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Of … such titles are entered by the first significant word following ‘Of’

Ofer Widne Garsecg see Songs for the Philologists

Official Name List. List of names in early Elvish languages (*Languages, Invented) which appear in The Fall of Gondolin in *The Book of Lost Tales, published as part of ‘Early Noldorin Fragments’ in Parma Eldalamberon 13 (2001), pp. 100–5, edited with commentary by Christopher Gilson, Bill Welden, Carl F. Hostetter, and Patrick Wynne.

The work is arranged with Eldarissa (Qenya) names on the left and Noldorissa (Gnomish, later Sindarin) names on the right. A few names are translated into English. The names come from the original manuscript of The Fall of Gondolin as revised by Tolkien, but before *Edith Tolkien made a fair copy. This list was written in the same note-book as the *Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa; the *‘Name-list to The Fall of Gondolin’ was derived from the Official Name List. A short table of abbreviations indicates that Tolkien probably intended to list names from all of the ‘Lost Tales’.

Oilima Markirya see The Last Ark

The Old English Apollonius of Tyre. Edition of the Old English version of Apollonius (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 201) prepared by Peter Goolden, published by Oxford University Press in November 1958 with a brief prefatory note by Tolkien. See further, Descriptive Bibliography B24.

Goolden was admitted as a B.Litt. student in English at *Oxford in May 1950 and received his degree in 1953; his thesis, The Old English Version of the Story of Apollonius of Tyre, was supervised by *C.L. Wrenn. In 1954 Goolden submitted the work to Oxford University Press and was informed that although the Press would not publish it independently (it was not judged to be a mature work of learning), it might be suitable for publication in the series *Oxford English Monographs, of which Tolkien was then chief among three general editors (with *F.P. Wilson and *Helen Gardner). Tolkien received a copy of Goolden’s thesis in February 1954 but could not consider it until later in the year. It was approved for inclusion in the series, pending revision.

At the beginning of March 1956 Goolden lost the manuscript of his work in a fire and had to start revision again with a second copy of his thesis. He seems to have completed this in short order. Already on 14 May 1956 the Delegates of Oxford University Press approved the publication of his book, supported by Tolkien and Wrenn; but Tolkien took more than a year to look over and approve the manuscript, and the finished work was not sent to the printers until the end of August 1957.

Wrenn complained to Oxford University Press about Tolkien’s delay, which was the more unfortunate because a German work with the same text of Apollonius (ed. Josef Raith) had been published in 1956. In his prefatory note Tolkien wrote that ‘the [series] editors feel justified … in publishing Mr. Goolden’s work, since it is independent, and differs from Dr. Raith’s edition in treatment and in some points of opinion,’ and because it was specifically designed for English students and ‘provides a conflated text of the Latin source, notes, and glossary’ (p. iii).

In his preface Goolden thanks C.L. Wrenn as ‘the prime mover of the work’, and ‘Professor J.R.R. Tolkien who kindly suggested revisions in presentation and style’ (p. vi).

The Old English Exodus. Edition of the Old English poem Exodus, with a Modern English translation and commentary, assembled from Tolkien’s lecture notes and other papers by his former B.Litt. student *Joan Turville-Petre, published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford in 1982 (despite imprint and copyright dates of 1981).

The Old English Exodus is a free paraphrase of that portion of the Old Testament book (ch. 13–14) which deals with the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea and the destruction of Pharaoh’s host. A single instance of the work survives, in an eleventh-century manuscript, Junius 11 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives). It is considered one of the most difficult Old English texts to interpret, in part because it is incomplete, and it contains many words that are otherwise unrecorded.

Tolkien lectured on the Old English Exodus at *Oxford for many years, beginning in Michaelmas Term 1926. Joan Turville-Petre comments that his papers concerning the poem were ‘never intended as an edition, although the lecturer scrupulously drew up an edited text as the basis of his commentary. It is an interpretation of the poem, designed to reconstruct the original (as far as that is possible), and to place it in the context of Old English poetry’ (p. v). And yet, on 25 October 1932 Tolkien noted in a letter to R.W. Chapman at Oxford University Press that

both Elene [a poem by Cynewulf] and Exodus will remain set books in the English School. They both need editing. I have commentaries to both. I should like very much after Beowulf [i.e. after he completes his Modern English translation of *Beowulf] to tackle a proper edition of O.E. Exodus. The Routledge edn. of Ms. Junius 11 by Krapp [The Junius Manuscript, 1931] is thoroughly bad, and virtually negligible for our students, though admittedly better than nothing. Sedgefield is of course merely laughable (he does a large chunk of Exodus in his miserable Anglo-Saxon verse-book [An Anglo-Saxon Verse Book (1922)]). [Oxford University Press archives]

Tolkien’s surviving lecture notes on Exodus represent ‘the discourse of a teacher among a small group of pupils, expressing his understanding of the text in the circumstances of that time.’ Joan Turville-Petre therefore reduced ‘diffuse comments and some basic instruction … such as observations on phonology and morphology’ (p. v).

A manuscript page by Tolkien showing the opening of the Old English Exodus, with his notes, is reproduced in Life and Legend, p. 81.

In Notes and Queries for June 1983 Peter J. Lucas harshly criticized The Old English Exodus for its manner of presentation, lack of an introduction and glossary, numerous errors and omissions, and unnecessary emendations. ‘As an editor Tolkien emerges as an inveterate meddler who occasionally had bright ideas’ (p. 243). Nevertheless, Lucas was himself indebted to Tolkien in his own edition of Exodus (1977; rev. edn. 1994): ‘In the preparation of this edition I have had access to notes taken from lectures given by J.R.R. Tolkien at Oxford. Two of the emendations adopted in the text … were, as far as I know, first suggested by him in these lectures …. His comments or suggestions are also incorporated in the Commentary from time to time …’ (p. x).

In another review, D.C. Baker commented in English Language Notes for March 1984 that ‘lesser mortals, in their preparation for lecturing undergraduate students, do not prepare themselves in this way; they do not edit the texts on which they are to expound; they do not provide a commentary exhaustive in its learning together with original criticisms and suggestions. These are the work of a master, a master of all he surveyed’ (p. 59).

See further, T.A. Shippey, ‘A Look at Exodus and Finn and Hengest’, Arda 3 (1986, for 1982–83), and his ‘Tolkien as Editor’ in A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Stuart D. Lee (2014).

‘Old English Verse’. Extracts from a lecture, published as an appendix to the volume *The Fall of Arthur (2013), edited by *Christopher Tolkien, pp. 223–33. The text provides ‘some indication’ of the ‘essential nature’ of the Old English alliterative verse form used in the poem *The Fall of Arthur (p. 223). The lecture originated in the radio talk Anglo-Saxon Verse, the sixth in the series Poetry Will Out: Studies in National Inspiration and Characteristic Forms, broadcast on the BBC National Programme on 14 January 1938. Tolkien expanded it for another talk in 1943, and with revisions for further delivery in 1945 and 1948.

He begins by quoting lines from the tenth-century Old English poem The Battle of Brunanburh, followed by his own Modern English alliterative version. He explains the background to the poem and something about the Anglo-Saxon period, then deals with the alliterative metre which he finds ‘worthy of study by poets today as a technique. But it is also interesting as being a native art independent of classical models …. It was already old in Alfred’s day. Indeed it descends from days before the English came to Britain, and is almost identical with the metre used for Old Norse (Norwegian and Icelandic) poems’ (p. 227). After explaining the metre, he describes the use of archaisms and ‘kennings’, and suggests that attempting to translate Old English Verse ‘is not a bad exercise for training in the full appreciation of word …’ (p. 230).

Appended by Tolkien to the lecture were four examples of his own alliterative verse: Winter Comes to Nargothrond (*The Lays of Beleriand, p. 129), lines 1554–70 of *The Lay of the Children of Húrin (with minor variations from the text printed in The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 129–30), and two extracts from The Fall of Arthur, both with minor differences from the text as published in 2013. Against the extract from Canto I, lines 183–211, Tolkien ‘wrote the relevant letters referring to the patterns of strong and weak elements (“lifts” and “dips”) in each half-line’ as described in the lecture (p. 231).

Oliphaunt. Poem, first published in *The Lord of the Rings, Book IV, Chapter 3. It was later printed with the title Oliphaunt (i.e. an elephant) in *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962), p. 47.

In the former work, Sam Gamgee describes the poem as ‘a rhyme we have in the Shire. Nonsense maybe, and maybe not.’ Tolkien included it, with three minor textual differences, as ‘a hobbit nursery-rhyme’ in a letter to his son Christopher, 30 April 1944 (Letters, p. 77). Although in another letter, to Mrs Eileen Elgar, 5 March 1964, he wrote that Oliphaunt was ‘my own invention entirely’, unlike *Fastitocalon which was ‘a reduced and rewritten form, to suit hobbit fancy, of an item in old “bestiaries”’ (Letters, p. 343), in fact Oliphaunt had a similar origin.

An earlier and much longer version, Iumbo, or ye Kinde of ye Oliphaunt, composed probably in the 1920s, was first published as one of the Adventures in Unnatural History and Medieval Metres, Being the Freaks of Fisiologus, as by ‘Fisiologus’ in the Stapeldon Magazine (Exeter College, *Oxford) 7, no. 40 (June 1927), pp. 125–7, and also in the expanded edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (2014), pp. 216–20. Like an earlier version of Fastitocalon and two other (unpublished) animal poems, Reginhardus, the Fox and Monoceros, the Unicorn, it was inspired by the medieval bestiary, which describes the characteristics of animals and draws from them Christian morals. This, in turn, was based on earlier sources, including the ?second-century compilation entitled Physiologus (‘Naturalist’).

Tolkien followed this model but added elements of contemporary culture. Iumbo (i.e. Jumbo) describes the elephant as ‘a moving mountain, a majestic mammal’, whose nose ‘Performs the functions of a rubber hose / Or vacuum cleaner as his needs impose.’ His vice is drugs, ‘the dark mandragora’s unwholesome root’, a notion from the bestiary. This fills him ‘with sudden madness’, and he ‘blindly blunders thumping o’er the ground’, crushing villages in his path. When he tires he leans against a tree, but hunters who know of this habit cut the trunk so that it will collapse, with the elephant – which, according to the bestiary, cannot rise again on its own. In the Physiologus the elephant falling to the ground because of a tree is related to Adam’s fall.

Oliphaunt in turn is a reduction of Iumbo, made simpler and cleansed of anachronisms. In The Lord of the Rings it is meant to be traditional verse, and indeed is in the form of nursery rhymes with which readers in English are familiar: it retains the essential characteristics of the elephant in a concise form and in a rhyme that is easy to remember (‘Grey as a mouse, / Big as a house’, etc.). These qualities have made the poem a popular choice to include in anthologies for children.

A private tape recording of Oliphaunt, made by Tolkien in 1952, was issued on the album J.R.R. Tolkien Reads and Sings His The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers/The Return of the King (1975; first reissued in 2001 as part of The J.R.R. Tolkien Audio Collection; see *Recordings).

On Ælfwine’s Spelling. Description of the orthographic practice of Ælfwine (*Eriol and Ælfwine), published as part of ‘Qenya Spelling’ in Parma Eldalamberon 22 (2015), pp. 67–78, edited with commentary and notes by Christopher Gilson and Arden R. Smith.

Ælfwine in the context of *‘The Silmarillion’ translated Eldarin legends and chronicles into Old English. Tolkien wrote six versions of this brief account of Ælfwine’s work, one entitled Ælfwine, four with the title as given for this entry, each on two sides of a single sheet. All of the versions appear to date largely ‘from the period when Tolkien was working on *The Etymologies around 1937 or 1938, or shortly after this …’ (Gilson and Smith, p. 57), except for the sixth version which is from the early 1950s. The editors point out that ‘mentions of Ælfwine’s transcription of names are given in the Outline of Phonetic Development and the Outline of Phonology’ (p. 60; see *Quenya: Outline of Phonology).

On Fairy-Stories. Lecture, first published in Great Britain in *Essays Presented to Charles Williams by Oxford University Press, December 1947, pp. 38–89. A slightly revised text was first published in *Tree and Leaf, in Great Britain by George Allen & Unwin, London, in May 1964, and in the United States by the Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, in March 1965. See further, Descriptive Bibliography B19, A7. References here are to the appearance in the 1988 edition of Tree and Leaf.

SYNOPSIS

Tolkien first gives a general definition of what may be found in a fairy-story:

The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost. [p. 9]

He then attempts to answer the question the question ‘What is a fairy story?’, turning to the *Oxford English Dictionary but finding its definitions too narrow. He rejects the notion of fairies as ‘supernatural beings of diminutive size’, propagated by works such as Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–6) and Michael Drayton’s Nymphidia (1627), and notes that although ‘fairy as a noun more or less equivalent to elf’ (p. 12) was hardly found until the late fifteenth century, faërie, meaning the realm of fairies or ‘Elfland’, appeared in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c. 1390). Tolkien also rejects the definition of fairy-story (or fairy-tale) as simply ‘a tale about fairies, or generally a fairy legend’.

Fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.

Stories that are actually concerned primarily with ‘fairies’, that is with creatures that might also in modern English be called ‘elves’ are relatively rare, and as a rule not very interesting. Most good ‘fairy-stories’ are about the aventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches. [p. 14]

Tolkien would exclude from a list of ‘fairy-stories’ traveller’s tales such as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), dream-fiction such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and beast-fables such as Reynard the Fox, although the latter has a connection with fairy-story in that it ‘derives from one of the primal “desires” that lie near the heart of Faërie: the desire of men to hold communion with other living things’ (p. 19).

Considering the origin or origins of fairy elements in stories, he finds little value in folklorists’ relation of tales according to similar motives. ‘It is precisely the colouring the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count’ (pp. 21–2). Using Sir George Webbe Dasent’s words, he says that ‘we must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled …. By the “the soup” I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by “the bones” its sources or material – even when (by rare luck) those can be with certainty discovered. But I do not, of course, forbid criticism of the soup as soup’ (pp. 22–3).

He notes various theories concerning the origin and history of fairy-stories, ‘independent evolution (or rather invention) of the similar; inheritance from a common ancestry; and diffusion at various times from one or more centres’, of which the first ‘is the most important and fundamental’ (p. 23). *Philology is no longer thought to be of such significance; nevertheless, the human mind and language have played a part.

The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and be able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into swift water …. Or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm [dragon]. But in such ‘fantasy’, as it is called, new form is made; Faërie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator. [pp. 24–5; see *Sub-creation]

After a discussion of mythology and religion related to folk- and fairy-tales, and of the magical face of fairy-story (notably in ‘The Golden Key’ by *George MacDonald), Tolkien comments that ‘new bits’ have been continually added to the constantly boiling ‘Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story’ (p. 28), and shows how fairy-tale elements may become attached to ‘the great figures of Myth and History’, such as Arthur (*Arthur and the Matter of Britain). The antiquity of some of these elements opens ‘a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe’ (p. 32). Tolkien thinks that such story elements have survived because they produce so profound a ‘literary effect’ (p. 33).

