In May, elements of the Clarendon Chaucer were set in page proof and forwarded to Tolkien. The glossary was now done; but the textual notes were still missing (Tolkien had not got beyond his first draft of them), as were Gordon’s introduction and notes. Sisam, who had expected the textual notes by the end of February, cannot have been pleased. But there was soon to be a larger bone of contention between him and Tolkien.
V – Model and mentor
We saw earlier how Jacob Grimm was, for Tolkien as for others, the very type of the ur-philologist, the model and gauge of all their endeavours. There was another man, closer to home and nearer in time, who as much as anyone was a model for the young Tolkien. This was Raymond Wilson (R.W.) Chambers.
Chambers was like Joseph Wright a Yorkshireman, although unlike him not working class or ever a mill-hand. He was a pupil of both A.E. Housman and W.P. Ker, the fine flower of University College London’s scholarship, and spent almost all of his professional life teaching at UCL. In 1899, aged twenty-five, he was appointed by Ker as Quain Student; four years later, he was made Assistant Professor; and almost two decades later, in 1923, he succeeded Ker as Quain Professor of English on the latter’s death. For much of this time he was also the College’s Librarian, and built up a large and impressive collection of books. In a lecture given in the mid-1930s, Tolkien described Chambers as ‘the greatest of living Anglo-Saxon scholars’.46 What (as Tom Shippey has pointed out) distinguished Chambers from many of his fellow philologists, but united him with Tolkien, was his unashamedly romantic nostalgia and enthusiasm for the lost poems and legends their rigorous analysis detected.47
Chambers’s first large-scale work was his great edition of the Old English poem Widsith, an apparently unadorned catalogue of the eponymous poet’s (Widsith, ‘the far-travelled’) wanderings amongst the tribes of Germanic Europe and their neighbours, and the courts of kings and rulers. Chambers draws together sources and analogues for all of these tribes and heroes, and for the legends that, to the original audience of the poem, would have sprung up unbidden as the names were heard. He presents Widsith, edited with philological rigour, as no less than a compendium of lost Germanic heroic legend, some of which he was able to retrieve by careful and patient work. It is a book at once scholarly (he was schooled by Housman, remember) and deeply romantic, charged with regret for the lost tales and the heroic age that had been so moved by them that a bare mention of their names was enough for memory, now darkened by long years and the indifference of the supposedly civilized:
One such [the fifth-century bishop Sidonius Apollinaris] has told us how his soul was vexed at the barbarous songs of his long-haired Burgundian neighbours, how he had to suppress his disgust, and praise these German lays. How gladly now would we give all his verses [Sidonius is a copious but unexciting poet] for ten lines of the songs in which these ‘long-haired, seven foot high, onion-eating barbarians’ celebrated, it may be, the open-handedness of Gibica, or perhaps told how, in that last terrible battle, their fathers had fallen fighting around Gundahari.48
Chambers published Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend in 1912, when Tolkien was in his first year at Oxford. It was at the forefront of English philology at the very time when Tolkien was first seriously engaging with the subject. As John Garth has said well, ‘Chambers’s book reads like a message to Tolkien.’49 As we shall see, it serves as a template for some of Tolkien’s own scholarship.
Two years later, Chambers published a revision of A.J. Wyatt’s standard English edition of Beowulf.50 He had in hand a long book on the poem, work on which was severely interrupted by his war service as a Red Cross orderly in France (in 1914 he was forty, considerably over military age); it finally appeared in 1921, as Beowulf: An Introduction. To this day it has not been bettered as a textbook for a serious student of the poem; one, that is, who wishes to consider not only literary but also historical and archaeological parallels to the text.51
Four years later, as a foreword to Sir Archibald Strong’s now-forgotten translation of Beowulf into rhyming verse, Chambers published an essay, ‘Beowulf and the Heroic Age’; Tolkien reckoned this ‘the most significant single essay on the poem that I know’.52
A shorter article of the same year, ‘The Lost Literature of Medieval England’,53 is by comparison a slightly disappointing work, although done with Chambers’s characteristic style and learning. Nevertheless, the title itself was surely evocative enough.
