A completed Silmarillion, at this time, would have consisted of the Quenta, Ainulindalë, four ‘Great Tales’ (Beren and Lúthien, The Children of Húrin, The Fall of Gondolin and Eärendil the Wanderer), and two tales from the Second Age: The Downfall of Númenor and The Rings of Power. The two sets of Annals may have been intended for the final compilation, but this is not clear.15
Early in 1951, The Hobbit was again reprinted. Tolkien was surprised to find that, alongside the trivial corrections he had made to the previous reprint of 1947, the new fifth chapter, which he had sent speculatively, appeared without further ado. The story of the earlier book was now, in its published form, more congruent with its impending sequel; but, paradoxically, the publication of that sequel now looked less likely than it had done three years earlier.
Chapter 12 – Philology at Bay
I – Lit and lang, again
We now come to a slightly complicated episode. According to Humphrey Carpenter, in 1951, the perennial dispute over the details of the Oxford English syllabus came to one of its periodic crises. The new holders of the professorial chairs were, unlike Tolkien and Lewis, keen for the academic study of Victorian literature to be restored to the syllabus, inevitably at the expense of philological concerns. In Carpenter’s account, Tolkien was appointed to the committee to consider this. The other members, says Carpenter, were the two new professors, David Cecil and F.P. Wilson, Helen Gardner and Humphry House. Gardner was a Fellow of St Hilda’s with decided interests in post-medieval literature; she published a book on T.S. Eliot in 1949, and one on Donne in 1952. House was a Fellow of Wadham, engaged since 1949 on a complete edition of the letters of Charles Dickens. Neither Dickens nor Eliot, of course, might be studied by undergraduates except, for the former, as an optional subject. Tolkien was persuaded to support the majority view, and to recommend that the syllabus he and Lewis had fought hard for should be replaced. Lewis was appalled, and at once badgered Tolkien to change his mind; so when the new syllabus came to a general vote of the Faculty Board, Tolkien sided with Lewis in opposing it. It passed, despite their opposition.1
The problem is that the archives of the English Faculty do not seem to bear out this version of events, which Carpenter probably got from someone present who may have conflated events from several different efforts at syllabus reform. There was certainly discussion of the syllabus at faculty meetings in early 1951, very probably with a view to making it less philological and more ‘literary’, but no decisive change was made, nor (and this is the important point) was a committee set up to consider one.2 In fact, the story seems to relate actually to a meeting that happened in 1954, three years later. It seems probable, though, that the 1951 discussions led, eventually, to the committee of 1954; and that even in 1951, the prognosis for philology was not good.3 Five years earlier, the National Union of Students had passed a resolution calling for the abolition of compulsory philology for undergraduates; they were supported by an article from Hector Chadwick, grand old man of Anglo-Saxon studies at Cambridge (he was seventy-six when the article appeared, and died the following year), arguing that philology should be reserved for postgraduate work.4
Some Oxford undergraduates, at least, shared this dislike of philology: ‘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.’ Thus Kingsley Amis;5 his great cohort Philip Larkin was equally dismissive. Old English verse, he declared, was ‘ape’s bumfodder’: ‘I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in. What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.’6 Amis and Larkin may not have been wholly representative, but in this particular they were probably not unusual.
Professional matters, then, were not going wholly Tolkien’s way; nor, it seemed, were his literary efforts. Negotiations with Collins over The Lord of the Rings first stalled, then petered out entirely; Waldman was often away (he lived much of the year in Italy), and his colleagues were not sympathetic to Tolkien’s work. In late 1951, Tolkien wrote a long letter to Waldman explaining the two works and their interrelations, in the hope of persuading him to get Collins to act; but it was not successful.7 Apart from anything else, the price of paper rose sharply in 1951: the outbreak of the Korean War the previous year had led to global shortages in many commodities and consequent price rises. Tolkien, however, would not settle for an abridgement; which looked like meaning no book at all.
That June, Tolkien finally gathered together all his papers relating to the much-delayed Clarendon Chaucer, and handed them to the OUP for them to be passed to a younger or more leisured man to finish; in the event, nothing was done with them. Sisam advised that nothing should be done before Tolkien retired to avoid embarrassing him, and thereafter no one with the required competences had the necessary leisure for the job. The book was never finished or published. The very considerable time and effort Tolkien had put into it came, then, to nothing; it had served only as a perduring roadblock to his further collaboration with the University Press throughout his whole time as an Oxford professor.
