As we saw above, the proposal to introduce a pure ‘English Prelim’ for first-year undergraduates failed; in 1930, however, Tolkien and his allies managed to have added to the available options for Pass Moderations two additional papers, one in Old English and another in seventeenth-century literature. This was hardly enough, but it was something. Nevertheless, the real business of reform needed to happen in the syllabus for Final Schools; and it was on this that Tolkien focussed his efforts.
His initial move, after making some suggestions to the Faculty Board in February 1930, was to publish, in the quasi-official Oxford Magazine for 29 May that year, a manifesto for reform of the syllabus. This essay, titled ‘The Oxford English School’, suggested, in effect, that Oxford adopt exactly the same pattern (of ‘A’ and ‘B’ schemes) as he had devised and implemented at Leeds (which was itself, ironically, a modification of the Oxford syllabus he had known as an undergraduate).
The Leeds syllabus was divided into the ‘A’ (broadly, ‘lit.’) scheme and the ‘B’ (philology); Tolkien’s Oxford proposal, however, assigned ‘A’ to the philologists and ‘B’ to literature. Those studying ‘A’ would be relieved of the obligation to study the later history of the language (1400–1900), since they were not required to study any books from the corresponding period, and instead encouraged to take cognate languages (Gothic, Old Norse) and study their surviving literature; whilst ‘B’ students were to be relieved of compulsory nineteenth-century literature (it might still be taken as an optional paper) and instead required to take a paper on Old and Middle English texts with the appropriate philological preparation, and examination on unseen passages. Whilst an observer might think these changes are decidedly, and unfairly, weighted in favour of ‘philological’ study over literary, Tolkien argued that the philological element in serious English studies was so fundamental (and, although he did not say it, the intellectual effort needed to understand nineteenth-century texts so negligible) that this was a necessary bias; and, moreover, what he proposed was at every point to bind philology close to the study of actual texts, of literary merit and power which might be unlocked only with some linguistic effort, an effort that would however yield corollary benefit to all other parts of the course. Despite Tolkien’s fluent advocacy, his proposal was not adopted in this form.
Instead, after long and involved negotiation, Tolkien and his allies (Lewis prominent amongst them) secured the adoption of a syllabus that gave the undergraduate reading for English Final Schools three options, Course I, Course II and Course III.
Course I was hard-core philology: there were seven compulsory papers (Old English Philology; Middle English Philology; Old English Texts; Old English Literature; Middle English Texts; Middle English Literature; Chaucer, Langland and Gower), two papers chosen from a list of subsidiary languages and an optional tenth paper drawn either from the language papers or from a formidable list of special subjects.
Course II was philology with a more ‘modern’ bent: the compulsory papers were the same as those of Course I, omitting only the two Literature papers but adding, instead, three others: Modern English Philology (1400–1800), English Literature 1400–1550 and Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists. One further paper was taken from a list of five options, all broadly philological apart from Spenser and Milton, and an optional tenth from a more limited selection of the Course I special subjects.
Course III was ‘literature’. Here the compulsory papers were wholly different: Modern English (language), Old English, Middle English (each with different set texts from the other two Courses), Chaucer and his Contemporaries, Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, Spenser and Milton, and three papers on literature from 1400 to 1830. An optional tenth paper might be added; here, and only here, was it possible to add a paper on Victorian literature.
I have described this new syllabus in some detail in part because of its intrinsic interest, but also to give some idea of the scale of Tolkien’s victory in the negotiations. The Oxford English Course was now rigorously philological in bias, with its core elements designed to give a close and humane education in English philology as classically understood, directed primarily at texts from early and medieval periods. Those whose interests were in later literature, or who were linguistically disinclined, were badly served, and that by design. Oxford was now set up to train a new generation of serious philologists; what Tolkien and his allies had not considered, or chose to ignore, was on the one hand the growing trend in literary study elsewhere (which preferred theory-heavy discussion of recent literature to close study of early texts) and on the other the prevailing inclinations of many, perhaps most, scholars and students, which was not, in the main, towards philology. How much of this we attribute to natural human laziness (it is harder to read Beowulf than Jane Austen, if not less rewarding) will depend in part on how highly we rate nineteenth-century and later literature, and in part on whether we think university courses should be intellectually challenging and require hard rote work as well as discursive fluency. But these are larger issues than we have space for here.