We do not know when Chambers and Tolkien first met; Shippey calls him Tolkien’s ‘patron and supporter’,54 whilst Tolkien himself referred to Chambers as ‘an old and kindhearted friend’,55 and gratefully received presents of books from him. However they met, it seems that Tolkien early acquired the friendship and support of this distinguished and humane man.56
VI – Return to Oxford
In June 1925, Sir William Craigie, Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, tired of wrangling about salaries and workload (and with his wife’s complaints on these topics), resigned his chair after nine years in post and moved to America (he went to the University of Chicago to work on a Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles and a Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue, whilst remaining on the staff of the OED). The electors to the chair approached their favoured candidate, none other than R.W. Chambers, Professor of English at University College London. Chambers was happy where he was, however – he had inherited the Quain chair from his mentor W.P. Ker only two years previously, and was devoted to UCL – and declined to be considered; so the chair was advertised for election. Tolkien applied.
Tolkien had assembled a formidable list of references, from, amongst others, Henry Bradley,57 George Gordon and Joseph Wright, as well as his senior Leeds colleague Lascelles Abercrombie, and the Baines Professor of English at Liverpool, Allen Mawer.58 Statements from them accompanied his application, formally printed and bound into a twelve-page pamphlet. Chambers, having declined the chair, was now an elector for it, and so could not act as a referee, although we may suspect he encouraged Tolkien to apply.
George Gordon’s reference was fulsome and generous:
There is no philological (or literary) scholar of his generation from whom I have learned so much, with whom I have worked more happily, or from whom, in my opinion, greater things may be expected.59
Gordon, we should remember, was now Merton Professor of English Literature, and thus a weighty voice in the Oxford English School.
Of all those who applied, it soon became clear to the electors that the choice was between Tolkien and his former tutor and current publisher, Kenneth Sisam. Sisam, as we know, was a man of formidable industry and hard-nosed scholarship, who was moreover only four years Tolkien’s senior; like Tolkien, he had once been on the staff of the OED. Professional relations between them, as we have also seen, had not always been easy; Sisam’s job at the University Press included a good deal of nagging authors, amongst them Tolkien, for overdue texts and the abridgement of overlong ones. Sisam’s work was close-hauled, bone-dry, and fiercely restricted to the text; Tolkien, on the other hand, although he was in his own way quite as rigorous, was always open to the larger imaginative and conjectural picture the details of the text suggested. If Sisam was in approach the classic, Tolkien was the romantic.
Sisam had been working for the OUP for two years, and before that had spent five years as a civil servant in and immediately after the war, whereas Tolkien had been for the previous five years a full-time teacher and lecturer; on the other hand, Sisam had been for three years personal assistant to (and effective substitute for) Napier during the latter’s long final illness, and thus had immediate experience of the day-to-day responsibilities of the Chair of Anglo-Saxon, which Napier had held concurrently with his Merton chair. Sisam’s only major publication to date was his undergraduate anthology, with its glossary by Tolkien; Tolkien’s edition of Gawain and the Green Knight was recently out, and the Clarendon Chaucer was apparently on the slips. Nevertheless Sisam’s aca
demic publications, particularly in the field of manuscript studies, were not negligible;60 he was a very strong candidate.
We may see this as a choice between the Napier approach, strict focus on technical language to the exclusion of literary considerations (Sisam had been Napier’s assistant, and his early inclinations were to manuscript studies, shaped by his apprenticeship to Bishop and his strong admiration for Wanley), versus the Chambers–W.P. Ker method of placing technical philology in its literary context. Tolkien exemplified the latter (his letter of application promised ‘to advance, to the best of my ability, the growing neighbourliness of linguistic and literary study, which can never be enemies except by misunderstanding or without loss to both’61) which may rightly be thought closer to the original Grimm approach to philology.