Children, he observes, are generally thought to be the natural or most appropriate audience for fairy-stories. But this was not always the case: such tales were once read by adults, and having become ‘old-fashioned’ in our ‘modern lettered world’ (p. 34) were relegated to the nursery. ‘In fact only some children, and some adults, have any special taste’ for fairy-stories; ‘and when they have it, it is not exclusive, nor even necessarily dominant’ (p. 35). Tolkien rejects a suggestion implicit in the introduction by *Andrew Lang to the large paper edition of his Blue Fairy Book (1889), that ‘the teller of marvellous tales to children’ appeals to a supposed desire to believe ‘that a thing exists or can happen in the real (primary) world’, and trades on a child’s ‘lack of experience which makes it less easy … to distinguish fact from fiction’ (p. 36). Instead, ‘what really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator”. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather, the art, has failed’ (pp. 36–7).

As for himself as a child, his reactions to stories were not those described by Lang:

Belief depended on the way in which stories were presented to me, by older people, or the authors, or on the inherent tone and quality of the tale. But at no time can I remember that the enjoyment of a story was dependent on belief that such things could happen, or had happened in ‘real life’. Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it, while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded …. I never imagined that the dragon was of the same order as the horse …. The dragon had the trade-mark Of Faërie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie. I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood …. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril. [pp. 39–40]

Some children may like fairy-stories, he argues, not because they are children, but because they are human, and fairy-stories are a natural though not a universal human taste. But ‘if fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults’ (p. 43).

Tolkien finds four particular values and functions in fairy-stories as adult reading. The first is Fantasy, which he uses to describe the successful achievement of ‘the inner consistency of reality’ (p. 44), which commands belief in a Secondary World. To succeed in making such a world demands much labour and skill, and is best achieved by words, not by visible arts such as painting, or by *drama. He contrasts the limitations of the latter with ‘Faërian Drama’ which

can produce Fantasy with a realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism. As a result their usual effect (upon a man) is to go beyond Secondary Belief. If you are present at a Faërian drama you yourself are, or think that you are, bodily inside its Secondary World … in a dream that some other mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your grasp. To experience Directly a Secondary World: the potion is too strong, and you give to it Primary Belief …. [pp. 48–9]

Tolkien defends Fantasy from those who would call it childish folly by quoting from his poem *Mythopoeia an extract in which he declares the right of Man, made in the image of his Creator, to sub-create in turn and fill the world with Elves, Goblins, dragons, and the like. He declares Fantasy to be ‘a natural human activity’ (p. 51), and in no way opposed to Reason.

The second value is *Recovery. Man is heir ‘in enjoyment or in practice of many generations of ancestors in the arts. In this inheritance of wealth there may be a danger of boredom or of anxiety to be original …’ (p. 53). Fairy-story and Fantasy help us to achieve Recovery, because they allow us to look again at things we think we know, see them in a new way, regain a freshness of vision.

*Escape is another important function of fairy-story, but many critics who describe fairy-stories as ‘escapist’ use that term in a derogatory sense, and consider those who read such tales as unable to face ‘real life’. Tolkien argues that such critics ‘are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter’ (p. 56). They consider a tale worthwhile only if it embraces all of the details of modern life: factories, ugly street-lamps, the noise of traffic, the latest and soon obsolete invention. Tolkien points out that a desire to escape from such transitory things to the more enduring is often accompanied by other emotions, ‘Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt’ (p. 56). He remarks sarcastically: ‘How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm-tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!’ (p. 57). There are worse things from which one might want to escape: ‘hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death’ (p. 60). The ‘oldest and deepest desire’ of all is the Escape from Death, and yet fairy-stories teach the burden of ‘immortality, or rather endless serial living’ (p. 62; see also *Mortality and immortality).

But the most important value offered by fairy-stories is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Tolkien coins a new word to describe it: *Eucatastrophe, ‘the joy of the happy ending; or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ …. In its fairy-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dycatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance …’ (p. 62).

In an ‘epilogue’ Tolkien suggests that a work which achieves an ‘inner consistency of reality’ must in some way ‘partake of reality’, and ‘the peculiar quality of the “joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth …. It may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world’ (p. 64). Tolkien applies this to the story of Christ: ‘the Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories’, one which ‘has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfilment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s History’ (p. 65).

HISTORY

In June 1938 the Faculty of Arts of the University of St Andrews (*Scotland) recommended to the Senatus Accademius the names of three candidates to deliver the next three Andrew Lang Lectures. Tolkien was chosen for the 1941 lecture, his name having been put forward probably by T.M. Knox, then Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews but earlier associated with Jesus College, Oxford, and a former pupil of *R.G. Collingwood. Tolkien later sent Knox a copy of Essays Presented to Charles Williams (including On Fairy-Stories) with a covering letter in which he begged Knox to accept his gift ‘at the least in memory of your kind hospitality [presumably at the time of the lecture], and (I suspect) your part in obtaining for me not only an undeserved honour, but a glimpse of St Andrews’ (reproduced in Meic Pierce Owen, ‘Tolkien and St Andrews’, University of St Andrews Staff Newsletter, January 2004, p. 1). When neither of the first two candidates – Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, and Lord Hugh Macmillan – were able to accept for the most immediate lecture, the Senatus voted, on 7 October 1938, to ask Tolkien to do so.

Andrew Bennett, Secretary to the University, wrote to him on 8 October 1938, inviting him to deliver the Andrew Lang Lecture for the current academic year and offering a stipend of £30. The subject of the talk was to be either ‘Andrew Lang and His Work’ or one of the many subjects on which Lang wrote. By preference, the lecture was to be delivered in November or December 1938, but a date in January or February 1939 was also possible. Tolkien’s letter of acceptance does not survive, but was acknowledged on 14 October. The Secretary having heard nothing more concerning either the subject chosen or a suggested date, wrote again to Tolkien on 18 January 1939. Tolkien replied on 1 February that his chosen topic was ‘Fairy-stories’ and suggested 8 March for its delivery.

Tolkien had little time to prepare the lecture before its delivery at St Andrews on 8 March 1939, but already had given thought to the subject. Probably towards the end of 1937 he was invited by the Lovelace Society at Worcester College, *Oxford to read a paper at a meeting of 14 February 1938. In a letter to C.A. Furth of George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers) on 24 July 1938, Tolkien said that he had rewritten *Farmer Giles of Ham the preceding January ‘and read it to the Lovelace Society in lieu of a paper “on” fairy stories’ (Letters, p. 39). It seems likely that he did not give a paper on fairy-stories on that occasion, because he found that he did not have enough time to write one, or to finish writing, and it was easier in the event to revise Farmer Giles of Ham, a version of which was already in hand.

Drafts for the lecture preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives) show that Tolkien drew upon resources that became available only after he accepted the invitation, and evidently worked on his text until the eleventh hour. He included several references to The Coloured Lands by *G.K. Chesterton, which was published in November 1938; and it seems likely that a comment in the second version of the lecture was inspired by a letter of 11 February 1939 to Tolkien from C.A. Furth, who found Farmer Giles of Ham hard to categorize for a prospective market. (‘Grown-ups writing fairy-stories for grown-ups’, Tolkien wrote, ‘are not popular with publishers or booksellers. They have got to find a niche. To call their works fairy-tales places them at once as juvenilia; but if a glance at their contents shows that that will not do, then where are you? This is what is called a “marketing problem”’ (Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford).)

Notes and working papers, as well as citations of many tales and authorities within the lecture, indicate that Tolkien did a considerable amount of background reading. It is also clear from his drafts that composition of the lecture did not come smoothly. After writing a first text, Tolkien decided that it needed revision and reorganization and wrote a second version, reusing some of the pages from the first. Both versions are heavily marked with revisions, and neither seems suitable as a reading copy for the actual lecture at St Andrews; it seems, in fact, that the text delivered in 1939 has not survived. One can say for sure, as Tolkien does in an introductory paragraph to On Fairy-Stories in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, only that the 1939 text was ‘abbreviated’ relative to that of 1947. The earlier papers contain nothing about eucatastrophe, or any of the material contained in the published ‘epilogue’. It is certainly significant that a lengthy summary of the lecture in the St Andrews Citizen for 11 March 1939 makes no mention of ‘eucatastrophe’ or any reference to Christianity (‘Andrew Lang’s Unrivalled Fairy Stories: Oxford Professor’s St Andrews Address’, p. 6).

The rough handwriting and frequent emendation of the On Fairy-Stories manuscripts, together with many miscellaneous notes and memoranda of various dates in the Bodleian papers, make it hard to trace the history of writing of the lecture. But much evidence exists, both among and outside of the preserved papers, to show that Tolkien returned to On Fairy-Stories only a few years later, revising and enlarging it, now including the ‘epilogue’. The first reasonably legible and continuous surviving manuscript (though still with many deletions and replacements) cannot be earlier than 1943, since it contains a new reference that a story about the Archbishop of Canterbury slipping on a banana skin might be disbelieved if it was said to have taken place between 1940 and 1943 (1940 and 1945). Drafting for this is on the verso of a sheet referring to cadets whom Tolkien taught at Oxford beginning in spring 1943.

It may be that Tolkien was inspired to look at On Fairy-Stories again after being appointed on 4 December 1942 an examiner of the B.Litt. thesis of *Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang as a Writer of Fairy Tales and Romances. Tolkien drafted a new introductory paragraph for the lecture on an unused calendar page for 16–22 August 1943, where it is said that only ‘some part’ of On Fairy-Stories ‘was actually delivered [at St Andrews]. Its present form is somewhat enlarged … and … made longer and I hope clearer than the lecture’ (Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford). In a letter to his son Christopher in 1944, Tolkien wrote, after giving an account of a miracle: ‘And all of a sudden I realized what it was: the very thing that I have been trying to write about and explain – in that fairy-story essay that I so much wish you had read that I think I shall send it to you. For it I coined the word “eucatastrophe” …’ (7–8 November 1944, Letters, p. 100).

Circumstantial evidence that Tolkien was working on the lecture, and perhaps reading it to or discussing it with the *Inklings, is contained in a letter by *C.S. Lewis to Gerald Hayes on 12 March 1943, defending his taste for works such the Morte Darthur, The Faerie Queene, Arcadia, the High History of the Holy Grail, and the prose romances of William Morris. ‘But ought we not both to defend our tastes more stoutly?’ he wrote. ‘To all this about being “grown up” may we not answer that the desire to be grown up is itself intrinsically puerile but the love of “fine fabling” is not. These books were written neither by children nor for children. Because they are now out of fashion they have gravitated to the nursery as the old furniture has – the same is true of fairy-tales themselves’ (Collected Letters, vol. 2 (2004), pp. 562–3). There are similar statements by Tolkien in versions of the essay. By 5 August 1943 *Charles Williams had arranged for the newest version to be typed by his friend Margaret Douglas, and on that date she wrote to a friend that she had agreed to type the lengthy essay and that Tolkien’s handwriting was difficult to read.

In late 1944, with the prospect that Williams would soon be leaving Oxford for the London office of Oxford University Press, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis began to organize a Festschrift to honour Williams’ work for Oxford University. When Williams died unexpectedly on 15 May 1945, the Festschrift became a memorial volume. Tolkien’s contribution, On Fairy-Stories, needed only a few emendations to the carbon copy of the typescript made by Margaret Douglas.

Tolkien felt that the ideas he developed in On Fairy-Stories had influenced the writing of *The Lord of the Rings, and said so in letters at least as early to correspondents including Peter Hastings (September 1954) and Dora Marshall (3 March 1955). In a letter to *W.H. Auden on 7 June 1955 he complained that Oxford University Press had ‘most scurvily’ allowed the lecture (in Essays Presented to Charles Williams) to go out of print (Letters, p. 216). But Allen & Unwin were eager to publish it themselves, perhaps as a small book if Tolkien could expand it by about half and remove references that revealed its origin as a lecture. In August 1959 Tolkien signed a contract with Allen & Unwin for publication of an expanded version of On Fairy-Stories, which he hoped to have ready by the end of the year; in the event, the idea lay dormant until 1963, when Tolkien and *Rayner Unwin discussed the possibility of publishing On Fairy-Stories to keep Tolkien’s name in the public eye while he continued to work on *The Silmarillion. At length it was decided to publish the lecture together with the story *Leaf by Niggle in a new volume, *Tree and Leaf.

In 2008 On Fairy-Stories was published by HarperCollins, London, in an ‘expanded edition’ as Tolkien on Fairy-Stories, with commentary and notes by editors Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. The essay proper was reprinted ‘in its final form as edited by Christopher Tolkien and published in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays’ (p. 27). With this are partial transcriptions, edited to form ‘a readable text’, of the two manuscript versions we refer to in the present article (numerous extracts also appear in Reader’s Companion); editors’ introductions and annotations; and a comparison of the essay as published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams with that published in Tree and Leaf (similar to the analysis in Descriptive Bibliography, pp. 184, 186–9).

CRITICISM

Published on 4 December 1947, Essays Presented to Charles Williams received few reviews. The anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement commented that ‘some of the contributors … present their ideas of what story should be. None of them hazards a definition, although Mr. J.R.R. Tolkein [sic], who has a decided conception of what a fairy-story should be, gets nearest to a prescription’ (‘Telling Stories’, 19 June 1948, p. 345).

On Fairy-Stories received more attention in 1964 when it was published in Tree and Leaf, and since then has been widely cited (if not extensively discussed) in most books concerning Tolkien, as well as in writings about children’s literature and fantasy fiction. Folklore scholar K.M. Briggs disagreed with Tolkien’s ‘belief, which is shared by a good many well-informed people, that the tiny fairies came into folk-tradition from literature in the sixteenth century. It was actually the other way round, and they first entered literature from that time; but he is of course right in maintaining that diminutiveness is not an essential part of fairy nature’ (Folklore 75 (Winter 1964), pp. 293–4). When Tolkien expresses his distrust of ‘the classification of tales’ he ‘puts his finger upon an insensitiveness to the essence of a story which is apt to overtake the classifier, anxious to find a home for the rebellious original theme’. Some form of classification of the thousands of stories is needed, but in ‘our anxious efforts to preserve, to classify, let us not forget that the stories we study were invented and handed down for the sake of delight and enlargement of spirit. Such an essay as this of Professor Tolkien’s is a timely and permanent reminder of the delight that lies behind our occupation’ (p. 294).