We should note, also, that the shortage of qualified teachers of philology remained acute, and this did nothing to ease the transition to the new syllabus, nor to make it popular once it was established. The new syllabus was adopted in 1931, and first examined two years later. For the next twenty years, this was the shape of the English syllabus at Oxford.31
The cabal of English dons who had engineered these changes continued to meet up; they took to calling themselves ‘The Cave’ (of Adullam, where David plotted against Saul): the leading lights were Tolkien, Lewis, Nevill Coghill, Dyson of Reading and others (amongst them Brett-Smith, Rice-Oxley, Wrenn, Dorothy Everett, M.R. Ridley). Their primary object was to maintain their changes against the ‘old guard’ of literary scholars personified by David Nichol Smith, Merton Professor of English Literature since 1929. Smith was a Scot, seventeen years Tolkien’s senior, and an expert on eighteenth-century writing; he had been elected to the Merton chair when George Gordon resigned on becoming President of Magdalen. He had been Goldsmith’s Reader since 1908, when he was brought in by Walter Raleigh, whose deputy he had been at Glasgow, but had missed out on the chair when Raleigh died.
There was, we should note, absolutely no inevitability about this change in the syllabus; indeed, at Cambridge, under the influence of Tolkien’s professorial counterpart Hector Chadwick, Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon there, the study of Old English was hived off from the English School proper and aggregated to Archaeology and Anthropology, where it was combined with the study of Norse and the Celtic languages and their respective archaeologies and histories (cultural rather than linguistic), forming Chadwick’s famous ‘Section B’, in which philology was optional, and although a wide range of linguistic facility was expected, little actual instruction was provided (many of Chadwick’s undergraduates spent their vacations in Kerry or North Wales picking up languages from the locals). This type of study, synthetic, wide-ranging and exciting, but often inevitably superficial, may well have seemed the obvious direction for the English School to have taken at Oxford also; but, in some part thanks to Tolkien, it remained a place where philology was taught in its fullness and as a matter of course.
Increasingly, Tolkien was the directing hand amongst Oxford philologists, especially as the old masters retired or died. In February 1930, for instance, Joseph Wright died, aged seventy-five (his wife recorded that his last word was ‘Dictionary’); Tolkien was named executor of his estate.
Chapter 6 – Delays and Frustrations
I – Chaucer, again
In the midst of all this, the business of the Clarendon Chaucer stirred once more. Sisam, still at the OUP, asked Tolkien for a progress report.1 He replied that George Gordon had had his notes since 1925 but had done little with them apart from make some annotations. He had not, as he had agreed to do, reduced them to the limits Sisam wanted. Tolkien was by now impatient of the whole project, and clearly mildl
y frustrated by George Gordon as a collaborator; unlike his namesake E.V., he seemed content to leave all the philological heavy lifting to Tolkien. Gordon’s excuse, that he had in 1928 been elected as President of Magdalen and now discharged the considerable duties of a Head of House in addition to any tutorial and lecturing responsibilities, was perhaps a good one, but did not make his dereliction any easier to bear. Tolkien retrieved his notes, and over the next eighteen months made some concerted efforts to shorten and simplify the notes and settle the text and glossary; but it was not enough to satisfy Sisam, and the book languished unfinished.2
Nevertheless, Sisam had not wholly dismissed Tolkien; in November 1930, he proposed he and Tolkien should collaborate on an edition of the Ancrene Riwle, preferably a simple edition of one of the better manuscripts (ideally Chambers’s favourite, Corpus 402) rather than a full-scale critical text. Tolkien replied that he would rather undertake the latter, especially as (under his new syllabus) the language of the text was to be one of the topics of the undergraduate course; but in any event, he could do nothing until Chaucer was put to bed. Sisam agreed on the last point, at any rate. It may be cynical to see this proposal as a carrot to encourage Tolkien to finish Chaucer, but Sisam was a wily man, and his usual tools, persuasion and cajolery, had obviously failed him, so he may have thought to use bribery. Alas, it did not work either. Tolkien was simply too busy.