II – Return to Unwin
In November 1951, Rayner Unwin wrote to Tolkien, and asked him about The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion; Tolkien didn’t reply, and Rayner wrote again in June 1952. In answer to this second letter, after shamefacedly mentioning the first, Tolkien asked if Unwin was still interested in the book: ‘Can anything be done … to unlock gates I slammed myself?’8 Rayner Unwin was given The Lord of the Rings to read, and advised his father that it should be published, even at a loss. In November 1952, Stanley Unwin offered to publish the book, on a profitsharing basis (which meant that Tolkien received no royalties until the publisher’s costs were covered, but thereafter a half-share of the profits: if the book sold well, he would benefit much more than under a normal royalty agreement). Tolkien accepted.
On 30 March 1953, Tolkien and Edith moved from Holywell Street to Sandfield Road in Headington, two miles from the city centre. This was for two main reasons: increasing city centre traffic had made the house too noisy; and Edith’s growing ill-health required her to move to a higher and drier climate (central Oxford is notoriously damp and miasmic). Headington-on-the-Hill, by the road to London, was the nearest residential high ground to the University. Their children were all now away, John as curate in a sprawling urban parish in Sparkhill, Birmingham. He was there until 1957, when he became Chaplain at the University College of North Staffordshire (now Keele University) and to two Catholic grammar schools, as well as parish priest at Knutton. In 1966, he was moved again, and, aged almost fifty, became parish priest in Stoke-on-Trent; in 1987, aged seventy, he was moved to the smaller rural parish of Eynsham until his retirement in 1994. Michael was teaching at the Oratory School (he later moved to Ampleforth, then to Stonyhurst); Christopher, now done with his B.Litt., was making his way as a junior lecturer in Old and Middle English and Icelandic (he was appointed University Lecturer in these subjects in the mid-1950s); Priscilla had taken her degree and was working in Bristol as a secretary.
Their new house was closer to the Lewis establishment, The Kilns, a couple of miles to the south-east; there is no particular evidence that Lewis and Tolkien met any more frequently, however. R.E. ‘Humphrey’ Havard was also now a nearish neighbour, and attended the same church as Tolkien, usually sitting next to him (he was often on his own) and sometimes driving him home.9 In May 1953, the Lewis brothers visited Havard’s house one evening, and found Tolkien there. The four men drank burgundy and talked about translation, particularly Ronald Knox’s Bible, which was then only a few years old (the New Testament appeared in 1945, the Old on 1950). It had been made from the Latin Vulgate, as had for centuries been mandated for Catholics, and aimed to replace the old and frequently incomprehensible Douay-Rheims-Challoner version. Unfortunately, it was quickly overtaken by history, since even before it was finished a papal encycli
cal (Divino afflante spiritu of 1943) had both permitted and encouraged translation from the original languages. According to Warnie Lewis’s diary, Tolkien was dismissive of Knox’s work: ‘Ronnie, he said, had written so much parody and pastiche that he had lost what little ear for prose he had ever had.’10 We might tenuously argue that the use of the familiar ‘Ronnie’ argues for some acquaintance between Tolkien and Knox; but the familiarity could just as easily be Warnie Lewis’s, or simply in popular use around Oxford. Tolkien’s verdict on Knox’s Bible may seem harsh, although even a sympathetic reader of his Old Testament must admit that it is, for long stretches, idiosyncratic to the point of, almost, unreadability (the Wisdom books in particular use systematic inversion of normal sentence order with such persistence that they read, to a modern, as if written by Yoda). It might seem odd to attribute this to Knox’s bravura stylistic virtuosity, shown off to such effect in the (to my mind) wholly marvellous Let Dons Delight, written in 1939 immediately before he began his Bible work, but it is arguable that Knox’s own native style had become so etiolated as to be irrecoverable; and that the self-described ‘timeless English’ he adopted for his Bible is itself just another stylistic hat, an attenuated late Victorian fustian that reads, now, awkwardly at best. There are certainly passages, particularly in the Pauline letters, where Knox’s native clarity of expression and light felicity of phrase are remarkable; but they are wrapped about in great swathes of enervated thee-and-thou-ing that only highlight the basic artificiality of Knox’s project. Tolkien’s own approach to Englishing the Bible would appear later in the decade.