In a review of the expanded edition of On Fairy-Stories for Mythlore 27, nos. 1/2, whole nos. 103/104 (Fall/Winter 2008) Jason Fisher praised the amount of previously unpublished working texts and information, but noted consistent errors in page references in commentaries to the working manuscripts, and found the two bibliographies and the index to be idiosyncratic. He also felt ‘that while the editors do a great deal to intercontextualize “On Fairy-Stories” with other works in the critical and literary milieu to which it belongs, they do less than they might have to intracontextualize it with the larger body of Tolkien’s own work, especially (but not exclusively) his fiction’ (p. 183).

Douglas A. Anderson, co-editor of the expanded edition, published a set of corrections to its hardback and paperback printings on his Tolkien and Fantasy blog, 31 March 2015.

See further, Robert J. Reilly, ‘Tolkien and the Fairy Story’, in Tolkien and the Critics: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, ed. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (1968); Chris Seeman, ‘Tolkien’s Revision of the Romantic Tradition’, in Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Conference 1992, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight (1995); James V. Schall, S.J., ‘On the Realities of Fantasy’, in Tolkien: A Celebration: Collected Writings on a Literary Legacy, ed. Joseph Pearce (1999); and essays in Hither Shore 12 (2015). On the background to the study of folk- and fairy-tales as touched on in On Fairy-Stories, see Verlyn Flieger, ‘“There Would Always Be a Fairy-tale”: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Folklore Controversy’, Tolkien the Medievalist (2003).

See also *Escape; *Eucatastrophe; *Fairy-stories; *Recovery; *Sub-creation.

On ‘The Kalevala’ or Land of Heroes. Two versions of a paper on the Kalevala, delivered by Tolkien to the Sundial Society at Corpus Christi College, *Oxford on 22 November 1914 and to the Exeter College Essay Club (*Societies and clubs) in February 1915, together with a revised text of the early 1920s, first published complete, with The Story of Kullervo (see *Kalevala), in Tolkien Studies 7 (2010), pp. 211–78, edited by Verlyn Flieger, and later in book form in *The Story of Kullervo (2015), also edited by Verlyn Flieger, pp. 63–131 including editorial introduction, notes, and commentary. Short extracts from the essays were first included in the original edition of the Companion and Guide.

THE FIRST VERSION

The earlier of the two versions is a rough manuscript in pencil, overwritten in ink, considerably reworked with deletions and sections reordered. It begins: ‘I am afraid this paper was not originally written for this society, which I hope it will pardon since I produce it mainly to form a stop-gap tonight, to entertain you as far as possible in spite of the sudden collapse of the intended reader’ (The Story of Kullervo, p. 67). While Tolkien’s friend *G.B. Smith, a student at Corpus Christi College, might have suggested Tolkien as a stop-gap, the minute book of the Sundial Society gives no indication of an unexpected change of speaker, recording only that the title of Tolkien’s talk was The Finnish National Epic. No record survives of the Exeter College reading.

The underlying pencil version might have been that given to the Sundial Society, and the rewriting and reworking in ink done for Exeter College, but the latter work seems extensive for a ‘stop-gap’ paper. The ink manuscript, which refers to the Saxons as the enemy and Russia as an ally of Britain, certainly dates from the First World War. Some support for an earlier date for the pencil text or for a lost earlier version, and at least some passage of time, is given in the second paragraph: ‘If I continually drop into talking as if no one in the room had read these poems before, it is because no one had, when I first read it …’ (p. 67).

In the first part of the paper Tolkien discusses why he likes the Kalevala. Its poems are literature ‘so very unlike any of the things that are familiar to general readers, or even to those versed in the more curious by paths’, coming from Classic, Celtic, and Teutonic sources (‘I put these in order of increasing appeal to myself’), which in spite of differences imply ‘something kindred in the imagination of the speakers of Indo-European languages’ (pp. 67–8). ‘When I first read the Kalevala’, he continued, ‘that is, crossed the gulf between the Indo-European-speaking peoples of Europe into this smaller realm of those who cling in queer corners to the forgotten tongues and memories of an elder day’, the newness worried him, yet the more he read, the more he felt at home and enjoyed it. ‘When H[onour]Mod[eration]s should have been occupying all my forces I once made a wild assault on the stronghold of the original language [Finnish] and was repulsed at first with heavy losses’ (p. 69).

He admits that ‘heroes of the Kalevala do behave with a singular lack of conventional dignity and with a readiness for tears and dirty dealing’, and that its lovers ‘are forward and take a great deal of rebuffing. There is no Troilus to need a Pandarus to do his shy wooing for him: rather here it is the mothers-in-law who do some sound bargaining behind the scenes and give cynical advice to their daughters calculated to shatter the most stout illusions’ (p. 70).

Although the work is often described as ‘the national Finnish epic’, it is not an epic, but rather

a mass of conceivably epic material: but … it would lose all that which is its greatest delight if it were ever to be epically handled. The main stories, the bare events, alone could remain; all that underworld, all that rich profusion and luxuriance which clothe them would be stripped away ….

We have here then a collection of mythological ballads full of that very primitive undergrowth that the litterature [sic] of Europe has on the whole been cutting away and reducing for centuries with different and earlier completeness in different peoples …. Therefore let us rather rejoice that we have come suddenly upon a storehouse of those popular imaginings which we had feared lost, stocked with stories as yet not sophisticated into a sense of proportion; with no thought of the decent limits of exaggeration …. [pp. 70–72]

Both the Kalevala and the Mabinogion (*Celtic influences) delight in a good story and in exaggeration, but the former pays no attention to plausibility and has no feel of a background of literary tradition. To Tolkien, in the Kalevala ‘the colours, the deeds, the marvels, and the figures of the heroes are all splashed onto a clean bare canvas by a sudden hand: even the legends concerning the origins of the most ancient things seem to come fresh from the singer’s hot imagination of the moment’ (p. 73).

In the second part of the paper Tolkien provides details of Finnish history and the transmission of its songs and ballads, and of Elias Lönnrot’s forming of the Kalevala. This is followed in the third part by a discussion of the Finnish language, which ‘makes a strong bid for the place of most difficult in Europe’ (p. 76), and of the metre of the poems. He mentions that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow pirated the metre and some incidents for his poem Hiawatha.

In the fourth part he describes the religion of the Kalevala as ‘a luxuriant animism – it can hardly be separated from the purely mythological: this means that in the Kalevala every stock and stone, every tree, the birds, waves, hills, air, the tables, swords and the beer even have well defined personalities’, and may speak (p. 80). In addition, ‘every tree wave and hill again has its nymph and spirit’ (p. 81), and there is a ‘jumble of gods great and small’ (p. 82).

In the fifth part Tolkien notes that Finland is also known as the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, and that the Kalevala describes a land of lakes and marshes and trees, and a fauna including bears, wolves, and subarctic animals. The customs and social relationships of its people are strange – travelling in sleighs, walking on snowshoes, the sauna or bath-house, and mothers who are very powerful. Characters sometimes travel north ‘to Pohja, a mirky misty northland country … whence magic comes and all manner of marvels’ (p. 85).

In the sixth part Tolkien mentions ‘some very curious tricks’ which add colour to the verse. After a statement in one line, ‘the next line contains a great enlargement of it, often with reckless alteration of detail or of fact: colours, metals, names are piled up not for their distinct representation of ideas so much as just for the emotional effect. There is a strange and often effectively lavish use of the words gold and silver, and honey, which are strewn up and down the lines’ (pp. 85–6). He notes many, sometimes lengthy, incantations. There is a certain amount of humour, and those with ‘dulled vision’ may laugh at the simplicity of some passages. But there are also ‘passages which are not only entertaining stories of magic and adventure, quaint myths, or legend; but which are truly lyrical and delightful even in translation’ (pp. 86–7). The formal text ends with this part, but is followed by a list of passages to be read.

THE SECOND VERSION

The second version of the paper survives in an unfinished typescript with the title The Kalevala. In the first edition of our Chronology, based on our examination of these works in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives), we dated the typescript to ?1921–?1924, when Tolkien was teaching at *Leeds; Verlyn Flieger (in both 2010 and 2015) questions this range of dates, preferring 1919–21. We stand by our reasoning, however, which is as follows. A reference in the typescript version (not in the manuscript first version) to the ‘late war’, that is the First World War, takes it to after 1918, while a reference to the League of Nations (in relation to the Kalevala being called the Finnish National Epic – ‘as if it was of the nature of the universe that every nation …, besides a national bank, and government, should before qualifying for membership of the League, show lawful possession also of a National Epic’, p. 103) moves it further to no earlier than 1920. (The League of Nations was created in the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, but the Treaty did not go into effect until 10 January 1920, the first meeting of the League council was not until 16 January 1920, and the first General Assembly meeting did not occur until 15 November 1920.) The typescript (only) also refers to the recording of the Kalevala a century earlier, and Lönnrot began his work in the 1820s. ‘?1921–?1924’ seemed, and seems, a reasonable period for this version of the talk. Like the manuscript, it refers to Petrograd, which was renamed Leningrad in 1924.

The typescript, which unlike the first version is not divided into parts, breaks off halfway through the manuscript’s Part V, before reaching a discussion of customs and social relationships. With some reordering it makes much the same points as the manuscript, but at more than double the length for the extent it covers. The whole is subject to minor additions and improved phrasing, such as Tolkien’s summing up the cast of the Kalevala as ‘this race of unhypocritical low-brow scandalous heroes, and sadly unsentimental lovers’ (pp. 101–2), but mainly by the expansion of previous matter and the introduction of new topics.

Tolkien now says much more about the Mabinogion in comparing it with the Kalevala:

Of course in the Welsh tales there is often, indeed continually, in evidence the same delight in a picturesque lie, in a strong breathless flight of fancy; but paradoxically the Welsh tales are both far more absurd and far less so than the Finnish. They are far more absurd for they are (when we get them) less fresh than they once were; there is in many places a thick dust of a no longer understood tradition lying on them; strings of names and allusions that no longer have any meaning, that were already nonsense for the bards who related them …. Any one who wants to see what I mean has only to look at the catalogue of the heroes of Arthur’s court in the story of Kilhwch and Olwen, or the account of the feats that Kilhwch had to perform for the giant Yspaddaden Penkawr in order to win his daughter Olwen. There is little or nothing of this strange lumber in the Kalevala. On the other hand, the Welsh stories are far less absurd for the pictures painted have far more technique; their colours are cleverly, even marvellously schemed; their figures are cunningly grouped. The fairy-tale’s own plausibility is respected; if a man slays an impossible monster, the story holds firm to its lie. In the Land of Heroes a man may kill a gigantic elk in one line and find it poetic to call it a she-bear in the next. [pp. 107–8]

Tolkien also has more to say about paganism and Christianity, noting that the Finns were one of the last peoples of Europe to become Christian.

Today the Kalevala and its themes are still practically untouched by this influence, much less affected by it than the mythology of ancient Scandinavia as it appears in the Edda. Except in the story of the virgin Marjatta at the end, in a few references to Jumala or Ukko god of the Heavens, and so forth, even hints of the existence of Christianity are almost entirely absent; of its spirit there is nothing …. To this is of course largely ascribable the interesting primitiveness of the poems …. [pp. 110–11]

He defends the Kalevala against those who wonder about the genuineness of works so recently collected by declaring that its lateness is the reason it has not been ‘whitewashed, redecorated, upholstered in the eighteenth century manner’, or ‘roughly or moralistically handled’ (pp. 112–13).

There appears to be no evidence that the later version of the paper was delivered, but it was certainly tailored for delivery – even though, strangely, it begins with the introductory sentence about being a stop gap on the collapse of the proper speaker. It stops in mid-sentence at the bottom of a page. Perhaps Tolkien was updating it for himself, and in the latter part adding too much that he could not bear to omit.

It should be noted that a sentence added to the second version has had an unfortunate effect on Tolkien scholarship. In Biography Humphrey Carpenter wrote that in ‘a paper on the Kalevala [read] to a college society’ Tolkien

began to talk about the importance of the type of mythology found in the Finnish poems. ‘These mythological ballads,’ he said, ‘are full of that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries with different and earlier completeness among different people.’ And he added: ‘I would that we had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English.’ An exciting notion; and perhaps he was already thinking of creating that mythology for England himself. [p. 59]

The implication is that both sentences come from the paper Tolkien delivered at Oxford in 1914 and 1915 – words which have been frequently quoted in association with the earliest poems of his *‘Silmarillion’ mythology, and as written before he commenced *The Book of Lost Tales in which the history of the Elves has close ties with that of England. Although a variant of his first sentence (‘These mythological ballads …’) is in the paper as given in 1914/15, the second sentence appears only in the version of the 1920s (p. 105), after Tolkien had written and abandoned The Book of Lost Tales. He may, therefore, have thought about creating a ‘mythology for England’ in 1914, but he did not write ‘I would that we had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English’ until, as it seems, the early 1920s. Whatever his thought or intent, he had much less to work on than Lönnrot, and his ‘Silmarillion’ is almost an entirely new creation, incorporating only a few fragmentary remains of lost English tales and legends. Its main connection with England is the recording and transmission of the history of the Elves by a man of Anglo-Saxon race and, temporarily, Tol Eressëa physically becoming England (see further, entries for *The Book of Lost Tales and *England).

On Translating Beowulf

see Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of ‘Beowulf’

Once upon a Time. Poem, first published in *Winter’s Tales for Children 1 (1965), pp. 44–5. It was printed also in the expanded edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (2014), pp. 280–2.

In the first of three stanzas, ‘once upon a day on the fields of May’, Goldberry is ‘blowing away a dandelion clock’ and ‘stooping over a lily-pool’. In the second, ‘once upon a night in the cockshut light’, Tom walks ‘without boot or shoe, / with moonshine wetting his big brown toes’. In the third, ‘once upon a moon on the brink of June’, Tom speaks to the ‘lintips’, but they are ‘the only things that won’t talk to me, / say what they do or what they be.’ Goldberry and Tom (Bombadil) first appeared in the 1934 poem *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and later more famously in *The Lord of the Rings (1954–5).

Rhona Beare suggests in an unpublished lecture that the ‘lintips’ are a development from the tiny spirits depicted by Tolkien in *An Evening in Tavrobel, published in *Leeds University Verse 1914–24 (1924); the two poems share similar imagery, and there seems a strong possibility that Once upon a Time was developed from the earlier poem. This was done probably later than 1962, since Tolkien did not suggest the poem for inclusion in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962).

See further, Douglas A. Anderson, ‘The Mystery of Lintips’, Tolkien Fantasy blog, 22 July 2013; and Kris Swank, ‘Tom Bombadil’s Last Song: Tolkien’s “Once upon a Time”’, Tolkien Studies 10 (2013).