Tolkien’s lectures on Beowulf were by now an invariable part of the English syllabus; from the late 1920s, he supplemented them with additional series examining the Finnesburg episode, the longest of the intercalated narrative interruptions to the main Beowulf story, which is uniquely attested also by a short fragment of another Old English heroic poem on the same subject. The story is an archetypically ‘northern’ one, involving crossed loyalties, violent death of close kin, vengeance delayed and awoken amidst the cold waters of the Baltic; one of the main actors, Hengest, was (Tolkien reckoned) the same man who figures in legends (fossilized in the Chronicle) of Anglo-Saxon origins. His theory explaining the episode is ingenious and fascinating, but so elliptically expressed as to be obscure even to the informed. Tom Shippey has pointed out, however, that Jill Paton Walsh’s 1966 children’s story Hengest’s Tale reproduces Tolkien’s theoretical reconstruction exactly. Tolkien lectured on this rich and heady subject first in 1928, and again more fully in 1930, 1932, 1934, 1935 and 1937.3 His explanatory theory became complex and subtle, and required him, as a preliminary, to produce an edition of the text with a comprehensive preliminary glossary of names. From these names, his theory – the tale behind the surviving fragments – grew up. The plan and model of this treatment was clearly Chambers’s Widsith.
In correspondence with the University Press about the still-unfinished Clarendon Chaucer, he mentioned both his Finnesburg material and a mass of other writing about Beowulf (the metre and diction of Old English verse in general, and examination of several particular cruces in the text) that he proposed could be prefixed to his (now practically complete) prose translation of the poem, perhaps as part of a cheap student’s edition. He also proposed to produce editions of two other Old English poems, Exodus and Elene, both set books on which he had frequently lectured: ‘they both need editing. I have commentaries to both’; he suggested, in the first instance, an edition of Exodus as a follow-up to his Beowulf translation. Tolkien’s practice in his lectures was to provide an edition of the text he was lecturing on, particularly when, as in these cases, he judged existing editions to be wholly inadequate (of the available texts of Exodus, one was ‘thoroughly bad, and virtually negligible for our students’, another ‘merely laughable’). Then he would work systematically through the text, commenting on disputed or obscure points, and explaining the emendations, often (by modern standards) very radical, he had felt it necessary to make. Tolkien, like Sisam, did not have a reflexively high opinion of the accuracy of the surviving manuscripts of Old English verse, and was ready to emend and suppose interpolation and omission in a fashion that strikes his more timid successors as cavalier (the most recent editor of Exodus described Tolkien, frankly unfairly, as ‘an inveterate meddler’4). Unlike Sisam, however, Tolkien did not remark, or if he did remark did not trouble to pursue, the obvious implication of this for philology: if manuscript readings were unreliable in substantial matters of vocabulary and syntax (very often, the unemended texts are simple gibberish), how could they be used as sure sources for the incidental philological minutiae of dialect and sound-change? But these are deep waters, and we need not enter them now.5
Tolkien had this material at his fingertips throughout the decade, and we may fairly ask why none of it was then published. In fact, Tolkien was conscious of this, but felt paralysed by ‘the Chaucerian incubus’, the stillunfinished Clarendon Chaucer. Until his ‘mind and conscience’ were free of Chaucer, he felt unable to undertake the (he reckoned) small amount of polishing the Beowulf material would need, let alone setting the other material in order. And Chaucer showed no sign of being finished soon, despite help offered by David Nichol Smith. What should have been Tolkien’s years of greatest academic productivity were becoming dangerously full of incomplete, and probably uncompletable, projects; and, always, there was the chore of marking examinations to make ends meet. In 1935, when the scheme for a new Oxford History of English Literature was drawn up, he was approached about writing the volume on Old English, but turned it down owing to lack of time. Lewis, who was surely as busy as Tolkien but significantly better organized, was asked to do the sixteenth century; he agreed with pleasure, although in time the project became burdensome to him.
