12Quoted in Carpenter, The Inklings, pp. 22–3.
13C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: the Shape of My Early Life (London, Collins, 2012), p. 22.
14Letter to Miss Bodle, 25 March 1954; quoted in Wilson, C.S. Lewis, p. 114.
15Quotations from Albert Lewis’s diary are taken from McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life, pp. 85–6.
16C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: the Shape of My Early Life (London, Collins, 2012), p. 231.
17Tolkien may have met the term first in a footnote to the introduction to Dasent’s Popular Tales from the Norse, if he read it as a boy.
18A distant connexion, it would seem, of his later namesake, the atheistical evolutionist.
19See the essay by Robert Scoble reprinted in Raven: The Turbulent World of Baron Corvo, pp. 274–307.
20Coghill and Lewis had been undergraduate contemporaries; it is not impossible, however, that Lewis was invited via the Magdalen Senior Common Room, of which a good proportion of the Coalbiters were members (Onions, McFarlane and from 1928 George Gordon).
21Tolkien, Letters, p. 362 (to Dick Plotz, 12 September 1965).
22See the Appendix, ‘Tolkien the Catholic’, below.
23See McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life, pp. 131–46, esp. pp. 141–6.
24One might think this a little bien trouvé, and more likely (perhaps) to be a pun on, or local pronunciation of, ‘poop’; in fact, in its original context (Wilson, C.S. Lewis, p. 9), taken from the oral testimony of Christopher Tolkien, the ‘popes’ are implied to be particles of mud in puddles. As repeated by McGrath ( C.S. Lewis: A Life, p. 4), they are reassigned to mean ‘stool’; McGrath is like Lewis an Ulsterman, and so may be drawing on local knowledge, or additional sources he does not mention.
25C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: the Shape of My Early Life (London, Collins, 2012), p. 252.
26Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 96 (to Arthur Greeves, 4 February 1933).
27The stages of composition have been painstakingly catalogued and analysed by John D. Rateliff in his careful and illuminating two-volume edition of The History of the Hobbit manuscripts.
28There were certainly elements in the story that approached the status of private joke: Bag End, for instance, was the name of an Elizabethan manor house and farm owned by Tolkien’s aunt Jane Neave between 1922 and 1931. It is almost certain that Tolkien visited her there. See Morton, Tolkien’s Bag End.
29‘AW & HM’, p. 106; quoted in Shippey, Road, p. 46. The theme was expanded on by R.W. Chambers in his 1932 study, On The Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More, first published as an introduction to the EETS edition of Harpsfield’s Life of More. Chambers quotes this same paragraph from Tolkien’s article on p. xcv, and is at pains to approve Tolkien’s approach; although one may wonder what Tolkien made of a passage on p. xcvii, which claims ‘that the cult of the “Rule” is not a fad of the modern grammarian. It is not a conspiracy between those strange yoke-fellows, the philological pedant and the papistical mystic, but a fact of English history with which every serious student must reckon.’ A comparable argument for the continuity of English verse, although without such fierce philological evidence, had been made by Sir Israel Gollancz in a 1921 pamphlet, The Middle Ages in the Lineage of English Poetry.
30Tom Shippey suggests that the very success of Tolkien’s article in fact impeded Middle English dialectology for a generation; if the ‘AB text’ scribes were as fearsomely good, and philologically sensitive, as Tolkien plausibly argued they were, other scribes by comparison seemed bunglers, unworthy of close attention and certainly unreliable as evidence for the development of English dialects. In fact, Shippey (following others) has argued, scribes ‘translating’ texts into their own dialect provide good dialectal evidence even if theirs is not the same language as the original writer’s, and that language itself philologically less ‘pure’ than the renowned ‘AB’ standard. See Shippey, ‘Tolkien’s Academic Reputation Now’, in Roots and Branches, pp. 208–9.
31This syllabus was broadly unchanged for the remainder of Tolkien’s professional life; after his retirement, it was re-organized, with Courses II and II being folded into each other and renamed Course I, and the old Course I, confusingly enough, becoming Course II. This later Course II was the Final Honour School that I read as an undergraduate.
Chapter 6 – Delays and Frustrations
1Or perhaps 1928: see Chapter 5.I above. In either case, Gordon had sat on the work for a good time.
2Sisam presumably contrasted this laboriousness with his own brisk approach to Chaucerian editions: he produced workable student texts of the Clerk’s Tale and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale in 1925 and 1927 respectively.
