The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 3: Reader’s Guide PART 2. Christina Scull
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literature. It says much for his persuasiveness that as we left the lecture room quite a few of us were convinced by the argument – until the cold winter winds in the High Street blew common sense back into our minds!
The following term Tolkien took us through Sir Gawaine and the Grene Knight … in a state of great confusion as he kept putting forward comments which directly contradicted those of his and Gordon’s views in the Clarendon Press edition! He often used such phrases as ‘I don’t know what Tolkien and Gordon were thinking about when they said ….’ We were far too hard pressed making sure that it was put down as correctly as possible in out notebooks to be able to follow him much of the time, or to get what he was saying. His technique as a lecturer was at once superb and dreadful. The matter he was imparting was priceless in its helpfulness, but his way of speaking, with his habit of dropping his voice as he approached the end of a sentence or clause and so losing his hearers at the vital moment, was about as unhelpful as could be …. [But notes from his lectures] were to prove invaluable when it came to the final School of English exam. These notes were full of wise pointers to all sorts of valuable help from other sources for the tale and for the vulgar language of the late fourteenth century. Nothing was, however, quite as funny as Tolkien’s reading of the parallel bits of The Feast of Bricriu in [George] Henderson’s unbelievable English translation in the Irish Text Society series. Its parallels with Gawaine suddenly made that a much livelier work in consequence! An audience listening intently for gold nuggets to be used in the examination papers … found itself roaring with laughter again and again as Professor Tolkien solemnly orated the relevant passages about Fatneck and the other shirkers …. Changing his tone, he reminded us that in order to understand an English masterpiece of the Middle Ages we must realise that its basic theme would, as likely as not, have travelled all round Europe in quite a variety of guises. It may even have travelled further, for it was from him that most of us heard the name Mahabharata in connection with The Pardoner’s Tale! [p. 12]
*Robert Burchfield, who came to Oxford in 1949, was another student who enjoyed Tolkien’s lectures, but although he was ‘entranced by the arguments that he presented to largely bewildered audiences of undergraduates in the Examination Schools’, the greater number, ‘many of them doubtless already devoted to hobbitry and all that, were soon driven away by the speed of his delivery and the complexity of his syntax. By the third week of term his small band of true followers remained …’ (‘My Hero: Robert Burchfield on J.R.R. Tolkien’, Independent Magazine, 4 March 1989, p. 50).
According to *George Sayer, Tolkien
was known mainly as, frankly, a very bad lecturer. He muttered and spoke very quietly. He had a very poor speaking voice ….
Very few people went to his lectures, because they couldn’t hear unless they were in the first three rows. The material, which was Old English poetry, was often excellent, especially the footnotes. The things he muttered and added to the typed text. You might often have only twenty people who went to listen to him …. [‘Tales of the Ferrograph’, Minas Tirith Evening-Star 9, no. 2 (January 1980), p. 2]
Harry Blamires, who read English at University College, Oxford in the mid-1930s, told his granddaughter that Tolkien’s lectures were considered so boring that few students attended. Blamires himself attended only Tolkien’s lectures on the ‘Finn and Hengest’ episode in Beowulf twice weekly, which he said he forced himself to do partly out of pity, but also out of curiosity, to have ‘something to talk about at sherry parties’, and because one of his other tutors, C.S. Lewis, recommended it. But the lectures were above his head: ‘Tolkien’s digressions covered the blackboard with learned linguistic connections and derivations, seemingly involving half the world’s languages.’ Later to become an authority on James Joyce, Blamires felt that the compulsory study of Old English was ‘a regrettable necessity’, and therefore Tolkien ‘remained a somewhat remote figure’. Although Blamires ‘was a member of a small tutorial group whom [Tolkien] took for a term through some Old English poems’, he never knew Tolkien well. ‘Yet he was plainly a likeable man, free of pretentiousness, and conveying a vague impression of scholarly unworldliness’ (quoted in Diana Blamires, ‘The Bore of the Rings’, The Times (London), 11 December 2003).
The critic Northrop Frye, who studied at Merton College, Oxford, recalled Tolkien’s lectures on Beowulf, which dealt
with a most insanely complicated problem which involves Anglo-Saxon genealogies, early Danish histories, monkish chronicles in Latin, Icelandic Eddas and Swedish folk-lore. Imagine my delivery at its very worst: top speed, unintelligible burble, great complexity of ideas and endless references to things unknown, mixed in with a lot of Latin and Anglo-Saxon and a lot of difficult proper names which aren’t spelled, and you have Tolkien on Beowulf. [The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939 (1996), vol. 2, pp. 794–5]
Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, who became a prominent novelist and poet respectively, went up to St John’s College, Oxford to read English at the same time in 1941. Amis recalled in his memoirs that ‘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’ (Memoirs (1991), p. 53). Elsewhere he wrote that Tolkien ‘spoke unclearly and slurred the important words, and then he’d write them on the blackboard but keep standing between them and us, then wipe them off before he turned round’ (quoted in Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993), p. 41). Amis found Tolkien ‘repulsive but necessary’ and thoroughly disliked philology (as a student; later he decided that ‘philology, however laborious, is a valid subject of academic study, and those post-Chaucerian poems and plays and novels we turned to with such relief are not’, Memoirs, p. 45). Larkin, on his part, objected to Old English as ‘filthy lingo’, even more so as he was (he thought) expected to admire Anglo-Saxon poetry. And yet, for all their complaints, both Larkin and Amis took first class degrees.
In his introduction to A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (1997), p. 2, Derek Brewer recalled, from his time as an Oxford undergraduate in 1946, that Tolkien lectured on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ‘to a small group of devotees, confining himself entirely to textual cruces (often forgetting to tell us which line he was discussing), and doing obscure (to me) battle with some mysterious entity, prophetically as it may now seem, called something like “Gollancz”’ – the Early English Text Society edition of Gawain edited by Sir Israel Gollancz.
An increasingly demanding part of Tolkien’s work was the supervision of B.Litt., and to a lesser extent D.Phil., students, most of whom would have visited him for an hour once per week or once each fortnight. Before the Second World War he generally supervised only one or two students at a time, but after the war he was frequently responsible for six or more. *R.F.W. Fletcher, then chairman of the English Faculty Board, described a B.Litt. supervisor’s duties in a paper dated 15 January 1947 which was circulated to members of the English Faculty:
Students for the B.Litt. course in English are admitted in the first instance as Probationers and are neither expected nor even encouraged to define their thesis at this stage. As Probationers they are expected to attend lectures on such subjects as the History of English Studies, Bibliography, Textual Criticism, &c., and have to pass an examination thereon within a year. Supervision of Probationers involves seeing that they pursue this probationary course, and discussing with them the field for a thesis and the choice of subject for submission for the Board’s approval ….
The supervision of a Full Student, whose subject for a thesis has been approved by the Board, naturally involves more advanced and more technical discussion of research for the approved subject. The discussion must, however, be limited to advice and general guidance (i.e. the supervisor must not shape the thesis or direct it in detail) ….
The amount of supervision needed varies with different students but as a whole it should be enough for the supervisor to see a student once a fortnight in Full Term. Sometimes it will be more convenient to see little of him in term and to concentrate on him in the vacation. [Oxford University Archives FA 4/5/2/8]
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