In October 1953, Tolkien’s alliterative poem, ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth’, begun at least twenty years previously as a ‘sequel’ to the Old English Battle of Maldon, was finally published in Essays and Studies;11 even with the addition of a prose commentary, it was one of the more unusual scholarly journal articles of that (or any) year. It is an implicit criticism of the view of Maldon taken by E.V. Gordon in his edition, namely that it celebrates the heroism of Beorhtnoth’s retainers, and the ‘northern theory of courage’ in general. Tolkien felt, rather, that the poet was critical of the consequences of Beorhtnoth’s rashness (ofermod) in inviting battle when he need not, at the price of his own life and that of his men. ‘Northern courage’, or at least the version of it imbibed from (Tolkien claimed) the old poets, might intoxicate a man and throw his judgement badly awry. It is perhaps worth noting that although Tolkien’s reading of Maldon as critical of Beorhtnoth has been very influential, and has largely supplanted E.V. Gordon’s interpretation of it as a ‘straight’ praise poem, Tom Shippey believes Tolkien is mistaken.12
III – Slow death by committee
In March 1954, Tolkien had been appointed to a committee considering proposed changes to the English syllabus, specifically making the optional paper on nineteenth-century literature compulsory for any taking Course III.13 It is not clear what it was to replace, but the probability is that it was either the Old or Middle English paper. The committee decided to recommend the change; when it was presented to the Faculty Board on 18 May, however, it was rejected. This is almost certainly the source of Carpenter’s phantom 1951 committee and proposal, so it was presumably on this occasion that Lewis, scenting the beginnings of an anti-philological movement, rallied his colleagues, and Tolkien, to defeat the change.
Although the motion was defeated, it was clearly only a matter of time (and a few retirements) before it passed; the mood of the younger faculty was less philological, and more literary, than it had been before the war. Lewis seems to have been more exercised than Tolkien about this; we may tentatively place here the subsequent chance meeting with Roger Lancelyn Green at which Lewis exclaimed, ‘Even Tolkien didn’t understand what it means! He at least should have supported me!’14
This, in some ways, marks the start of what Tom Shippey has called ‘the long defeat’ of academic philology; over the following half-century, even at Oxford, university English faculties gradually stripped the syllabuses of their historical elements, which became, at best, options taken by a diminishing few, where they were not suppressed altogether, and replaced by fashionable (and intellectually negligible) alternatives (literary theory, post-colonial this or that, and such things). Shippey comments:
I would myself put it this way: Tolkien was the most talented philologist of his generation, but like other talented philologists, he did not bother to establish the security of his profession in educational institutions, as a result of which it is now all but dead – not defeated in argument, but bypassed and allowed to wither on the vine.15
This development was some years in the future, of course; but the signs were already there. We may wonder, incidentally, what Shippey supposes Tolkien and his philological allies might have done, practically, to ‘establish the security’ of their avocation; Shippey himself reckons that, despite his efforts to the contrary, Tolkien never managed to heal the breach between linguistic and literary study of texts.16 Most Oxford undergraduates, then as later, saw Old English as a pointless chore of cribs and cramming, and never passed to truly literary appreciation of the texts. They were only too happy to skimp on the hard study required so as to pass to less challenging, or more immediately rewarding, topics; and in this a good and growing proportion of the faculty were happy to encourage them. If Tolkien had been a better lecturer, or a more prolific and less niggling writer, he might have been able to make Beowulf (say) come alive (by, for example, finishing and publishing his translation) and so lure struggling undergraduates through the dense thickets of grammar and syntax to the grand philological landscape he saw so well but somehow never managed to convey except to a minority of his audience. As it was, philology and philologists were diminishing year by year; and without a continually refreshed majority of advocates, the more difficult elements of the English syllabus, at Oxford and elsewhere, would sooner or later be dropped, regretfully or otherwise.