II – A don’s life
It was however almost impossible for someone in Tolkien’s position not to accumulate some at least of the subsidiary projects and responsibilities that invest the higher reaches of the scholar’s profession. During the 1930s, for instance, Tolkien became first general editor and then chief editor of a series of ‘Oxford English Monographs’ published by OUP; these were selected B.Litt. theses passed by the English School and considered interesting or important enough for publication. Tolkien did not do this work alone, however; he was assisted first by Nichol Smith and C.S. Lewis, later by F.P. Wilson and Helen Gardner.
The parade of graduate students to be supervised was continuous. Tolkien took pains over his supervision, and remained friendly with many of his students. One such was Simonne d’Ardenne, a thirty-threeyear-old Belgian of aristocratic antecedents, who began her B.Litt. in 1932 with Tolkien as her supervisor. She was a member of the Society of Oxford Home-Students (the women’s house of study that later became St Anne’s College), and lived at the hostel at Cherwell Edge, run by the nuns of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus to accommodate Catholic women.6 She soon became a family friend and ‘unofficial aunt’, and lived in the Tolkien household from October 1932 until her degree course finished the following summer. She was awarded the B.Litt. in 1933, for an edition of the Katherine Group text Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene, on the basis of which she later gained a Liège doctorate. Published in 1936, the edition bears her name alone, although Norman Davis declared many years later that it ‘presents more of Tolkien’s views on early Middle English than anything he himself published’ and would, in any context other than that of an academic degree, have appeared as a joint publication.7 E.V. Gordon was, in a private letter to Tolkien, even more forcible: he professed himself ‘grieved that your name is not attached to it, because … practically all that is especially valuable in it is recognisably yours. There is really no other piece of Middle English editing to touch it.’8 Tolkien seems to have been given a share of the royalties by Simonne d’Ardenne, but Gordon was unconvinced that was enough. He did not actually talk of messes of pottage, but the implication – that Tolkien was being rashly lavish with help and losing kudos that, rightly and undoubtedly to his benefit, should have been his – is clear. Publicly, Gordon reviewed the edition in generous terms without disclosing Tolkien’s contribution.9
We may speculate that Tolkien felt still so paralysed by the Chaucerian incubus that he had lost hope of ever, or soon, bringing any of his own work on this topic to light over his own name, and decided it was better to publish thus covertly than not at all.
There was a greater aim in view, too: one of the great textual desiderata for the study of early Middle English, in Tolkien’s view, was a proper edition of the whole corpus of the Katherine Group; he seems to have realized that, on his own, he simply could not find the time to do this, and may well have decided at this point that Simonne d’Ardenne was an excellent potential collaborator in this project, and should thus be helped in this generous manner. Their joint efforts to this end were, inevitably, delayed and impeded by the usual besetting hosts of rival calls on Tolkien’s time and attention. Increasingly, influence on others was to become the primary way Tolkien’s academic efforts found expression.
During these years, Tolkien was undoubtedly prodigal with help and advice to other scholars, as a glance at the prefaces to most works of scholarship in his field published during this time shows. Throughout his academic career, his influence was much wider than the list of his own scholarly publications would suggest.
He did however publish a comprehensive two-part article, ‘Sigelwara Land’, analysing the curious name used in Old English as a synonym for ‘Ethiopian’, and concluding that, in an original form *sigelhearwan, it referred to the soot-blackened fire-giants of northern legend. This, he reckoned, was another fragment of what England had lost.10 A different area of interest was explored in another 1934 piece, ‘Chaucer as Philologist’, which argued that The Reeve’s Tale preserved accurate northern dialect forms in the speech of some of its characters, whom Chaucer wished to present as ‘speaking funny’. The article is fine and illuminating as far as it goes, but it does assume a high degree of scribal accuracy in attributing these forms to Chaucer rather than to a copyist or copyists of northern speech-patterns. Philologists of Tolkien’s vintage were briskly confident of their ability to nose out authorial from scribal forms in a way that, to their pallid followers, seems overbold. But he, and they, certainly knew more Middle and Old English than we do, so his nose may well have been better. Much of the business of distinguishing the original readings of a medieval text works by an intuitive sense more akin to smell or taste than anything more rationally accountable (or by extension teachable). Those of my readers, presumably a majority, who have never edited an early manuscript will have to take this on trust; the rest may disagree if they like. This article, incidentally, was the only concrete result of Tolkien’s long and involved work on the Clarendon Chaucer.
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