3These dates are from Alan Bliss’s introduction to Finn and Hengest, pp. v–vi, modified by H&S 1, pp. 145 (Trinity Term 1928), 153 (Trinity 1930), 163 (Trinity 1932), 174 (Trinity 1934), 178 (Michaelmas 1935), 203 (Michaelmas 1937). He was scheduled to lecture on the Freswael again in Michaelmas 1939, but the lecture list for that term was cancelled (H&S 1, pp. 790–1).
4Peter Lucas, in Notes and Queries, 30, no. 3 (June 1983), p. 243 (reviewing the posthumous edition of Tolkien’s Exodus); see H&S 2, p. 682.
5For these abortive proposals to the OUP, see H&S 1, pp. 165–6, and H&S 2, pp. 681–2; and, on emendation, Sisam’s essay ‘The Authority of Old English Poetical Manuscripts’, first published in the Review of English Studies, 22 (1946), pp. 257ff, and reprinted in his Studies in the History of Old English Literature, pp. 29–44.
6Several of Tolkien’s pupils lodged there over the years; the convent and attached hostel were taken over by Linacre College in 1977.
7Postmaster (the Merton College magazine) (January 1976), p. 11; quoted in H&S 2, p. 202. A corrected text of Seinte Iuliene was published by the EETS in 1961.
8Quoted in H&S 1, p. 185.
9See Anderson in TMed, p. 22; he notes that Gordon’s review declared, ‘there is probably no other edition of a Middle English text with so many new contributions and discoveries in it’.
10The article appeared in Medium Aevum 1 (December 1932), pp. 183–96; and Medium Aevum 3 (June 1934), pp. 95–111.
11Tolkien’s son Christopher published editions of several of the Canterbury Tales in the 1950s and 1960s (the Pardoner’s Tale in 1958, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale in 1959, the Man of Law’s Tale in 1969); we may wonder whether, although his primary collaborator was Nevill Coghill, he found anything of use in his father’s still unpublished edition.
12On Chambers’s death, the manuscript passed to a friend and colleague at UCL, who in turn on her retirement gave it to one of his students, who by then was teaching at Monash University; and thus the manuscript made its way to Australia. Parts of it appeared in the Monash Review for July 1975. A manuscript of a revised version was given by Tolkien to an Oxford colleague in 1953.
13The excavation is described in Mortimer Wheeler’s autobiography, Still Digging, pp. 95–8, and in Jacquetta Hawkes’s Mortimer Wheeler: Adventurer in Archaeology, pp. 144–9.
14 See H&S 2, p. 163.
15See Chapter 12.II below.
16They were eventually published, with commentary by Christopher Tolkien, in 2009.
17954 lines in all. It was finally published in May 2013.
18See Christopher Tolkien’s introduction and commentary to The Fall of Arthur, esp. the essay ‘The Unwritten Poem and its Relation to The Silmarillion’ (pp. 125–68).
19Written in May 1924.
20It is printed in HME 4.76–218.
21Noad in TLeg, p. 42.
22Noad in TLeg, p. 44.
23 See HME 4.235–61.
24Letters, p. 421 (to Christopher Tolkien, 11 July 1972).
25Carpenter, Inklings, p. 32.
26Quoted in Carpenter, Biography, p. 148, and Inklings, p. 32 (whence the date).
27Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 297 (24 November 1939); quoted in Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion, p. 33.
28Much of this is to a degree speculative whilst Tolkie
n’s private papers remain unpublished and off limits to research; but I have tried to introduce nothing that is not justified by such material as has been made public.
29Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 969 (to Arthur Greeves, 22 September 1931); also They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963), Walter Hooper (ed.), London, Collins, 1979, p. 421. ‘Macfarlane’ is presumably K.B. (Kenneth Bruce) McFarlane, history tutor at Magdalen 1927–66, an authority on fifteenth-century England and a notably private man; we met him briefly above as one of the Coalbiters.
30Warren Lewis’s diary for 4 December 1933, quoted in Carpenter, Inklings, p. 55.
31Letters, p. 416 (to Michael Tolkien, 24 January 1972).
32Certainly between 1933 and 1938, probably towards the early end of the range; if Robert Havard’s memory is accurate, by 1935 at the latest.
33The original Inklings was founded by Edward Tangye Lean, an undergraduate at University College, at some point during his undergraduate career (1929–33). He probably met Lewis, who had also been an undergraduate at University College, through another college club. Lewis and Tolkien had been enlisted by Lean as ‘senior members’ of the original Inklings; neither was ever Lean’s tutor. Lean’s elder brother was the film director (Sir) David Lean.