In the immediate term, however, there were younger philologists of talent and achievement, many – perhaps most – of them Tolkien’s sometime pupils, usually for the B.Litt. Gabriel Turville-Petre, Christopher’s sometime supervisor, was scion of grand if slightly raffish Leicestershire recusant gentry; he had been Reader in Old Icelandic since 1941 (although war service postponed his taking up the post until 1946), and published a series of important books: The Heroic Age of Scandinavia in 1951, in 1953 the highly regarded Origins of Icelandic Literature, in the preface to which he thanks Tolkien for ‘many useful suggestions’, and in 1964 Myth and Religion of the North. That year, aged forty-five, he was given the title Professor of Old Icelandic. A year his senior was Alistair Campbell, since 1949 University Lecturer in Middle English and engaged on what, in 1959, was published as his monumental and definitive Old English Grammar (Tolkien is thanked in his acknowledgements; he had been one of the examiners of Campbell’s B.Litt. thesis). The New Zealander Norman Davis, five years younger than Turville-Petre, taught at Oxford from 1947 to 1949, when he was appointed to a chair in Glasgow.
If younger allies were still to be found, Tolkien was soon to lose his oldest and closest. At the start of 1954, the University of Cambridge decided to create a new professorship in Medieval and Renaissance English, hitherto covered only inadequately by another professor whose expertise was in more recent writing. The deadline for applications was the end of April 1954. Lewis had just published his OHEL volume, and was without question the leading candidate for the job, which might fairly be said to have been tailor-made for him. He had been almost thirty years in Oxford as a tutorial fellow, and was utterly weary of teaching undergraduates; he had, moreover, been passed over for three separate Oxford professorships in quick succession.
Nevertheless, Lewis did not apply; he felt tied to Oxford by his domestic arrangements: although his ‘adopted mother’ Janie Moore had died in the January 1951 influenza epidemic, his brother Warren, who was by now a solid alcoholic, and their old gardener were both very dependent on him. In
stead, he encouraged G.V. Smithers, a philologist then teaching at UCL, to apply, even though, unknown to Lewis, the statutes of the chair required a literary-critical rather than philological approach to the subject. When the electors, who included Tolkien and Lewis’s old tutor F.P. Wilson, met in early May, they resolved unanimously to offer the chair to Lewis in any case. He declined, citing ‘domestic necessities’, his having told another candidate (Smithers) he was not applying, and, last, his own loss of energy due to age (Lewis was fifty-six, but considered he came ‘of a stock that grows early old’17). The chairman of the electors offered to postpone the decision until June to give Lewis time to consider, but Lewis was firm in his refusal. The electors accordingly approached their second choice, Helen Gardner of St Hilda’s. In the meantime, however, Tolkien went to see Lewis, and managed to persuade him his objections were groundless: Smithers was ineligible for the job, and Lewis could fairly discharge its responsibilities in a four-day week, which would allow him to keep up his Oxford household with its miscellaneous personnel. Tolkien spoke to Warnie Lewis and secured his support for the move. He was also convinced that a change of air would do much to renew Lewis’s energy and enthusiasm. Tolkien’s conversation with Lewis about this took place on 17 May, the day before the faculty meeting at which the syllabus changes were rejected. The meeting could well have settled Lewis’s disenchantment with the Oxford English School. On consideration, Lewis concluded that, if he stayed in Cambridge only during the week, his complicated domestic arrangements could cope without him. He wrote to the chairman signalling his tentative interest, if (what he was not wholly convinced of) Tolkien had not overstated the case. The chairman replied that he would be happy to discuss the business, if their second choice (Helen Gardner) declined. She heard rumours that Lewis was again interested, and chose to withdraw and take up a readership at Oxford instead. Lewis was accordingly elected to the Cambridge chair from October 1954, although (to tie up loose ends) he took up his duties only from the following 1 January. He left Oxford, then, after almost thirty years, and a series of disappointments over jobs. Walter Hooper remembers him claiming Oxford tried, belatedly, to keep him by offering him a chair immediately after the Cambridge election; no evidence for this survives. Certainly Lewis was approached in 1957 when Wilson retired from his Merton chair, the chair that Lewis had missed out on in 1946, and perhaps this is what lies behind Hooper’s story; but this was too little, too late: Lewis had concluded Oxford wanted none of him, and was happy in his new job.18
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