The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 3: Reader’s Guide PART 2. Christina Scull
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instruction, by occasional or periodical examination, and otherwise, as he may judge to be expedient. For receiving Students who desire such assistance he shall appoint stated times in every week in which he lectures’ (p. 61). Most professors were required to reside within the University for at least six months in each academic year, between the first day of September and the following first day of July, and to lecture in each term (by 1945 this span had become between 1 October and the following 1 August). The Vice-Chancellor of the University could grant dispensation from this requirement for a short time for reasons of health or some other urgent cause. Any leave of absence or dispensation from statutory duties, whether for ill-health or travel for the purpose of research, had to be approved by the Visitatorial Board.
By 1945 a change in the Statuta included among the duties of a professor ‘original work by the Professor himself and the general supervision of research and advanced work in his subject and department’ (p. 41).
According to the 1925 Statuta the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon – thus Tolkien between 1925 and 1945 – was required to ‘lecture and give instruction on the Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, and on the other Old Germanic Languages, especially Gothic and Old Icelandic … [to] lecture and give instruction for six hours in each week, and for a period not less in any Term than six weeks, nor less in the whole year than twenty-one weeks’ (pp. 117–18): a minimum of 126 hours per academic year. The announcement of the forthcoming election to the chair on 12 June 1925 in the Oxford University Gazette (following the resignation of W.A. Craigie) said that the successful candidate would be required to ‘give not less than forty-two lectures in the course of the academical year; six at least of such lectures shall be given in each of the three University Terms, and in two at least of the University Terms he shall lecture during seven weeks not less than twice a week’ (supplement, p. 745). Presumably the remaining hours required of him were devoted to instruction and the supervision of post-graduate students. According to the Oxford University Gazette, in the second year after his election (when he was fully resident in Oxford and had no duties at *Leeds) Tolkien was scheduled to give seven lectures and classes each week in Michaelmas Term 1926 and Hilary Term 1927, and three each week in Trinity Term 1927 (see Chronology).
By 1945, when Tolkien left the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair (while continuing to teach Old English until his successor was named), the requirement had been reduced to only thirty-six lectures or classes per academic year, of which at least twenty-eight had to be lectures. The same requirement applied to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, to which Tolkien was elected in 1945 and which he held until 1959. The Merton Professor of English Language and Literature was required to lecture and give instruction in the History of the English Language, and in the History of English Literature through the period of Chaucer.
Opinions about Tolkien as a lecturer vary. He himself said in his 1959 *Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford that he had not given an inaugural address on his election to the Merton chair, because ‘my ineffectiveness as a lecturer was already well known, and well-wishers had made sure (by letter or otherwise) that I should know it too; so I thought it unnecessary to give a special exhibition of this unfortunate defect’ (*The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 224). But in a letter to his son *Michael in October 1968 he wrote: ‘I have only since I retired learned that I was a successful professor. I had no idea that my lectures had such an effect – and, if I had, they might have been better. My “friends” among dons were chiefly pleased to tell me that I spoke too fast and might have been interesting if I could be heard. True often: due in part to having too much to say in too little time, in larger part to diffidence, which such comments increased’ (Letters, p. 396).
At least one of his students at Leeds retained pleasant memories of Tolkien’s lectures. On 22 December 1937 K.M. Kilbride, to whom he had sent a copy of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, wrote that in reading it she was pleased to find the sense of humour that she recalled from Tolkien’s language lectures, which had made them entertaining as well as informative. *Roger Lancelyn Green, who matriculated at Oxford in 1937, described the first lecture by Tolkien that he attended in 1938:
He strode to the rostrum, his gown wrapped tightly round him, his cap pulled low over his brows, scowling fiercely. After taking off his cap and bowing slightly to us, he barked out: ‘Take notes. I will give you the headings of what I propose to deal with this term.’
Accordingly we took down twelve headings of aspects of Beowulf, and he finished: ‘And that’s what I intend to discuss’. Then suddenly his face broke into the utterly charming smile which we were soon to know so well, and he added, in a burst of confidence: ‘But I don’t suppose we’ll get through half of it!’ … Nor did we, as he was for ever wandering off into side issues – usually more entertaining than the rather philological-slanted study of the epic itself.
I think it was on this occasion, while we relaxed with restrained titters over the beautiful timing of his last remarks, that he suddenly shouted out the first words of the poem: ‘HWAET we Gardena ….’ And then remarked ‘That made you jump! Well, that’s what the author intended – so that the skald could suddenly silence his would-be audience as they sat at the end of the feast drinking their beer or mead.’ [‘Recollections’, Amon Hen 44 (May 1980), p. 6]
Another former student, *J.I.M. Stewart, wrote that Tolkien ‘could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests’. And *W.H. Auden wrote to Tolkien many years after hearing him lecture: ‘I don’t think I have ever told you what an unforgettable experience it was for me as an undergraduate, hearing you recite Beowulf. The voice was the voice of Gandalf’ (both quoted in Biography, p. 133).
Helen Tyrrell Wheeler, who read English at Oxford during the war years, recalled that Tolkien’s lectures,
usually held in the Taylorian, were packed out largely because of the extraordinary pressure of excitement that swept over his audience when he broke (as he frequently did) into a Bardic rendering of Beowulf. Where else in the world would one be able to hear the hypnotic rhythms and crashing, criss-crossing alliterations of this poem delivered with such (we thought) impeccable authenticity of inflection? And if it was not impeccably authentic, then it ought to be, for the effect of spellbound attention was never-failing. [‘Two More Women Pupils’, Canadian C.S. Lewis Journal 67 (Summer 1989), p. 5]
Adele Vincent heard Tolkien lecture on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the mid-1950s:
The highlight of each lecture was when Tolkien would move away from his lectern and pace back and forth at the front of the room, his black academic gown billowing round his shoulders, as he recited whole sections of the poem. One sonorous line would follow rapidly after another, now rippling like a running stream, now roaring like a raging torrent. He always spoke quickly, as if there was so much to say that he couldn’t get the words out fast enough. When he was explaining a passage it was something of a strain to follow him, but when he was reciting, it was enough just to sit back and let the sound float over your ears. [‘Tolkien, Master of Fantasy’, Courier-Journal & Times (Louisville, Kentucky), 9 September 1973, reprinted in Authors in the News, vol. 1 (1976), p. 470]
B.S. Benedikz, in ‘Some Family Connections with J.R.R. Tolkien’, Amon Hen 209 (January 2008), recalled that from 1952 to 1954 he
had the privilege of having my study of Middle English livened and made a pleasure by the teaching of the Merton Professor of English [Tolkien] …. My contact began with Tolkien’s lectures on the fourteenth-century poem The Owl and the Nightingale. A fairly select company assembled in one of the middle-sized lecture rooms of the Schools, and a few moments after the advertised hour the Professor came in and put us on the appropriate page of old Joe [Joseph] Hall’s Selections from Early Middle English ….
The lectures took us in a wide sweep through the whole gamut of flyting (exchanges of abusive and insulting language) and mediaeval vulgarity, as well as through some very pertinent textual questions caused by the two variant forms available and concerning why the [manuscripts] differed. We were, I feel sure, vastly informed by them – even when the