Onions, Charles Talbut (1873–1965). Following education at Mason College (later the University of Birmingham), C.T. Onions joined the staff of the *Oxford English Dictionary in 1895 as an assistant, first to Sir James A.H. Murray, and then to *Henry Bradley. He was co-editor from 1914 to 1933, during which period he and *Sir William Craigie brought the original OED to completion. Some of Tolkien’s work for the Dictionary was done under Onions’ supervision. In his *Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford Tolkien recalled his ‘first glimpse of the unique and dominant figure of Charles Talbut Onions, darkly surveying me, a fledgling prentice in the Dictionary Room’ in 1919. Onions was also responsible for the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1933) and the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966, with the assistance of *R.W. Burchfield), and produced a Shakespeare Glossary (1911, etc.) which was an offshoot of his work on the OED.

He was no less valuable to Oxford University Press as an advisor and editor concerned with Old and Middle English texts and readers. He revised Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader (1922, 1946, etc.), urged Tolkien to undertake an edition of *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925), and supported Tolkien and his collaborator *E.V. Gordon in disputes with the Press on the length and contents of Sir Gawain. From 1932 to 1956 he was editor of the distinguished journal of medieval studies Medium Ævum (latterly with *J.A.W. Bennett), and from 1944 to 1957 served on the Council of the Early English Text Society (*Societies and clubs), from 1945 as its Honorary Director.

Onions was also on the faculty of the Oxford English School, as Lecturer in English (1920–27) and Reader in English Philology (1927–49). He had therefore the added responsibilities of lectures to be delivered in term, notably on Middle English texts, and (often in company with Tolkien) administrative duties on the English Faculty Board and various committees. In 1923 he was made a fellow of Magdalen College. In 1925 he was an elector for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship when Tolkien was chosen for that chair. As a member of the Kolbítar (*Societies and clubs) Onions, like Tolkien, had the advantage of existing knowledge of Icelandic in translating the sagas and Eddas.

On 9 January 1965 Tolkien wrote to his son Michael: ‘My dear old protector, backer, and friend Dr C.T. Onions died on Friday at 91 1/3 years. I had not seen him for a long while. [Excepting Kenneth Sisam] he was the last of the people who were “English” at Oxford and at large when I entered the profession’ (Letters, p. 353).

According to Tom Shippey, C.T. Onions pronounced his surname not like the vegetable but ‘On-aye-ons’, and ‘unlike Tolkien he retained a Birmingham accent through his life’ (‘History in Words: Tolkien’s Ruling Passion’, in The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (2006), p. 26).

See further, J.A.W. Bennett, ‘Charles Talbut Onions, 1873–1965’, in Proceedings of the British Academy 65 (1979).

Orcs. Two essays, a note, and an extract, published with notes and commentary as texts VIII, IX, and X in the section ‘Myths Transformed’ of *Morgoth’s Ring (1993), pp. 408–24.

Text VIII is a short essay, entitled Orcs, which *Christopher Tolkien describes as ‘very much a record of “thinking with the pen”’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 409). The Orcs posed a major problem for Tolkien as he recognized at the beginning of the essay: ‘Their nature and origin require more thought. They are not easy to work into the theory and system …. As the case of Aulë and the Dwarves shows [see *‘Of Aulë and Yavanna’], only Eru could make creatures with independent wills, and with reasoning powers. But Orcs seem to have both …’ (p. 409). In September 1954 Tolkien had written to Peter Hastings that because Eru had given

special ‘sub-creative’ powers to certain of His highest created beings: that is a guarantee that what they devised and made should be given the reality of Creation. Of course within limits, and of course subject to certain commands or prohibitions. But if they ‘fell’, as the Diabolus Morgoth did, and started making things ‘for himself, to be their Lord’, these would then ‘be’ real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove …. They would be … creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote ‘irredeemably bad’; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God’s and ultimately good.) But whether they could have ‘souls’ or ‘spirits’ seems a different question; and since in my myth at any rate I do not conceive of the making of souls or spirits, things of an equal order if not an equal power to the Valar, as a possible ‘delegation’, I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them. [Letters, p. 195]

In other words, the Orcs were not ‘made’ by Morgoth but only corrupted and, as Tolkien describes them elsewhere in the letter, ‘fundamentally a race of “rational incarnate” creatures’ (p. 190). The only question was whom or what had Morgoth corrupted to produce them.

Up until at least 1954 Tolkien’s solution was that Morgoth transformed captured Elves into Orcs. Towards the end of the 1950s his opinion seems to have shifted, however, to the idea that Orcs had been bred from both Elves and Men, but primarily Men (see *Notes on Motives in the Silmarillion, another of the texts in ‘Myths Transformed’). Probably at this time he also added a note in the Annals of Aman (*Annals of Valinor), originally written c. 1951, beside a statement that Orcs were believed to be corrupted Elves: ‘Alter this. Orcs are not Elvish’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 80). In the present essay, which dates probably from 1959, he now considered other possibilities for the origin of Orcs, and ultimately decided that ‘“talking” is not necessarily the sign of the possession of a “rational soul”’, and therefore Orcs were ‘beasts of humanized shape (to mock Men and Elves) deliberately perverted/converted into a more close resemblance to Men’ (p. 410) – though possibly there was an Elvish or Mannish strain also.

In the untitled text IX, undated but probably from also from the late 1950s, Tolkien reiterated: ‘One point only is certain: Melkor could not “create” living “creatures” of independent wills’ (p. 413). He decided that Orcs had a mixed origin, not only from corruptions of Elves and Men, but also from corrupted minor spirits.

Text X contains the first two paragraphs of Appendix C of *Quendi and Eldar, ‘Elvish Names for Orcs’, and another essay entitled Orcs. Both probably date from 1959–60. Deliberately bypassing the question of the ultimate origin of Orcs, the extract describes them as bred by Morgoth in ‘mockery of the Children of Ilúvatar, wholly subservient to his will, and nursed in an unappeasable hatred of Elves and Men’. Nevertheless they are ‘living creatures, capable of speech and of some crafts and organization, or at least capable of learning such things from higher creatures or from their Master’ (p. 416). But it was unlikely that the Eldar had met any orcs before they began their march into the West.

This seems to have led Tolkien to compose on his typewriter a four-page essay on Orcs, which he attached to Quendi and Eldar. Prior to Tolkien’s proposed revision of the cosmology of Arda in the late 1950s, Men awoke only with the rising of the Sun, formed from the last fruit of the tree Laurelin after the destruction of the Two Trees, and therefore could not have been corrupted to form Orcs, who were abundant in Middle-earth before this event. But once the Sun was conceived as having been in existence since the beginning, the awakening of Men could be placed far back in the history of Middle-earth, though not, Tolkien decided, before most of the Elves followed Oromë on the Great March to the West. This, however, also posed a chronological problem, since Melkor had been taken prisoner to Aman before the March began. Orcs, like Men, were short-lived; and ‘it became clear in time that undoubted Men could under the domination of Morgoth or his agents in a few generations be reduced almost to the Orc-level of mind and habits’ (p. 418).

In the essay Tolkien seems also to be trying to explain why Orcs were treated differently from other servants of Morgoth or Sauron:

Though of necessity, being fingers of the hand of Morgoth, they must be fought with the utmost severity, they must not be dealt with in their own terms of cruelty and treachery. Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost. ([footnote:] Few Orcs ever did so in the Elder Days, and at no time would any Orc treat with any Elf ….] [p. 419]

The essay continues with a discussion of Orcs in the Second and Third Ages under Sauron, who ‘achieved even greater control over his Orcs than Morgoth had done’ (p. 419). This suggests a solution to the chronological problem: the idea of breeding Orcs came from Morgoth, but the accomplishment was left to Sauron, who was able to continue with the programme in the long years of Morgoth’s captivity in Aman.

Accompanying one copy of the typescript of text X are two notes written almost a decade later on versos of papers dated 10 November 1969. One discusses the spelling orc versus ork, the other the ability of Morgoth to reduce Orcs to ‘puppets’ but at a great expense of his power, and therefore this was the case for only a small part of their numbers.

Ósanwe-kenta see Quendi and Eldar

Otley (Yorkshire). From mid-April to mid-May 1916 Tolkien took an army course at the Northern Command and Ripon Training Centre Signalling School, based in Farnley Park, Otley, a market town north-west of *Leeds. Within the park is Farnley Hall, built in 1581 with an eighteenth-century addition.

Otsan. List, detailing the week as defined by the Elves, published as part of ‘Otsan and Kainendan’, pp. 16–22 in ‘Early Qenya Fragments’ in Parma Eldalamberon 14 (2003), edited with commentary and notes by Patrick Wynne and Christopher Gilson.

The full title of the list is The Otsan or Otsola (oglad) of the Elves. In this the Qenya (later Quenya, see *Languages, Invented) names for a seven-day week, derived from terms in the *Qenyaqetsa, are equated to English names, and each is also associated with names and domains of responsibility of the Valar (or Children of the Valar). Wednesday, the first day of the week, is linked to Manwë and Varda, perhaps ‘to create an association between Manwe, Lord of the Valar, and Woden (Odin), chief of the Germanic gods after whom Wednesday is named … while still according Manwe the honour of having his day come first in the week’ (pp. 19–20).

Tolkien wrote the list on a loose leaf which he laid into a notebook associated with *The Book of Lost Tales, and referred to it in another Lost Tales notebook from 1916–17.

See also *Kainendan.

Outline of Phonology see Quenya: Outline of Phonology

Over Old Hills and Far Away. Poem, published in *The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (1983), pp. 108–10.

The poet is lured from his bed by the sound of a flute. He finds Tinfang Warble (cf. *Tinfang Warble) ‘dancing there, / Fluting and tossing his old white hair, Till it sparkled like frost in a winter moon’; but the piper slips ‘through the reeds like a mist in the glade’. The poet follows ‘the hoot’ of a ‘twilight flute’ ‘over old hills and far away / Where the harps of the Elvenfolk softly play’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, pp. 109–10).

The poem exists in five texts, the latest of which was published in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One together with selected earlier readings. According to an apparently contemporaneous note on an early manuscript of the poem, Tolkien composed Over Old Hills and Far Away in January–February 1916; at the time, he was in Brocton army camp, *Staffordshire. A later manuscript, however, is inscribed by Tolkien ‘Brocton Camp, Christ[mas]–Jan[uary] 1915–16’, while another, presumed to be the latest version, is marked ‘Brocton 1916? Oxford 1927’, suggesting revision after Tolkien had returned to Oxford; but the latter inscription is struck through.

Oxford and environs. The city of Oxford, where Tolkien lived and worked for most of his life, lies north-west of London at the meeting place of two rivers, the Cherwell and the Isis (as the upper part of the Thames is known locally). A settlement existed there as early as the eighth century, by a ford used for oxen, hence Oxford, and a town was established by the year 912. Oxford received its city charter in 1155. It became an important crossroads, and trade flourished. The University of Oxford grew up there in the twelfth century.

The importance of Oxford (the place) in Tolkien’s life has demanded that it be treated in detail, and it has been most convenient to divide this treatment into three parts: one concerned with Tolkien’s homes in Oxford, a second with buildings, businesses, colleges, and other features within central Oxford, and a third with places that Tolkien knew near Oxford but which are outside the city proper. The history and operation of the University of Oxford are discussed in a separate entry, *Oxford, University of.

TOLKIEN’S OXFORD HOMES

Tolkien went up to Exeter College in Michaelmas Term 1911. Until the end of Trinity Term 1914 he lived in a building called ‘Swiss Cottage’, which looked out on Turl Street at the Broad Street end; see his sketch Turl Street, Oxford in Artist and Illustrator, fig. 19, and his cover for an ‘Exeter College Smoker’ programme reproduced in Life and Legend, p. 26, and The Tolkien Family Album, p. 32. He had a bedroom and a sitting-room, in his first year (1911–12) at no. 7 on the no. 8 staircase, and afterward moved to no. 9 on the no. 7 staircase. He paid rent for these rooms as well as a fee for the hire of furniture. ‘Swiss Cottage’ seems to have been so named because it had a gable and exposed timber frame reminiscent of Swiss architecture. Its construction reused elements of the Prideaux Buildings, built in 1620 and demolished in 1856. A photograph of these buildings is reproduced on p. 38, and one of the ‘Swiss Cottage’ on p. 40, in Frances Cairncross, ed., Exeter College: The First 700 Years (2013); the latter is also reproduced in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 20. ‘Swiss Cottage’ was later replaced by the building today occupied by the specialist art bookshop operated by Blackwell’s.

During the academic year 1914–15 Tolkien shared rooms at 59 St John Street with his friend *Colin Cullis. St John Street connects Wellington Square with Beaumont Street, west of and parallel to St Giles’. Tolkien found living there ‘a delicious joy compared with the primitive life of college’ (quoted in Biography, p. 72). It was at this address that he wrote, at least, the poems You & Me and the Cottage of Lost Play (*The Little House of Lost Play: Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva) and *Goblin Feet.

In late 1918, Tolkien having accepted an offer to join the staff of the New English Dictionary (*Oxford English Dictionary), he and his wife *Edith, their son *John, and Edith’s cousin *Jennie Grove moved into rooms at 50 St John Street let by a Miss Mahon. From there it was only a short walk to the Old Ashmolean (see below) in Broad Street, where the Oxford English Dictionary editorial offices were located.

In late summer 1919, his income at last sufficient to rent a small house, Tolkien moved with his family to 1 Alfred Street (Pusey Street). Alfred Street connects St John Street and St Giles’; it was renamed Pusey Street in 1925. A photograph of 1 Alfred Street at that time is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 43. John Tolkien recalled the boyhood sight of elephants in the St Giles’ Fair led down Alfred Street for morning exercise: as they passed the Tolkiens’ dining-room window ‘they blocked out the light’ (The Tolkien Family Album, p. 43). In early 1921 the family moved to *Leeds, Tolkien having taken up the Readership in English Language at the University in October 1920.

Although Tolkien became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford as of Michaelmas Term 1925, it was not until 7 January 1926 that he and his family moved into their next Oxford home. This was at 22 Northmoor Road in North Oxford, ‘L-shaped and of pale brick, with one wing running towards the road’ (Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 113). Photographs taken in its garden are reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, pp. 50–2. A small sketch by Tolkien of the front of 22 Northmoor Road is reproduced in Artist and Illustrator, fig. 77.

North Oxford is a residential suburb situated on land once owned largely by St John’s College, Oxford, extending (in one definition) from St Giles’ Church in the south to near Summertown in the north, and divided in the centre by the Woodstock and Banbury Roads. The College began to develop the property, meadows or pasture land beyond the built-up part of Oxford, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Northmoor Road, to the east of the Banbury Road, was built in the area known as the Bardwell Estate, the last substantial section of North Oxford to be developed by St John’s College, beginning in the 1890s, and a section reserved for the best class of houses. According to Tanis Hinchcliffe in North Oxford (1992),

by 1915 when the North Oxford estate was nearly complete, the suburb had been building for fifty years and the area had absorbed the middle-class suburban ethos. The sequestered character of the suburban village had combined with the necessary conformity of the inner suburb, to produce that peculiar character which displayed itself in retreat behind walls and hedges and a jealous concern for accepted norms, whether laid down by the landlord’s covenants or by local custom. [p. 87]

No. 1 Northmoor Road was first leased by the College in 1899. The first lease of no. 22, with Tolkien the original lessee, was recorded in 1925. No. 22 was designed by a local architect, Christopher Wright, who was also responsible for five other houses in the upper numbers in the road.