There were six electors for the chair; they included Chambers, Henry Wyld, the Merton Professor, and Tolkien’s old OED colleague C.T. Onions, as well as Hermann Fiedler the Professor of German, Charles Plummer of Corpus (the legendary editor of Bede) and Hector Chadwick, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge. Three voted for Tolkien, and three for Sisam: the Vice-Chancellor, Joseph Wells of Wadham, gave his casting vote for Tolkien.
We do not know which three voted for Tolkien, but my guess would be Chambers, Onions and (probably) Wyld. Plummer was primarily a historian rather than a philologist (indeed in an obituary Frank Stenton stated baldly, ‘he was not interested in Old English philology’), although he was also an enthusiast for things Celtic (especially Irish) and Icelandic. Chadwick is perhaps fractionally more likely: his synthetic study The Heroic Age, which appeared in the same year as Chambers’s Widsith, sought to relate Old English and other Germanic heroic verse to Homer and other classical exemplars; although we should note that it was by Chadwick’s influence that, in 1917, philology became only an optional part of the English course at Cambridge. Wyld, as we have seen, was a German-educated philologist whose interests were probably closest to Tolkien’s; he had, too, been taught by Joseph Wright. Certainly, he and Tolkien worked closely together in the following decades. All this, of course, is utterly speculative. As for the casting vote: Wells was a classicist of an older generation (he was born in 1855) who had collaborated on a great (and still not superseded) two-volume edition of and commentary on Herodotus, first published by OUP in 1912. Interestingly, when it reached a second edition, in 1928, it included a brief note apologizing for failing to incorporate any substantive changes in the light of scholarship in the intervening years, but only correction of ‘a few obvious errors’, ‘owing to the high cost of making changes on stereotyped plates’. It may not be fanciful to detect Sisam’s hand here, and suppose, presuming negotiations for the second edition were in hand by 1925, that Wells like Tolkien was irritated by his elevating parsimony, or economical publishing, above scholarship, and may thus not have been disposed in his favour. Wells’s classicist colleague at Wadham, moreover, was Henry Wade-Gery, who we will remember had served with Tolkien and G.B. Smith during the war, had known both of them well, and was a fellow contributor with them to Oxford Poetry 1915. He would (had Wells asked) have been the source of a good personal report. Lastly, and this may be a point of no significance, Wells’s 1923 Studies in Herodotus was published not by OUP but by Basil Blackwell.
On 21 July 1925, then, Tolkien was elected to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. This was a remarkable achievement for a man of his comparative youth; to gain an Oxford chair, even so comparatively junior and recent a creation as that of Anglo-Saxon, aged only thirty-three argues a very unusual quality in him. He was also unusual in his religion: he joined the few Catholic dons then at Oxford, although the numbers had grown steadily.62 Sisam, or his advocates at least, thought they had picked the wrong man. The Russian medievalist Eugène Vinaver wrote, in 1971 after Sisam’s death (but before Tolkien’s), ‘everyone knows what a terrible mistake Oxford made when they by-passed him for the Chair of Anglo-Saxon’.63
Tolkien himself was hardly unconscious of this; when, on his retirement in 1959, he gave a valedictory lecture (in belated place of the two inaugurals custom had expected, but he had never given) he first praised his successor, the New Zealander Norman Davis, then remarked:
If we consider what … the Oxford English School owes to … scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925.64
The prestige of his new job was high; its pay was not (the stipend was £1,000 a year65). To meet the growing expenses of school fees (the Tolkiens now had three children, aged seven, four and eight months; their fourth and last, Priscilla, was born in 1929, when Edith was forty) and doctors’ bills – Edith was often unwell – not to mention normal household expenses, Tolkien again took on work as an external examiner for other universities, setting and marking papers.66 He also continued to mark School Certificate papers. This was drudge’s work, but remained a financial necessity for many years; Tolkien devoted large parts of the University vacations to it.