34‘Professor J.R.R. Tolkien: A Personal Memoir’, Mythlore, 17, no. 2 (Winter 1990), p. 61; quoted in H&S 2, p. 361.
35See my review of Duriez and Porter’s The Inklings Handbook in The Tablet (5 January 2002).
36See Havard in Como (ed.), C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, p. 216.
Chapter 7 – A Wilderness of Dragons: Beowulf and The Hobbit
1It was originally published as a pamphlet, on 1 July 1937, by the OUP, then definitively reprinted in the Proceedings of the British Academy for 1936, which appeared on 30 December 1937; it has often been reprinted since.
2In the Michaelmas Terms of 1933, 1934 and 1936; in 1935, its place was taken by lectures on the text of the poem (see H&S 1, ad loc, and Drout, Michael D.C. (ed.), Beowulf and the Critics by J.R.R. Tolkien, revised second edition (Tempe, AZ, ACMRS, 2011), passim). The 1933 series was revised, probably for the 1934 series; these represent, respectively, the ‘A’ (original) and ‘B’ (revised) texts printed by Drout.
3Most of them (Jusserand, Strong, Shane Leslie) are now rightly forgotten; see Drout, Michael D.C. (ed.), Beowulf and the Critics by J.R.R. Tolkien, revised second edition (Tempe, AZ, ACMRS, 2011) for details.
4Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction, end of Chapter 3 (p. 128 in the 3rd edition of 1959). Frederick Klaeber had made a comparable point, if less eloquently, in a 1911–12 article, ‘Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf ’ that appeared over two issues of the journal Anglia (Vol. 35, pp. 111–36, 249–70, 453–82; Vol. 36, pp. 169–99).
5Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 909 (to Arthur Greeves, 22 June 1930). We should note, however, that in the very next sentence Lewis admits, ‘My pen has run away with me on this subject’, so the detail of the passage may reflect Lewis’s amplification of the idea rather than Tolkien’s original expression of it; but we can be confident that Tolkien insisted on the importance of a physical connexion between man and place.
6Ker, The Dark Ages (1955 edition), p. 58.
7See Shippey’s Roots and Branches, particularly the essay ‘Tolkien’s Academic Reputation Now’ (pp. 203–12).
8After the death of their lord fighting a Viking army, the retainers of Beorhtnoth (or Byrhtnoth) of Essex fall in a last stand around his body; one of them exclaims, ‘Hige sceal þe heordra heorte þe cenra / Mod sceal þe mara þe ure mægen lytlað’ (lines 312–13), roughly ‘Mind shall be the harder, heart the bolder, spirit prouder as our strength dwindles.’ Tolkien’s own verse translation is included in ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth’; see TL (2001 edition), p. 141.
9Carpenter, Biography, p. 104.
10Anderson (TMed, p. 21) argues that the existence of a fragment of the text on the back of a manuscript copy of ‘Bilbo’s Song at Rivendell’ means that Beorhtnoth ‘seems to predate Gordon’s edition by some years’; but I do not see that the evidence as cited (in HME 7.106–7) requires this conclusion, and it is wholly possible that the draft dates from the early 1940s.
11Carpenter, Biography, p. 105. As an instance of this, we may note that, in the same year as his Maldon came out, Gordon also published a translation of a then-standard work, Scandinavian Archaeology, a long and technically complex text. See Anderson in TMed, p. 19. That September, Tolkien sent Gordon one of his new-minted author’s copies of The Hobbit.
12For the ‘wager’, its background and its consequences, see Rateliff’s fine essay in TLeg, pp. 199–218.
13We might suspect a looser parallel with Ronald Knox’s Let Dons Delight, a virtuoso stylistic exercise tracking themes of exile and return through snapshots of an Oxford common room at fifty-year intervals; but this cannot stand if we look at the strict chronology of publication – Let Dons Delight appeared in 1939. It is not of course impossible Tolkien had had personal communication from Knox or one of his friends of the theme of his book in advance of its appearance in print, but the influence if any could only have been slight.
14HME 5.41. See Glyer and Long in Fisher (ed.), Tolkien and the Study of his Sources, pp. 197–8.
15See Noad in TLeg, p. 46, and HME 5.18.
16See Chambers’s Widsith, a book that Tolkien certainly knew and read closely, pp. 117–21.