Edith Tolkien always thought no. 22 too small for their growing family, and with the arrival of a daughter, *Priscilla, in 1929 a larger house became a necessity. Fortunately in that year a neighbouring house became available, and on 14 January 1930 the Tolkiens moved to 20 Northmoor Road. ‘This second house was broad and grey, more imposing than its neighbour, with small leaded windows and a high slate roof’ (Biography, pp. 113–14). It had been built for Oxford bookseller and publisher *Basil Blackwell in 1924 by a local architect, Frederick E. Openshaw. Its rooms were not large, but there were many of them. The most exciting room in the house, as far as the Tolkien children were concerned, was their father’s study:

The walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling, and it contained a great black lead stove, the source of considerable drama every day …. The study was very much the centre of Ronald’s home life and the centre of his study was his desk. Over the years the top of his desk continued to show familiar landscapes: his dark brown wooden tobacco jar, a Toby jug containing pipes, and a large bowl into which the ash from his pipe was regularly knocked out,

as well as inks, sealing wax, coloured pencils, and tubes of paint (The Tolkien Family Album, pp. 55–6). In Humphrey Carpenter’s words, Tolkien’s study contained ‘a tunnel of books formed by a double row of bookcases, and it is not until the visitor emerges from this that the rest of the room becomes visible. There are windows on two sides, so that the room looks southwards towards a neighbouring garden and west towards the road. Tolkien’s desk is in the south-facing window’ (Biography, p. 116). Because he snored and kept late hours, Tolkien slept apart from his wife, in a bathroom-cum-dressing-room which looked east over the garden.

John and Priscilla Tolkien wrote that no. 20

was as much loved for its garden as for the house. John and Ronald worked at landscaping and redesigning the garden over many years, turning the rather decrepit tennis court at the top into a vegetable garden: an important asset during the war years that were to follow. Over the years we lived there the trees planted by the Blackwells grew almost to forest height. In a side garden, Edith had an aviary, in which budgerigars, canaries and other exotic birds lived during the summer months, being taken indoors for the winter. In war-time, the aviary was turned into a hen-house …. [The Tolkien Family Album, p. 55]

A photograph of the hens at 20 Northmoor Road is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 72. Although the house has no architectural significance, in 2004 it was given protected status as a Grade II listed building, on the basis of Tolkien’s importance as an author.

In 1933 Tolkien and his son John built a trellis in front of 20 Northmoor Road to at least partly screen their garden from the view of passers-by. In spring 1940 Tolkien drew a picture of the garden, with daffodils and a flowering Victoria Plum tree (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 3).

On 14 March 1947 the Tolkiens moved to a small house at 3 Manor Road owned by Merton College, of which Tolkien became a fellow in 1945. By this time, with only Priscilla among the children still living with her parents, 20 Northmoor Road had become too large and too costly to maintain. But in Manor Road Tolkien and Edith ‘found both house and garden cramped and claustrophobic after the spaciousness’ they had previously enjoyed (The Tolkien Family Album, p. 74). Tolkien described their Manor Road home in a letter to Sir Stanley Unwin as ‘a minute house near the centre of this town’ (5 May 1947, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). Manor Road runs east from St Cross Road towards the Cherwell, past the English Faculty Library and the Law Library. For lack of space Tolkien no longer had a proper study: he later remarked to his Aunt *Jane Neave that he had typed out the whole of *The Lord of the Rings twice, ‘mostly on my bed in the attic of the tiny terrace-house to which war had exiled us from the house in which my family grew up’ (8–9 September 1962, Letters, pp. 321–2). A photograph of Tolkien, Priscilla, *Christopher, and Edith in the garden of 3 Manor Road in 1949 is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 74. Austin and *Katharine Farrer were neighbours at 7 Manor Road.

In May 1950 Tolkien, Edith, and Priscilla moved not far away to a larger Merton College house at 99 Holywell Street which dated from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ‘The house had a small step up from the street and lay back at an angle …. Its small garden contained a hawthorn tree that attracted nuthatches and tree creepers, and the high wall at the back, dividing it from the gardens of New College, was part of the medieval wall of the city’ (The Tolkien Family Album, p. 74; photographs, pp. 74, 75). Tolkien again had room for a study, and could see his postgraduate students at home as well as in college. But by now Holywell Street, connecting Parks Road (near its intersection with Broad Street) and St Cross Road (near its intersection with Longwall Street), had become a major traffic route. On 24 October 1952 Tolkien wrote to *Rayner Unwin that his ‘charming house has become uninhabitable – unsleepable-in, unworkable-in, rocked, racked with noise, and drenched with fumes. Such is modern life. Mordor in our midst’ (Letters, p. 165).

On 30 March 1953 Tolkien and Edith moved to 76 Sandfield Road in Headington, east of the centre of Oxford; Priscilla by now had taken her degree and had left Oxford for Bristol. Holywell Street was abandoned in part on doctor’s orders: Edith’s increasing ill health required that she live in ‘a house on high dry soil and in the quiet’ (Tolkien, letter to Rayner Unwin, 24 March 1953, Letters, p. 166). Humphrey Carpenter describes 76 Sandfield Road in Biography as it looked in spring 1967: it was a long way down ‘a residential street of two-storey brick houses, each with its tidy front garden …. The house is painted white and is partially screened by a tall fence, a hedge, and overhanging trees.’ One entered through an arched gate – a photograph of Tolkien and Edith at the gate is reproduced in Biography, pl. 13 – and along a short path between rose bushes. The entrance hall was ‘small and tidy and contains nothing that one would not expect in the house of a middle-class elderly couple. *W.H. Auden, in an injudicious remark quoted in the newspapers, has called the house “hideous”, but that is nonsense. It is simply ordinary and suburban’ (Biography, pp. 3–4).

The house was small; it could not hold comfortably all of Tolkien’s books, most of which he had kept at Merton College but which on his retirement in 1959 he was obliged to remove. When he had filled his upstairs study–bedroom, he converted the (unoccupied) garage into a library-office. Humphrey Carpenter described the latter:

The shelves are crammed with dictionaries, works on etymology and philology, and editions of texts in many languages, predominant among which are Old and Middle English; but there is also a section devoted to translations of The Lord of the Rings …; and the map of his invented ‘Middle-earth’ is pinned to the window-ledge. On the floor is a very old portmanteau full of letters, and on the desk are ink-bottles, nibs and pen-holders, and two typewriters. The room smells of books and tobacco-smoke. [Biography, p. 4]

Tolkien himself wrote about it to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer on 8 February 1967:

May I say that it is not a ‘study’, except in domestic slang …. It was a hastily contrived necessity, when I was obliged to relinquish my room in college and provide a store for what I could preserve of my library. Most of the books of value have since been removed, and the most important contents are the rows of orderly files kept by my part-time secretary. She is the only regular user of the room. I have never written any literary matter in it. [Letters, p. 373]

Since there were only two rooms on the ground floor besides the kitchen, Tolkien converted a smaller bedroom into a study where he did his writing. (Under later ownership, the property was much altered and modernized. When it was offered for sale in 2017 it was described as containing five bedrooms, three bathrooms, and six reception rooms.)

The chief disadvantage of 76 Sandfield Road was that it was almost two miles from Oxford centre, a long journey for Tolkien while he was still the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature – and the same for family and friends to visit Sandfield Road. The size of the house was also a problem, demanding too many domestic chores of people in advanced years, even with daily help. Nor did the quiet that Tolkien and Edith found there in 1953 last more than a few years. As Tolkien wrote to Christopher Bretherton on 16 July 1964:

Sandfield Road was a cul-de-sac when I came here, but was soon opened at the bottom end, and became for a time an unofficial lorry by-pass, before Headley Way was completed. Now it is a car-park for the field of ‘Oxford United’ at the top end. While the actual inhabitants do all that radio, tele, dogs, scooters, buzzbikes, and cars of all sizes but the smallest, can do to produce noise from early morn to about 2 a.m. In addition in a house three doors away dwells a member of a group of young men who are evidently aiming to turn themselves into a Beatle Group. On days when it falls to his turn to have a practice session the noise is indescribable …. [Letters, pp. 344–5]

In mid-July 1968 Tolkien and Edith moved to a bungalow in *Poole, near *Bournemouth. Soon after Edith died in November 1971 Tolkien began to look for a place in Oxford, and in mid-January 1972 Christopher Tolkien wrote on behalf of his father to the Warden of Merton to ask if the College had any housing available. The Warden called a special meeting of Merton’s Governing Body, which unanimously voted that Tolkien should be invited to become a residential fellow. In this manner he was offered a set of rooms at 21 Merton Street, a road which runs south and west from the High Street past Merton College towards Corpus Christi and Christ Church Colleges. This proved an ideal arrangement, if short-lived: it was Tolkien’s final Oxford home before his death in 1973. On 24 January 1972 he wrote to his son Michael:

Merton has now provided [me] with a very excellent flat, which will probably accommodate the bulk of my surviving ‘library’. But wholly unexpected ‘strings’ are attached to this! (1) The rent will be ‘merely nominal’ – which means what it implies: something extremely small in comparison with actual market-value. (2) All or any furniture required will be provided free by the college – and a large Wilton carpet has already been assigned to me, covering the whole floor of a sitting room …. (3) Since 21 M[erton] St. is legally part of the college, domestic service is provided free: in the shape of a resident care-taker and his wife as housekeeper [*Charlie and Mavis Carr]. (4) I am entitled to free lunch and dinner throughout the year when in residence: both of a very high standard. This represents – allowing 9 weeks absence – an actual emolument of between £750 and £900 a year which the claws of the I[ncome] Taxgatherers have so far been driven off. (5) The college will provide free of rent two telephones: (a) for local calls, and calls to extensions, which are free, and (b) for long distance calls, which will have a private number and be paid by me. This will have the advantage that business and private calls to family and friends will not pass through the overworked lodge; but it will have the one snag that it will have to appear in the Telephone book, and cannot be ex-directory …. (6) No rates, and gas and electricity bills at a reduced scale. (7) The use of 2 beautiful common-rooms (at a distance of 100 yards) with free writing paper, free newspapers, and mid-morning coffee. It all sounds too good to be true – and of course it all depends on my health …. [Letters, pp. 415–16]

On 16 March 1972 Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin: ‘I am now at last … IN but not “settled” in [at 21 Merton Street] …. The great bank in the Fellows’ Garden looks like the foreground of a pre-Raphaelite picture: blazing green starred like the Milky Way with blue anemones, purple/white/yellow crocuses, and final surprise, clouded-yellow, peacock, and tortoiseshell butterflies flitting about’ (Letters, p. 417).

A photograph of the façade of 21 Merton Street is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 87.

CENTRAL OXFORD

Blackfriars. Blackfriars, the Priory of the Holy Spirit at 64 St Giles, was established in 1929 by Father Bede Jarrett as a House of Studies for the English Province of the Order of Preachers, better known as the Dominicans. The Order had arrived in Oxford as early as August 1221, only five years after its founding in 1216, and there established a priory and school of teaching. The school flourished during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but had declined by 1538 when the Order was suppressed by Henry VIII. The chapel and priory were designed by Edwin Doran Webb, the architect of the *Birmingham Oratory; the chapel was consecrated on 20 May 1929, but the priory buildings were not completed until 1954, though sufficiently advanced in 1929 for a small number of friars to take up residence. *Father Gervase Mathew was a member of the community.

On at least one occasion, in 1945, Tolkien served during Mass in the chapel. On 26 October 1966 he read his still unpublished *Smith of Wootton Major to so large an audience at Blackfriars ‘that the Refectory (a long hall as long as a church) had to be cleared and could not contain it. Arrangements for relay to passages outside had to be hastily made. I am told that more than 800 people gained admittance’ (letter to Michael George Tolkien (see *Michael Tolkien), 28 October 1966, Letters, pp. 370–1).

Blackwell’s Bookshop. The most famous of Oxford booksellers, founded in 1879. Since 1883 its main shop has been at 50 Broad Street, later expanded into nos. 48 and 49 and other buildings nearby. Tolkien was a frequent customer. In 1942 the chairman of the firm, Basil Blackwell, gracefully helped him settle an overdue account (see *Pearl). Tolkien also bought books from the now defunct Parker and Son, once in Broad Street at the present site of Blackwell’s art bookshop.

Bodleian Library. One of the oldest and most important libraries in the world, opened in 1602 through the generosity of Sir Thomas Bodley but on a foundation of books given to the University of Oxford from the early fourteenth century. It is one of six deposit libraries entitled to receive a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom. Its oldest buildings are located south of the Sheldonian Theatre and the Clarendon Building, around the Schools Quadrangle. A doorway on the west leads from the Quadrangle to the Proscholium and the Divinity School, constructed from about 1420 through most of the fifteenth century. Above these rooms are Duke Humfrey’s Library (begun 1444, completed 1488, refitted 1598–1602, named for the collection of manuscripts given by Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester) and its extensions Arts End (completed 1612) and Selden End (completed 1637). The Schools Quadrangle (built 1613–19) was originally a series of lecture-rooms with a picture gallery on the top floor, but was taken over by the Library for additional book storage and reading rooms beginning in 1789.

Tolkien used the Bodleian holdings on many occasions. Some of the works he consulted for *On Fairy-Stories are listed with the Bodleian shelfmarks in his notes for that essay. Among the Library’s rich manuscript holdings, MS Bodley 34 was of particular interest to Tolkien: this contains works in the Middle English *Katherine Group. As a member of the English Faculty Library Committee Tolkien advised the Bodleian Library regarding the purchase of foreign books and periodicals on English.

The Radcliffe Camera, a large circular building in Radcliffe Square south of the Schools Quadrangle, was designed by James Gibbs after Nicholas Hawksmoor and built as a general library in 1737–49 with money bequeathed by Dr John Radcliffe. It became a reading room of the Bodleian Library in 1862. Tolkien refers to the ‘Camera’ with its lofty dome in *The Notion Club Papers: it seems to remind Lowdham of the circular, domed temple that Sauron built in Númenor (as described in *The Drowning of Anadûnê and the *Akallabêth).