Tolkien did not relinquish his Leeds post until the end of the calendar year, and so was under an obligation to continue teaching there for another term; it was not until January 1926 that he and his family – Edith, John, Michael, Christopher – moved down to Oxford. They found a house in Northmoor Road (no. 22), in the dons’ quarter of north Oxford; they spent three years there, until, after the birth of Priscilla, Tolkien finally admitted that, as Edith had always argued, the house was too small for them. Fortunately, their next-door neighbour, the publisher Basil Blackwell, had a larger house he was ready to sell to them. They moved in January 1930 to Blackwell’s old house, 20 Northmoor Road; a large house with many small rooms and an extensive garden, it was to be their home for the next seventeen years.
Part II – Philology in Practice
‘… by applying his mind industriously to his subject, with a firm conviction of its value and a resolution not to be deceived about it.’1
Chapter 5 – Oxford and Storytelling
I – A new professor
Tolkien’s day-to-day job was the teaching of English language by lectures, one-to-one tutorials and tireless campaigning to preserve and if possible increase the position of philological studies. He was constantly reading and rereading the great monuments of the English tradition, both pre-Conquest and medieval, and their analogues amongst the literature of the north, notably Norse and Icelandic texts. From this rich mental soil, aside from his purely academic work, grew two sorts of creative writing: improvised stories for his children, and the high legendary matter of his ‘elvish’ tales, which (we should remember) he insisted with absolute seriousness began as providing the ‘necessary background’ for his invented languages. It took a decade or more, but eventually these two genera cross-fertilized, and produced a third thing both like and unlike themselves.2
Meanwhile, Tolkien now held a senior post in the country’s oldest university; he was kept, and kept himself, very busy. For his first term, indeed, he was as we have seen also teaching at Leeds; even after his formal obligation to do so ended, he gave occasional help for another term, until April 1926.
Tolkien was notable for his careful and very extensive preparation for his lecture series; frequently, before lecturing on a particular text, he would prepare a new edition of it reflecting his own views of its nature and the problems it exhibited. This was both time-consuming and unusually diligent. His method in lecturing, as described by a sometime pupil, was ‘to translate and, for “criticism”, to hop from crux to crux’.3 He lectured frequently: most professorial chairs required their holders to give a minimum of thirty-six lectures or classes a year; Carpenter notes that during Tolkien’s second year in post, he gave fully 136 lectures and classes.4 This was not wholly voluntary: the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair, unusually, mandated no fewer than six hours a week of lectures or classes, for a minimum of twenty-one weeks in t
he academic year: 126 in all.5 This would amount to six classes or lecture courses each term, spread in each case across seven of the weeks of full term. During these years, Tolkien worked hard.
His formal teaching was confined to postgraduate students; unlike tutorial fellows at colleges, or professors at Leeds, Oxford professors do not, typically, have any responsibility for undergraduate tutorials, although their lectures and classes are in the first instance meant for the undergraduate body. The lack of a teaching load is deliberate: its purpose is to allow the professor the freedom to pursue research, and produce and publish scholarly material that will both advance his subject and (incidentally) be a credit to the University. The electors to the Chair of Anglo-Saxon would have expected much from Tolkien in this regard. As we have seen, however, financial necessity led him to devote the majority of the vacations to acting as an external examiner; this was time lost to scholarship.
By the end of 1925, the notes and other apparatus for the Clarendon Chaucer were completed in draft; when they were sent in to Sisam, still at OUP, however, he objected: the glossary was too long, the notes too extensive, and the preface pitched too high for a school audience. George Gordon drafted an alternative preface, but the rest of the work fell to Tolkien. This was galling, as Tolkien considered he had already expended disproportionate time and energy on the book (the selection of texts covered had been changed when the glossary was already far advanced, which had made necessary a very meticulous and timeconsuming unpicking and reweaving of it). Tolkien found that the pressures of his new job left no leisure for the work of compressing his notes; Gordon agreed to do it for him, and took the materials in hand.6 This was the end of the business for the next five years.
Tolkien Page 16