowdiness rather than anything actually criminal. The following evening, he gave a gleeful account of his adventures to the Stapeldon Society. Later that term he was elected Secretary of the Society for the term following. As at King Edward’s, Tolkien combined wide-ranging scholarship with vigorous and high-spirited social activities; but unlike there, he was now responsible for his own budget.
VI – Vacation adventures
In the summer of 1913, woefully short of money, Tolkien found a job acting as tutor to two Mexican boys who were pupils at Stonyhurst, the Catholic public school in Lancashire; his primary duty was to escort them to Paris, where they were to meet two Mexican aunts and spend August there and elsewhere in France on holiday, before term at Stonyhurst began in mid-September. Tolkien’s role seems to have been otherwise undefined, except (in general terms) as tutor and escort; this sort of job was not unusual in those days. He presumably got the job, which could competently have been done by any undergraduate or even sixth-former, because of his Catholicism; it seems likely that he was put forward by Fr Francis Morgan or another Oratorian connexion. In Paris they were joined by a third, younger, boy, fresh from Mexico, and the brace of aunts, who were (it seems) hard work. Tolkien disliked France and speaking French; he also had to use his uneven Spanish. Philological competence of a high order, we should remember, does not inevitably (or perhaps even often) translate to polyglot fluency in spoken tongues. After a week in Paris, where he was irritated by the constant ‘vulgarity and the jabber and the spitting and the indecency’,24Tolkien went with the boys and the elder of the aunts to Brittany; initially delighted to be going to the home of a Celtic language and a vigorous tradition of folklore (Brittany was largely populated by refugees from late Roman Britain, and the Breton language is closely analogous to Welsh and Cornish), Tolkien was disappointed to find their destination a mere seaside resort. A week into their stay there, the aunt was hit by a motor-car and died. This event naturally blighted the remainder of the month, which Tolkien spent helping to make funeral arrangements and trying, with eventual success, to persuade the surviving aunt not to take the boys back to Mexico at once, but allow them to return to England to complete their schooling. At the end of August, after a frustrating two weeks (his main triumph, aside from making various successful arrangements, seems to have been to introduce the boys to proper schoolboy reading – King Solomon’s Mines, Kim, The White Company), Tolkien and the boys returned to England, and spent two weeks in Bournemouth. On 15 September, he brought them to London, and the next day put them on the train to Stonyhurst. Never, he wrote to Edith, would he take on such a job again, ‘except I am in the direst poverty’.25
Tolkien visited Warwick, and Edith, at least twice before term began at Oxford in mid-October. His first full year as an undergraduate in the English School was, also, the last year of old peacetime England.
VII – On the eve
The popular image of these last days of peace is, perhaps, a partial one: long summers, great houses, a monied aristocracy given both to taste and to extravagant display; below them, an infinitesimally graded middle class – from Howard’s End to Kipps and Mr Polly, and all stations in between – and, lower yet, a vast and unbeneficed working class, whose lives were governed by poverty, cramp, disease, whose only avenues of (comparative) escape were the Army or domestic service. Not a comprehensive or wholly accurate picture by any means; but its primary inaccuracy is the false impression of stasis. Edwardian England (it is easiest to call it this, even though Edward VII died in May 1910) and contemporary Europe were in a condition of rapid (and, for some, wholly unsettling) change.
British political life had been in turmoil, amounting in some eyes almost to revolution, since the election of a radical Liberal government in 1908; the Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, and his Chancellor David Lloyd George had introduced a series of social welfare measures and, to pay for them (and for a vastly expensive naval arms race with Germany), a number of taxes on landed property including inheritance taxes. Pass
ed by the Commons but rejected by the Conservative-dominated House of Lords, this 1909 Budget had provoked a constitutional crisis, with threats of the mass creation of peers to overturn the Lords’ opposition, and the eventual resignation of the government. Two subsequent General Elections returned Liberal governments (who however relied on Irish Nationalist support), and led to the 1911 Parliament Act, establishing the supremacy of the Commons by allowing it to ignore opposition by the Lords to anything declared to be government business. The price of Nationalist support was Irish Home Rule; passed in 1912, but delayed for two years by the Lords’ opposition, it was due to come into effect in 1914. The largely Protestant province of Ulster began to organize for armed resistance to Home Rule; significant elements in the Army signalled they would resign rather than obey orders to suppress an Ulster rebellion.
Other European polities were not so inclined to change: all the great autocracies (Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary) had something approximating to parliaments, which their respective emperors were however prone, at a pinch, to suspend and instead rule by decree. Prussian-led Germany had been united since 1871, born out of the defeat and humiliation of Second Empire France, and was strongly marked both by militarism and by technologically advanced and efficient industry. German scholarship, not just in philology, was justly renowned and emulated; political opposition from Marxist social democrats was neutered by a comprehensive system of social welfare. Meanwhile Austria, Prussia’s defeated rival for supremacy in the Germanies, was a patchwork of ethnic and cultural diversity uncertainly bound together by the venerable figure of Franz Josef, but hamstrung by a fractious and insistent Hungarian minority who had engineered a constitution that established in law both their own particularism and their ability to suppress the rights of other ethnicities, and by a recently and unwisely acquired province of volatile Bosnians with ambitions to join neighbouring Serbia. Whilst Germany and Austria-Hungary were industrially and culturally highly advanced, and life there was by and large good, Russia, on the other hand, still had a vast population of peasant farmers tied to an inefficient medieval system of strip farming, and a seething urban proletariat rife with revolutionary activity and prolific of bomb plots and assassination attempts. Defeat in the 1905 war against Japan had spurred a bloody revolution. Thereafter, the Tsar’s first minister, Pyotr Stolypin, had tried to implement land reform to create a class of smallholders who would form a barrier to revolution; but in 1911 he was shot and killed whilst at the opera, and the reforms stalled. Nevertheless Russia was beginning to emerge from its habitual backwardness, and there, too, high culture flourished.
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