The New Bodleian Library, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, was built on the corner of Broad Street and Parks Road in 1937–40. This more modern building provided book storage, reading rooms, and staff offices to supplement the ‘old’ Bodleian across the street. Due to the Second World War it was not opened officially until 24 October 1946, by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth: Tolkien was present on that occasion, when the ceremonial key broke in the lock and someone had to open the door from the other side. During the war, the building was commandeered for other purposes, housing (for example) the Red Cross Educational Books Section which supplied books to British prisoners of war. The New Bodleian closed at the end of July 2011, and has since been redeveloped as the Weston Library; the new facility opened to special collections researchers in 2014, and to the public in 2015, with new exhibition facilities, shops, and a café. One of the two major collections of Tolkien manuscripts is housed there (see *Libraries and archives), including his academic working papers, some printed books from his personal library, family papers and correspondence, paintings and drawings, and manuscripts of most of his literary works except for those at Marquette University.

Botanic Garden. Founded in 1621 as the Oxford Physick Garden for the Faculty of Medicine, the Botanic Garden is located south of High Street across from *Magdalen College. In its grounds and greenhouses are a wide variety of cultivated plants, including some 150 trees of botanical interest. Tolkien’s rooms in Merton Street near the end of his life overlooked the Garden, to which he was a frequent visitor. In August 1973 he was photographed by his grandson Michael George (see *Michael Tolkien) next to one of his favourite trees, a Pinus nigra (Black or Austrian pine, see Biography, pl. 14b); and that month also he twice walked in the Garden with his friend *Joy Hill. In 2014 the Pinus nigra specimen, now more than 200 years old and considered totemic in Oxford, unfortunately became unsafe and had to be taken down.

Cherwell Edge. Built in 1886–7 in St Cross Road, Cherwell Edge was originally a private house, designed by J.W. Messenger. In 1905 it became a convent of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. In 1907 the Reverend Mother *St Teresa Gale established at Cherwell Edge a house of studies to bring the Society into contact with Oxford University standards of education. Under her guidance it became a centre of Catholic action in Oxford. A chapel and a large residential block (designed by Basil Champneys) were subsequently added to the house, the latter to serve as a hostel for Catholic women in the Society of Oxford Home-Students. *Susan Dagnall and *M.E. Griffiths, among many others, lodged there, and Tolkien is said to have been a friend and supporter of the establishment. In 1977 Cherwell Edge became part of Linacre College, and was later altered and further enlarged.

Clarendon Building. As a member of various boards and committees at Oxford, Tolkien attended numerous meetings in the Clarendon Building in Broad Street, opposite Blackwell’s Bookshop. The building (not open to tourists) was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and built in 1712–13 for the Oxford University Press (*Publishers); it was used for that purpose until 1829. During Tolkien’s time at Oxford the Clarendon Building contained University offices. It is now part of the Bodleian Library.

Corpus Christi College. Founded in 1517, Corpus Christi College is located on the south side of Merton Street, west of Merton College. Tolkien stayed at Corpus Christi in December 1909 when he first sought to win a scholarship or exhibition to Oxford. His friend *G.B. Smith became an exhibitioner at Corpus Christi in Michaelmas Term 1913. On 22 November 1914 Tolkien read a paper, The Finnish National Epic (*On ‘The Kalevala’ or Land of Heroes), to the Sundial Society at Corpus Christi. On 7 June 1947 he was one of the members of a committee appointed by the English Faculty Board who met at Corpus Christi to draft an outline proposal for an English Preliminary Examination.

Eagle and Child. Public house, located at 49 St Giles’ since 1650, named for the family crest of the Earl of Derby (a coronet with eagle and child) but popularly known as the ‘Bird and Baby’. From about 1939 until the early 1950s the *Inklings met informally on Tuesdays (later, Mondays) for conversation and refreshment, usually at the Eagle and Child. *C.S. Lewis liked its traditional character, as well as its landlord, Charlie Blagrove (d. 1948); and it was conveniently close to the Taylor Institution where many English School lectures were given during the Second World War. The Inklings usually assembled in late morning in the pub’s small back room. According to *John Wain, Lewis preferred the open tavern, and deeply regretted that Tolkien later arranged for them to meet in the Blagrove family’s private parlour. In 1962, when the parlour was opened to the public and joined on to the main bar, the Inklings moved across St Giles’ to the Lamb and Flag.

There are many references to the Eagle and Child in Letters and in the diaries of *Warren Lewis (Brothers and Friends). See also John Wain, ‘Push Bar to Open’, Oxford Magazine, Eighth Week, Hilary Term (1988). A photograph of the Eagle and Child is reproduced in The Inklings, p. 8b.

Eastgate Hotel. The Eastgate Hotel at 73 High Street was built in 1899–1900 and later enlarged. It is close to Magdalen College where *C.S. Lewis was a Fellow, and to Merton College, where Tolkien was Professor of English Language and Literature from 1945 to 1959. For many years Tolkien and Lewis would meet in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen on Monday morning, and then take a drink together in the Eastgate. It was often favoured by Tolkien for lunch or dinner when he had guests to entertain.

Examination Schools. Designed in a neo-Jacobean style by Thomas Graham Jackson and constructed in 1876–82, the Examination Schools in the High Street are used for lectures as well as examinations. Tolkien knew the ‘Schools’ as an undergraduate, and taught and examined in them as an Oxford professor. He gave most of his lectures in the Examination Schools, except during the Second World War when the building was used as a military hospital; the English Faculty Library, normally housed in the Schools, was then moved to the Taylor Institution and later to its new building in Manor Road.

Exeter College. Bounded by Turl Street, Broad Street, and Brasenose Lane, Exeter College was founded in 1314 as Stapeldon Hall by Walter de Stapeldon, Bishop of Exeter. Most of its present architecture dates from the seventeenth century, notably the Hall built in 1618, or from the nineteenth century, including two Gothic Revival buildings by Sir George Gilbert Scott, the library (1855–6) and the chapel (1856–9). In the latter is a fine tapestry designed by Edward Burne-Jones and *William Morris. A photograph of Exeter College before the First World War is reproduced in Life and Legend, p. 24.

Tolkien won a Classical Exhibition to Exeter in December 1910 and came up to the College in Michaelmas Term 1911. His rooms until Trinity Term 1914 were in an Exeter building called Swiss Cottage (on the site of the present Blackwell’s art bookshop), which looked out on Turl Street – see his sketch Turl Street, Oxford in Artist and Illustrator, fig. 19, and his cover for an ‘Exeter College Smoker’ programme reproduced in Life and Legend, p. 26, and The Tolkien Family Album, p. 32. He usually had breakfast in his rooms, brought to him by his scout (college servant), and dinner in the Hall. In February 1913 he sent his fiancée (*Edith Tolkien) a postcard with a view of the Hall and an ‘X’ marking the spot where he usually sat: see Life and Legend, p. 35. He had to pay weekly for any food and drink brought to his room. Surviving battels (re-used by Tolkien for notes) show that he was charged for tea, coffee, milk and cream, sugar, dry toast, butter, jam, marmalade and honey, anchovy and buttered toast, cakes, crumpets and muffins, porridge, eggs, fruit, potted meat and pickles, sardines, chutney and sauce, cider and claret cup and mulled claret, and lemon squash, as well as tobacco and cigarettes.

Tolkien was active in College life, joining inter alia the Exeter College Essay Club and the Stapeldon Society (*Societies and clubs), in both of which he held office. He was a member of the committee appointed by the Stapeldon Society to organize the elaborate dinner held 6 June 1914 at which the Junior Common Room entertained the Senior Common Room to celebrate the Sexcentenary of the College’s foundation. He also often attended social events such as concerts and the annual Freshman’s Wine. For part of his time at Oxford he played on the Exeter College rugby team; see photograph, Life and Legend, p. 25. From Hilary Term 1919 until Trinity Term 1920, while he was working in Oxford after the war, Tolkien was an honorary member of the Essay Club, to whom he read The Fall of Gondolin (*The Book of Lost Tales) on 10 March 1920. At a meeting of the Club in November 1926, after his return to Oxford from *Leeds, Tolkien read a paper on the Elder Edda.

On 26 July 1933 Tolkien and *Hugo Dyson invited C.S. Lewis and his brother Warren to dine at Exeter College. Warren Lewis on that occasion described the college as ‘a delightful place, the chief feature being the garden – a quiet oblong of close shaven, walled and treed fringed grass, ending in a little paved court with a sunk pond where a small fountain plays on water lilies: this court is overlooked from a terrace or rampart which is approached by a flight of stone steps from the lawn.’ From the terrace Lewis found ‘a most unusual view of Oxford: the terrace is perhaps fifteen feet above the square in which the Bodleian stands … it looked wonderfully dignified, backed by St Mary’s and a pale yellow afterglow of sunset’ (Brothers and Friends, pp. 105–6).

Tolkien retained an affection for Exeter College, though as a professor he was later attached to Pembroke and Merton colleges. His daughter *Priscilla remembered a ‘conflict of loyalties’ one year during the annual college Boat Races, ‘when Exeter were rowing against Pembroke: whilst having tea with us … on the Pembroke [spectators’] barge, he shouted for their opponents!’ (The Tolkien Family Album, p. 77).

Exeter College made Tolkien an honorary fellow in 1958.

According to J.R.L. Maddicott in the booklet Exeter College, Oxford (published by the college c. 1990), Tolkien has eclipsed the Exeter authors that went before, even William Morris. ‘It is safe to say that his later books have been more widely read than those of all the Exeter men since the fourteenth century and that he has almost certainly given more pleasure to more people than any other single member of the College’ (p. 22). Not all of the biographical details given for Tolkien in the booklet are correct, however, and later investigation refuted the attribution to Tolkien of a suggestion left in the Junior Common Room that ‘a good English dictionary’ be purchased for that space.

See further, John Garth, ‘Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War’, in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration (2008); Frances Cairncross, ed., Exeter College: The First 700 Years (2013); and John Garth, Tolkien and Exeter College (2014). The latter reproduces a previously unpublished sketch by Tolkien of Exeter College Hall, as well as one of Broad Street in Oxford, and several previously unpublished photographs of Tolkien as an undergraduate.

King’s Arms. A public house at 41 Holywell Street, opened in 1607. Most of the present building dates from the eighteenth century. It is close to the Bodleian Library, and therefore much used by readers and employees. On 22 August 1944 Tolkien wrote to his son *Christopher: ‘This morning I … found the Bird and Baby [Eagle and Child] closed; but was hailed in a voice that carried across the torrent of vehicles that was once St Giles’, and discovered the two Lewises [C.S. and W.H.] and *C[harles] Williams, high and very dry on the other side. Eventually we got 4 pints of passable ale at the King’s Arms – at a cost of 5/8’ (Letters, p. 92). *Roger Lancelyn Green recalled that during one summer, c. 1949–50, he ‘was doing research work in the Bodleian and would meet C.S. Lewis … and he would say in a conspiratorial whisper “King’s Arms! 12.30!” and we would meet there for a drink and a talk in the yard behind the hotel. There Tolkien usually joined us, and frequently Hugo Dyson, plus occasionally others of the “Inklings”’ (‘Recollections’, Amon Hen 44 (May 1980), pp. 7–8).

Lady Margaret Hall. Founded in 1878 to accommodate women desiring to study at Oxford, Lady Margaret Hall was named after Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII and a patron of learning. Its buildings range from the original grey brick villa built in 1879 (extended in 1881) to a neo-Georgian block by Raymond Firth, constructed 1963–6. Gardens stretch east to the Cherwell. During Tolkien’s day Lady Margaret Hall was one of five women’s colleges in Oxford (men began to be admitted in 1979), and according to his daughter Priscilla, an undergraduate there between 1948 and 1951, ‘probably the one he knew best’ (‘Memories of J.R.R. Tolkien in His Centenary Year’, The Brown Book (December 1992), p. 12).

Lamb and Flag. A public house at 12 St Giles’, almost opposite the Eagle and Child, opened towards the end of the seventeenth century. Some of the original building survives. When the Eagle and Child was modernized in 1962 and its inner parlour opened to the public, the Inklings met instead in the Lamb and Flag.

Magdalen College. The college of St Mary Magdalen, founded in 1458 by William Waynflete, is one of the wealthiest and most spacious colleges in Oxford. Its original quadrangle was built in 1474–80, its landmark tower in 1492–1505. To the north is the New Building of 1733, largely designed by Edward Holdsworth; behind it is Magdalen Grove, a deer park. South-east of New Building a bridge leads over the River Cherwell to a meadow enclosed by a path called Addison’s Walk. (A photograph of Addison’s Walk is reproduced in The Inklings, p. 4b.)

As an undergraduate Tolkien attended lectures and classes given by *Sir Walter Raleigh at Magdalen. During the First World War part of the College was commandeered; for a short time in spring 1915 G.B. Smith was billeted there with the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry.

C.S. Lewis became a fellow of Magdalen in 1925: he occupied rooms no. 3 on staircase 3 of New Buildings. On 19 September 1931 Tolkien dined with Lewis and *Hugo Dyson at Magdalen, then strolled along Addison’s Walk and through Magdalen Grove discussing myth, a conversation which led to C.S. Lewis accepting Christianity. On 22 November 1931 Lewis wrote to his brother that it had become a regular custom for Tolkien to call on him at Magdalen on Monday mornings ‘and drink a glass. This is one of the pleasantest spots of the week. Sometimes we talk English school politics; sometimes we criticise one another’s poems: other days we drift into theology or “the state of the nation” …’ (Letters of C.S. Lewis (rev. edn. 1988), p. 292). When Charles Williams came to Oxford in September 1939 he often joined Lewis and Tolkien at Magdalen, and the three would read their works aloud. Lewis recalled the occasion when Williams read the first chapters of his Figure of Arthur: ‘Picture to yourself, then, an upstairs sitting-room with windows looking north into the “grove” of Magdalen College on a sunshiny Monday Morning in vacation at about ten o’clock. The Professor [Tolkien] and I, both on the chesterfield, lit our pipes and stretched out our legs. Williams in the arm-chair opposite to us threw his cigarette into the grate … and began …’ (Charles Williams, Arthurian Torso [1948], p. 2).

From some time in the 1930s the Inklings met in the same sitting-room after dinner on Thursday evenings, often not leaving until at least midnight. Humphrey Carpenter has described the room (The Inklings, pp. 128–9) as shabby and in need of cleaning; but there Tolkien, and later his son *Christopher, read aloud much of *The Lord of the Rings as it was written, and in turn heard the other Inklings read their works. In addition to C.S. Lewis, Inklings who were Fellows of Magdalen were *Adam Fox, *C.E. Stevens, *Colin Hardie, and *J.A.W. Bennett. During the Second World War part of Magdalen was again commandeered by the military: on that occasion *James Dundas-Grant, commanding the Oxford University Naval Division, resided there and became an Inkling. Two other friends of Tolkien associated with Magdalen were *George S. Gordon, president of the College from 1928 to 1942, and *C.T. Onions, fellow and librarian.