17Chambers, Widsith, p. 124.
18 HME 5.98.
19The superior of the convent, Revd Mother St Teresa Gale, was one of these early readers.
20She worked on an (unfinished) B.Litt., on the vocabulary of the Corpus manuscript of the Ancrene Wisse, between 1933 and 1936, supervised by Tolkien; she also helped him with a transcription of the manuscript for his projected edition. In 1938, she was elected Fellow in English at the Society of Oxford Home-Students, later St Anne’s College.
21It is also possible that Griffiths merely told Dagnall about the book, and she subsequently borrowed it from Tolkien directly, perhaps when visiting him in connexion with a proposed revision of the old Clark Hall translation of Beowulf, which Unwin wanted him to do (but which he declined, eventually providing a brief preface). Elaine Griffiths began a revision, but abandoned it; one was eventually completed by C.L. Wrenn, and published in 1940.
22See Letters, p. 20.
23 HME 6.7.
24The 1937 Quenta Silmarillion is in HME 5.199–338.
25See Noad in TLeg, esp. pp. 47–50.
26The genealogies are described, but not given in full, in HME 5.403–4; The Tale of Years is unpublished: a later version is given in HME 11.342–56. The Tale of Battles is apparently wholly unknown, apart from the reference in the 1937 Quenta preamble (HME 5.202).
27For the preamble, see HME 5.203.
28According to Rayner Unwin, TLeg, p. 3.
29Carpenter, Biography, p. 183.
30Letter to Stanley Unwin, 16 December 1937; quoted in H&S 1, p. 208.
31Letters, p. 346 (to Christopher Bretherton, 16 July 1964). See also the account in HME 3.364–7.
Chapter 8 – In the Background, War
1Letter to Stanley Unwin, 31 July 1947, in Letters, p. 122.
2Paul Edmund Thomas, in TLeg, p. 177.
3This date was Tolkien’s own for the writing of Leaf by Niggle; Hammond and Scull, however, date it to April 1942 (on the basis of a postcard seen on eBay – see H&S 2, p. 495), which would coincide with a hiatus in the composition of The Lord of the Rings.
4Dawson had been a part-time lecturer at the University College of the South West of England (later Exeter University) between 1924 and 1933. He was a Catholic convert, three years older than Tolkien; like Tolkien, he had made a wartime marriage, although ill-health kept him from the army. Unlike Tolkien, he had a modest private income, which allowed him to study and write without needing a university job. Progress & Religion was first published in 1929, when Dawson was forty; Tolki
en seems to have read it in a paperback reprint of 1938 (see OFS, p. 104). Dawson’s only fulltime academic job was a chair at Harvard awarded him when he was sixty-nine. There is no evidence he and Tolkien ever met (although Dawson knew Robert Havard, Tolkien’s doctor, so it is possible) or that Tolkien read any of his other books. Dawson was involved with the Dublin Review between 1940 and 1956, and in 1945 Tolkien published a short story in it; but this seems to have been at the instance of its then editor, T.S. Gregory, rather than Dawson. Claims (made for example by Bradley J. Birzer, Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (Wilmington, DE, ISI Books, 2002), p. 136) that Dawson is a major influence on Tolkien’s thought may be thus a touch exaggerated.
5See OFS, esp. pp. 192, 203.
6These are printed in OFS. The lecture was first called ‘Fairy Stories’; it became On Fairy-Stories only in revision.
7The original report of this episode (in The Daily Telegraph for 16 September 2009) claimed that the assessors had marked Tolkien as ‘keen’ to do the work; this is almost certainly a misunderstanding of a note on how to pronounce his name (as, ‘Tolkien (“-keen”)’) rather than a comment on his disposition.
8Cf. Robert Havard as quoted in Duriez and Porter, The Inklings Handbook, p. 118.
9It is printed by Carpenter, The Inklings, pp. 123–6.
10Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 273 (to W.H. Lewis, 10 September 1939).
11See Letters, p. 55 (to Michael Tolkien, 9 June 1941).
12Letter to Arthur Greeves of December 1940, quoted in Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, p. 32.
13It is possible he was evacuated via Dunkirk in late May, or (along with tens of thousands of other line-of-service troops) via Cherbourg or St Nazaire in mid-June. Both were highly dangerous affairs; the liner Lancastria, for example, was sunk by bombers off St Nazaire on 17 June with the loss of considerably over 3,000 lives.
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