Tolkien attended several meetings of the Early English Text Society (*Societies and clubs) committee or council at Magdalen between 1945 and 1963. At the end of August 1950 he was present at the Conference of University Professors of English held at Magdalen which led to the formation of the International Association of University Professors of English.

Merton College. Merton College was founded in 1264 by Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England and later Bishop of Rochester. Its statutes are the oldest in Oxford. It is bounded on the north by Merton Street and on the south originally by the city wall, now by Merton Field and Christ Church Meadow. Many of its medieval buildings survive, alongside later construction and renovation. Its thirteenth-century Hall was rebuilt by Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1874.

When Tolkien was elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature in 1945 he also became a fellow of Merton College, which had endowed the chair in 1885. Tolkien felt more comfortable at Merton than he had at Pembroke College: Merton gave him spacious rooms in which he could receive postgraduate students and entertain friends, and in which until his retirement he kept most of his library. He was scheduled to give seminars and classes at Merton from Trinity Term 1947 to Hilary Term 1951, and morning lectures there in Michaelmas Term 1957. On occasion he stayed overnight in college, while his wife Edith was on holiday or in hospital. From at least autumn 1947 he hosted meetings of the Inklings at Merton, sharing that duty with C.S. Lewis at Magdalen College. He also invited friends to dine with him at Merton: on one such occasion, Warren Lewis recalled in his diary, ‘as I waited for him in his room, I was struck by the absolute silence of Merton compared with the perpetual hum that floats in through Magdalen windows. We dined in common room [term was not yet in session] by candle light a party of seven …. A good dinner, and a glass of better port than Magdalen gives one’ (22 August 1946, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois).

Tolkien described his first impressions of Merton to his son *Christopher in letters written on 11 October and 22 October 1945:

I was duly admitted yesterday at 10 a.m. and then had to endure the most formidable College Meeting I have ever seen – went on till 1.30 p.m. without cessation and then broke up in disorder. The Warden talked almost unceasingly. I lunched in Merton and made a few arrangements, putting my name down at the Estates Bursary on the housing list; and getting a Master Key to all gates and doors. It is incredible belonging to a real college (and a very large and wealthy one) …. I walked round this afternoon with [*Hugo] Dyson who was duly elected yesterday, and is now ensconced in the rooms I hoped for, looking out over the meadows! [Letters, p. 116]

I dined for the first time at Merton high table on Thursday, and found it very agreeable; though odd. For fuel-economy the common room is not heated, and the dons meet and chat amiably on the dais, until someone thinks there are enough there for grace to be said. After that they sit and dine, and have their port, and coffee, and smoke and evening newspapers all at high table in a manner that if agreeably informal is rather shocking to one trained in the severer ceremonies and strict precedence of mediaeval Pembroke. [Letters, pp. 116–17]

He was allotted new rooms, part of set 6, staircase 4, in the Fellows Quadrangle on 24 June 1947, overlooking Christchurch Meadow, and moved to even better rooms in May 1954.

Tolkien and his wife lived successively in two houses owned by Merton College, at 3 Manor Road and 99 Holywell Street, after they could no longer afford to stay at 20 Northmoor Road. After Edith’s death in 1971, when Tolkien wished to return to Oxford, Merton made him a resident fellow and provided a set of rooms at 21 Merton Street.

During his years at Merton Tolkien played an active part in college life. He attended most College meetings, an average of eleven per year. He was a member of the Library Committee in 1946–9 and 1952–3, of the Wine Committee in 1947–59, and of the Stipends Committee in 1948–59. He was also on various committees set up to consider specific matters: in 1948, for instance, to recommend a suitable inscription on a commemorative tablet to be placed in the College Chapel. The most onerous of his several College offices was that of Sub-Warden, from 1 August 1953 to 21 June 1955: in this capacity he was ex officio a member of the Finance Committee, and of any other committee set up during his term of office, of which there were many. In September 1947, as fellow attending on the estates progress, Tolkien spent four days with the Warden and Bursar inspecting the College’s extensive holdings of land in Leicestershire and *Lincolnshire. John and Priscilla Tolkien have noted that their father ‘enjoyed warm relationships with the College’s domestic staff. He was their champion, often arguing that they should enjoy better working conditions …’ (The Tolkien Family Album, p. 79). In December 1963 Tolkien was elected to an emeritus Fellowship, and in May 1973 an Honorary Fellow. A memorial service was held for him on 17 November 1973 in Merton College Chapel.

A photograph of Merton College from a distance is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 78.

Mitre Hotel. Located at the corner of High Street and Turl Street, the Mitre was founded in 1300, and from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century was a major coaching inn. It has belonged to Lincoln College since 1450. Its present buildings date from c. 1630 with some later additions. The hotel rooms on the upper floors became accommodation for Lincoln College students, and its ground floor a pub/restaurant only. In 1926 its stables were converted into a separate bar. The Mitre was one of the places where the Inklings met during the Second World War.

Old Ashmolean. Now the Museum of the History of Science, the Old Ashmolean was built in 1679–83, probably to the design of Oxford master mason Thomas Wood, to house a collection of natural curiosities inherited by Elias Ashmole as well as a scientific lecture room and a chemical laboratory. Much of the Ashmole collection was transferred to the University Galleries (the Ashmolean Museum; see *Taylor Institution, below) in Beaumont Street at the end of the nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary editorial offices were located in the Old Ashmolean when Tolkien was on the OED staff (1919–20).

A photograph of the interior of the Old Ashmolean, showing the Dictionary Room where Tolkien worked and some of its staff (including Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and Charles Onions), is reproduced in Peter M. Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (2006), p. 5.

Pembroke College. Pembroke College, founded in 1624 by King James I and named after the then Chancellor of the University, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, lies to the west of St Aldgate’s. Most of its buildings date from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; its few earlier buildings have been mostly remodelled. Tolkien became a non-stipendiary professorial fellow of Pembroke in 1926. In that year the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge (Asquith Commission) came into force, by which (inter alia) each professor was made ex officio a fellow and member of the governing body of a college; the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship was thus attached to Pembroke, in fact imposed upon the college, and in these circumstances Tolkien seems to have felt that he was not entirely welcome. Also he found the atmosphere at Pembroke rigid and formal: when he moved to Merton College in 1945 he commented to his son Christopher that dining at Merton ‘if agreeably informal is rather shocking to one trained in the severer ceremonies and strict precedence of mediaeval Pembroke’ (Letters, p. 117). Even so, Tolkien attended over half of the College meetings while he was attached to Pembroke, an average of seven per year.

In the Pembroke Record for 1966–7 *R.B. McCallum noted that in 1925 the College consisted of the Master, a professional full-time bursar, three teaching fellows, and about 125 undergraduates. Pembroke was one of the smaller colleges at Oxford, and one of the poorest. But it

kept a good table, the menu being rather old English in its flavour, and our port was, and remains, the best in Oxford. On the undergraduate side Pembroke was known for a remarkably strong beer …. The Fellows after some time passed a limiting order which reduced the quantity anyone could have at one time in Hall. Professor Tolkien, in a minority of one, protested against this enactment, alluding derisively to the continued potations of our very formidable port in the Senior Common Room …. [‘Pembroke 1925–1967’, Pembroke Record, pp. 14–15]

Tolkien seems to have dined regularly at Pembroke, usually on Thursdays, and occasionally entertained guests. He gave some of his classes there, and seems to have hosted meetings of committees set up by the English Faculty Board. During the Second World War Pembroke was partly taken over by the Army and the Ministry of Agriculture. ‘At lunch one day Ronald reported that a notice on the College Lodge now read: PESTS: FIRST FLOOR’ (The Tolkien Family Album, p. 71).

Even after he became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature in 1945 Tolkien continued to be an honorary member of the Senior Common Room at Pembroke and occasionally dined there. The College announced his election as an honorary fellow in March 1972.

Randolph Hotel. Oxford’s largest and most prestigious hotel, the Randolph is on the corner of Magdalen and Beaumont streets. It was designed by William Wilkinson in the Victorian Gothic style and opened to the public in 1866. On 1 June 1912 Tolkien enjoyed a nine-course dinner in the hotel as a member of the Apolausticks (*Societies and clubs). In late July 1924 he dined there with George S. Gordon and three visitors from Canada. On 20 January 1965 he waited in the hotel foyer for Denys Gueroult before being interviewed by him for the BBC.

St Aloysius, Church of. A Roman Catholic church at 25 Woodstock Road, designed by Joseph Hansom for the Jesuits and completed in 1875. St Aloysius was one of the churches that Tolkien attended while an undergraduate, and while living in Northmoor Road from 1926 to 1947. His eldest son, John, a Roman Catholic priest, said his first Mass in the church in February 1946.

St Anthony of Padua, Church of. A Roman Catholic church at 115 Headley Way, Headington, built in 1960 after a hall in Jack Straw’s Lane, in which Mass was held, became inadequate for the numbers attending. Tolkien was a parishioner both while he lived in Sandfield Road (until 1968) and after his return to Oxford in 1971. He was driven by taxi to St Anthony’s from Merton Street every Sunday. On 6 September 1973 a Requiem Mass was held for him at St Anthony’s, conducted by his son John, assisted by *Robert Murray and the parish priest Monsignor Wilfrid Doran.

St Gregory and St Augustine, Church of. A Roman Catholic church at 322 Woodstock Road, designed by Ernest Newton in 1912. Tolkien sometimes attended this church while living in Northmoor Road. He had a long and close relationship with the parish priest, *Father Douglas Carter. Tolkien’s eldest son, John, was ordained a priest in the church in February 1946.

Sheldonian Theatre. The Sheldonian, on the south side of Broad Street, was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and built in 1664–7 at the expense of Gilbert Sheldon, Warden of All Souls (later Archbishop of Canterbury). It provides a venue for various University ceremonies, including meetings of Convocation and, in June, Encaenia when honorary degrees are presented and speeches are made in Latin. Tolkien sat his English Honour School examinations in the Sheldonian in June 1915, as the Examination Schools had been commandeered, and received his B.A. there on 16 March 1916. An honorary Doctorate of Letters was conferred on him in the Sheldonian on 3 June 1972.

Taylor Institution. The Taylor Institution or ‘Taylorian’ at the corner of Beaumont Street and St Giles’ is the centre for the study of modern European languages and literatures at Oxford, established with a bequest from the architect Sir Robert Taylor. Its building was designed by Charles Robert Cockerell and constructed in 1841–4, originally to house both the Taylor Institution and the University Galleries; the latter were enlarged at the end of the nineteenth century and became the Ashmolean Museum. An extension to the Taylorian along St Giles’ was completed in 1938.

As an undergraduate Tolkien attended lectures at the Taylor Institution, in particular those by *Joseph Wright on Gothic and on Greek and Latin, and by *W.A. Craigie on Scandinavian Philology and Old Icelandic. Two series of Tolkien’s own lectures were delivered there in Hilary Term 1932, and during the Second World War, when the Examination Schools were commandeered as a military hospital, English Faculty lectures moved to the Taylorian along with most of the English Faculty Library.

Trinity College. This college with a narrow entrance in Broad Street and another in Parks Road was founded by Sir Thomas Pope in 1555. Some fifteenth-century buildings survive from the earlier Durham College which stood on the same site, but most of the present buildings are from later times. Two of Tolkien’s sons, Michael and Christopher, were undergraduates at Trinity, in each case interrupted by service in the Second World War. Christopher returned as a postgraduate to work on a B.Litt. *Rayner Unwin was stationed at Trinity College as a Naval Cadet for six months in 1944, and returned as an undergraduate. When Tolkien heard from *Stanley Unwin of Rayner’s arrival in 1944 he asked if a visit would be welcome. Rayner later recalled: ‘He did roll into my room at Trinity. I was somewhat abashed: a Professor was a revered figure in Oxford in those days. But Tolkien was considerate and quite prepared to do most of the talking. The difficulty was to follow the thread of his conversation’ (George Allen and Unwin: A Remembrancer (1999), pp. 87–8). Austin Farrer, fellow and chaplain of Trinity College 1935–60, and his wife *Katharine were friends of the Tolkien family.

University Museum. Housed in a Gothic Revival building designed by Benjamin Woodward under the influence of John Ruskin and constructed in Parks Road in 1855–60, the Museum preserves the University’s collections of zoological, entomological, mineralogical, and geological specimens. There, on 1 January 1938, Tolkien gave a lecture on dragons, one of a series of Christmas lectures for children sponsored by the Museum.

University Parks. An extensive area to the north of central Oxford, bounded to the east by the River Cherwell. Tolkien drilled in the Parks as an undergraduate member of the Officer Training Corps. In 1992 two trees were planted in the Parks to mark the centenary of his birth, a silver-leaved maple and a false acacia, chosen to represent Telperion and Laurelin, the Two Trees of Valinor in Tolkien’s mythology.

The White Horse. A public house at 52 Broad Street, next to Blackwell’s Bookshop. A pub has stood on this site since at least 1591, and has been called ‘White Horse’ since at least 1750. Although the interior is old, the façade was rebuilt in 1951. Tolkien met C.S. Lewis, his brother Warren, and Charles Williams at the White Horse at least twice in 1944.

Wolvercote Cemetery. Originally a village to the north-west of Oxford, Wolvercote was absorbed into the expanding city in 1929. Here Tolkien and his wife Edith are buried, in the area reserved for Roman Catholics on the western side of the Corporation cemetery. Their grave is marked by a grey granite stone inscribed, at Tolkien’s instruction, ‘Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889–1971’ and ‘John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892–1973’, after characters in his mythology. Their son John is buried nearby. Following his return to Oxford, Tolkien visited Edith’s grave every Sunday after attending Mass in Headington.

Worcester College. Worcester College was established by royal charter in 1714 and built slowly from 1720 onward, on the site and incorporating parts of the former Gloucester College for Benedictine monks (founded 1283) and its successor, Gloucester Hall. Parts of the medieval buildings survive. On 14 February 1938 Tolkien read *Farmer Giles of Ham to members of the Lovelace Society, an essay club at Worcester College. *C.H. Wilkinson, Dean of Worcester College, later urged Tolkien to publish the story, and was made its dedicatee.

PLACES NEAR OXFORD

The county of Oxfordshire in central southern England is bounded by Buckinghamshire, *Berkshire, Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and North-amptonshire. After their move to Oxford in 1926 Tolkien, his wife Edith, and their children made many excursions into the surrounding countryside, especially after Tolkien purchased a car in 1932: Humphrey Carpenter mentions ‘the drives on autumn afternoons to the villages east of Oxford, to Worminghall or Brill or Charlton-on-Otmoor, or west into Berkshire and up White Horse Hill to see the ancient long-barrow known as Wayland’s Smithy’ (Biography, p. 160).

Worminghall is a village in Buckinghamshire a few miles east of Oxford. John and Priscilla Tolkien recalled the excitement one year when they found a rare bee orchid in the countryside near Worminghall. The village also figures in Farmer Giles of Ham. Brill, a hilltop village about twelve miles north-east of Oxford, is appropriately, indeed doubly named: Brill is derived from Welsh bree (‘hill’) and English hill; see T.A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth (2nd edn. 1992), p. 99, and compare Bree in The Lord of the Rings. A mile or so further east is Wotton Underwood, one of several Wottons or Woottons (from Old English ‘homestead’ or ‘village in or by a wood’) in Oxfordshire, whose name is echoed in the setting of Smith of Wootton Major. Charlton-on-Otmoor is a village about eight miles north-east of Oxford, with a fine Gothic church.

The Tolkien family also enjoyed punting on the Cherwell, which was not far from their home in Northmoor Road, ‘down past the Parks to Magdalen Bridge, or better still … up-river towards Water Eaton and Islip [see below] where a picnic tea could be spread on a bank’ (Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 160). The river winds along the eastern boundary of the University Parks and through the grounds of Magdalen College until it joins the Isis (Thames) to the south of Christ Church Meadow. The family also went on ‘walks across the fields to Wood Eaton [north of Oxford] to look for butterflies … walks when their father seemed to have a boundless store of knowledge about trees and plants’ (Biography, p. 160).

John and Priscilla Tolkien note in The Tolkien Family Album that ‘celebratory visits were sometimes made to take tea at country inns, like The Roof Tree at Woodstock (now long since gone), The White Hart at Dorchester (now a very grand restaurant) and The George at Sandford-on-Thames’ (p. 63). Woodstock is about eight miles north-west of Oxford. Its royal manor built by Henry I no longer exists, but the king’s deer park is part of the grounds of Blenheim Palace. *Chaucer’s House in Woodstock is said to have belonged to the poet’s son. Tolkien stayed at The Bear in Woodstock in April 1946 for about ten days with his son Christopher while Edith was away. On 2 April Warren Lewis and *R.E. Havard joined them there for lunch, and on 11 April there was an Inklings dinner and meeting at The Bear.

Dorchester is about ten miles south of Oxford, once a Roman station and an important Anglo-Saxon town, at times the cathedral city of Wessex or Mercia. The Augustinians established a house here in 1140, and their fine church, with parts from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, survives. Sandford-on-Thames is just beyond the southern edge of Oxford, along the towpath of the river below Iffley. In the second half of October 1911, while an undergraduate, Tolkien wrote the poem From Iffley (*From the Many-Willow’d Margin of the Immemorial Thames), describing Oxford seen from the river at that village.

Before the Second World War Tolkien also often visited Deddington, about sixteen miles north of Oxford. On 14 December 1956 he made a speech at the dedication of the new town library, and was entertained to tea by the Domestic Science Department in the local secondary school.

Several places in Oxfordshire are mentioned or alluded to in Farmer Giles of Ham and its projected sequel, including Islip, Oakley, Otmoor, the Rollright Stones (the Standing Stones), Thame, and Worminghall. Islip is a village seven miles north of Oxford, the birthplace of Edward the Confessor. Oakley is a small village about five miles north-east of Oxford, originally called Quercetum; a church was first recorded in Oakley in 1142. In Farmer Giles of Ham the parson of Oakley is eaten by the dragon Chrysophylax. Otmoor is a wild moorland east of the city, one of the boundaries of Giles’ ‘Little Kingdom’. It was once a great marshy area, and is so described by Tolkien in notes for the sequel to Farmer Giles.

The Rollright Stones are a prehistoric monument about twenty-four miles north-east of Oxford on the Warwickshire border, near the village of Little Rollright: they consist of a small stone circle about 100 feet in diameter, with a large isolated ‘King’s Stone’ probably dating from the early Bronze Age, about 1500 BC. A group of five additional large stones about a quarter of a mile distant, known as ‘The Whispering Knights’, is probably the remains of a late Stone Age long barrow built c. 2000 BC. Thame is an old market town thirteen miles east of Oxford, named for the River Thame, which flows into the Thames. Despite its spelling, Thame is pronounced ‘Tame’. In Farmer Giles of Ham Tolkien pretends that the name derives from a conflation of its ‘original’ name Ham and Giles’ titles ‘Lord of Ham’ and ‘Lord of the Tame Worm’. Worminghall has been mentioned already; its name, pronounced ‘wunnle’, figures in Farmer Giles of Ham as that of the hall built by the twelve Draconarii or Wormwardens on the spot where Giles first met the dragon (or worm, from Old English wyrm ‘serpent’). The true if more prosaic origin of Worminghall, according to Eilart Ekwall, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Place-names (1960), may be ‘Wyrma’s halh’ (Old English halh or healh, ‘nook, recess’).

In later years Tolkien mourned the destruction of much of the ‘Little Kingdom’ – that is, the countryside around Oxford. In ?March 1945 he wrote to Stanley Unwin: ‘The heart has gone out of the Little Kingdom, and the woods and plains are aerodromes and bomb-practice targets’ (Letters, p. 113).

Tolkien also associated Tom Bombadil, of *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and The Lord of the Rings, partly with Oxfordshire. On 16 December 1937, in a letter to Stanley Unwin, he called Tom Bombadil ‘the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside’; and on 25 June 1962 he wrote to *Pauline Baynes, who was to illustrate *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book, that ‘one might say that the “landscape” envisaged is southern English, and in particular South Oxfordshire and Berkshire’ (quoted in Sotheby’s, Valuable Printed Books and Manuscripts, London, 13 December 2001, p. 260).

For several years after the Second World War Michael Tolkien was a master at the Oratory School at Woodcote in southern Oxfordshire. At times in July and early August 1948, and from 14 August to 14 September of that year, Tolkien went into ‘retreat’ at Michael’s home, then Payables Farm in Woodcote, where he ‘succeeded at last in bringing the “Lord of the Rings” to a successful conclusion’ (letter to Hugh Brogan, 31 October 1948, Letters, p. 131). Michael and his family later moved to a house on the School grounds. On 29 August 1952 Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin: ‘I am now going to devote some days to correcting [The Lord of the Rings] finally. For this purpose, I am retiring tomorrow from the noise and stench of Holywell [see above, Tolkien’s Oxford homes] to my son’s cottage on Chilton-top while he is away with his children: Chapel Cottage, the Oratory School, Woodcote, near Reading’ (Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). In a letter to his grandson, Michael George, on 24 September 1952 Tolkien wrote: ‘I enjoyed staying in your house; and I used your desk’ (British Library MS Add. 71657).

Useful sources for the present entry include Christopher Hibbert, ed., The Encyclopædia of Oxford (1988); Derek S. Honey, An Encyclopaedia of Oxford Pubs, Inns and Taverns (1998); Philip Atkins and Michael Johnson, A New Guidebook to the Heart of Oxford (1999); and Geoffrey Tyack, Oxford and Cambridge (the Blue Guide to this region, 5th edn., 1999). Primarily visual information about Oxford and its environs is provided by Oxford Then & Now: From the Henry Taunt Collection by Malcolm Graham and Laurence Waters (2006), which contains photographs of Oxford between 1858 and 1922, juxtaposed with photos of more or less the same view as it is today; Robert S. Blackham, Tolkien’s Oxford (2008), includes maps as well as both historical and modern photographs; and Harry Lee Poe, The Inklings of Oxford: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Their Friends, photography by James Ray Veneman (2009).

Oxford, University of. The University of Oxford was of paramount importance in Tolkien’s life, with only brief interruptions, from his days as an undergraduate at Exeter College until his death. Colleges and other features of the University (and of the city of Oxford and surrounding areas) are considered in this volume under *Oxford and environs. The following notes on the University, its institutions and administration, though expressed usually in the present tense (to harmonize with quotations from contemporary sources), are intended to be generally applicable to Oxford as it was when Tolkien was an undergraduate or professor, and do not necessarily take account of reforms and changes made since his retirement in 1959.

HISTORY

The origins of the University of Oxford can be traced to the late twelfth century, when groups of scholars began to gather in Oxford around masters who lectured on Canon and Roman Law, Liberal Arts, and Theology. Some scholars lived in a house or ‘academic hall’ hired by the master. The young university received royal support and ‘prospered, gradually gaining a large measure of independence under a Chancellor elected by the masters, whose interests were represented by the Proctors and whose collective decisions were made known in Convocation’ (The Encyclopædia of Oxford, ed. Christopher Hibbert (1988), p. 471). During the thirteenth century the first colleges were founded, including University (1249), Balliol (1263), Merton (1264), and Exeter (1314). These gradually replaced the less organized ‘academic halls’. The Reformation brought many changes, including the confiscation of the property of some Oxford institutions linked to religious communities such as the Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, and Benedictines, as well as changes in curriculum. By the seventeenth century most students belonged to a college, and a smaller number to the few remaining academic halls; but the University continued to teach and examine.

From the end of the eighteenth century various reforms have been made, often as a result of special commissions intended to make the organization of the University and the colleges more democratic and to abolish vested interests; to raise academic standards and make the syllabi of the various schools more appropriate to national needs; and to broaden the student body by removing restrictions by religion or gender, and providing financial assistance for those whose families could not afford the cost of a university education. Much reform has also been directed at ensuring the proper use of the colleges’ income from property and endowments, and strengthening the role of the professoriate, both as a teaching body and in the government of the University.

From 1874 fellows – elected senior members of a college – were allowed to marry, and many became only nominally resident. During the second half of the nineteenth century women students were admitted to lectures and the first women’s colleges were founded: Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville, both in 1879. Although women students were allowed to sit some University examinations in 1884, and from 1894 even the B.A. final examination, it was not until 1920 that they were allowed to matriculate, become full members of the University, and receive degrees.

Oxford (like *Cambridge) differs from other British (and American) universities in that its colleges, established from the medieval period onwards, have remained largely independent self-governing bodies within the University, and ‘membership in [the University] is acquired and retained only through membership in a College, Hall or other recognized society, which is itself a federated member of the University’ (L.A. Crosby, ‘The Organization of the University and Colleges’, Oxford of Today: A Manual for Prospective Rhodes Scholars (1927), p. 29). The colleges have charitable status and elect their own (often resident) fellows, who are responsible for the administration of the college and of its property. When Tolkien went up to Oxford in 1911 there were twenty-five colleges, varying in size and wealth. By the time he retired in 1959 there were twenty-nine, but three of the additions (St Edmund Hall, St Anne’s, and St Peter’s) had existed in other guises prior to 1911. After the Second World War the number of undergraduates at Oxford, and of graduates reading for higher degrees, increased dramatically, many of them from less privileged backgrounds as a result of the introduction of state aid for higher education.

The University is responsible for various functions which are distinct from those of the colleges:

First, to examine and to grant degrees, and for this purpose to lay down courses, syllabuses, and regulations, and to exercise a general supervision over the lectures and other methods of study. Second, to provide, through its professors and other teachers, its scientific departments and special research institutes, such teaching and guidance as the colleges cannot or do not customarily offer. Third, to maintain discipline and order, to represent the assembly of colleges in relation to outside authorities or persons, to collect and distribute central finances, to extend the activities of the University beyond its local habitation, and to lay down the general conditions under which colleges and halls may be created, and they and their members conduct their life. Fourth, to create and maintain such institutions as libraries, laboratories, museums, parks, printing presses, and so on, which it would be wasteful or otherwise improper for the several colleges to maintain. [J.L. Brierly and H.V. Hodson, ‘The Constitution of the University’, Handbook to the University of Oxford (1933, first published 1932), p. 92]

The colleges, in contrast, are self-governing bodies with charitable status, owning their own buildings. Some have substantial endowments. In general, the governing body of a college

is composed of Fellows, who, if they are not administrators such as bursars, are statutorily required to teach or to research. Most of the tutors and lecturers in a college will be Fellows, and so will the professors attached to the college. The chairman of the governing body is the Head of the College (Master, President, Warden, Principal, Provost, Rector) elected by the Fellows to hold office until he reaches the statutory retiring age …. The Fellows form a close corporation, save for the appointment of professors, having otherwise the independent and unchallenged right to choose new Fellows within the bounds set by their statutes. The Fellows are nowadays usually elected for a term of years, but … they are commonly re-elected ….

The colleges are entirely responsible for discipline within their walls …. The colleges also possess the extremely important privilege of admission to the University. No candidate can be matriculated if he is not sponsored by a college, while the University accepts without veto all those put forward by the colleges, subject to the condition that candidates for matriculation … must have passed or be exempt from Responsions, the University entrance examination. [Brierly and Hodson, pp. 97–8]

In Tolkien’s day as now, colleges played a major role in the teaching of undergraduates, and also provided rooms for their students, who were usually resident for most of their time at Oxford, moving in their third or fourth year into outside lodgings or ‘digs’. College manservants, known as scouts, looked after the undergraduates and other residents, performing services such as laying fires, bringing breakfast and lunch and washing up afterwards, and making beds. When Tolkien returned to Merton College in 1972 *Charlie Carr and his wife performed many of these duties for him. There were strict rules governing behaviour, in particular the time in the evening by which undergraduates had to be within college, the only official entrance to which was through the Porter’s lodge.

Hannah Parham has written that at Exeter College in the early 1900s

it was a spartan life … with coal fires, chamber pots, and lukewarm tin baths. These were lit, emptied and filled by College servants. Staircase scouts polished boots, washed clothes, laid fires, and served breakfast and lunch to men in their rooms. These typically comprised a bedroom and a sitting room, the latter with dark-wood furniture, chintz curtains, wall paper and Turkish rugs. A decanter and glasses on a silver tray would usually be to hand, ready to be poured by the scout when the inhabitant hosted a private lunch party, as many often did. [‘A Turbulent Century’, in Exeter College: The First 700 Years, ed. Frances Cairncross (2013), p. 84]

When Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville Hall opened in 1879, twenty-five women students chose not to attach themselves to either institution, and instead were taken in hand by the Association for Promoting the Education of Women at Oxford (AEW). This group was given the name Oxford Home-Students in 1891, changed to the Society of Oxford Home-Students in 1898. Judy G. Batson writes in Her Oxford (2008) – an invaluable source of information on Oxford women – that ‘the Home-Students consisted of a much more diverse population than did the two halls [Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville]. Some of the students were from illustrious academic Oxford families and lived in their own homes; others lodged with relatives, friends, or ladies’ whom the principal ‘carefully handpicked. Older women interested in the new opportunities for higher education but uninterested in hall life found the Society ideally suited to their needs, as did women not wishing to pursue a full course of study but wanting to briefly sample some of what the AEW offered’ (p. 28). *Susan Dagnall and *Elaine Griffiths, for example, were Home-Students, and as Roman Catholics lived in the hostel founded especially for Catholics in 1908 (a hostel for Anglican Home-Students was not created until twenty years later). The Society of Oxford Home-Students was later renamed St Anne’s Society, and in 1952 was incorporated as St Anne’s College.

In 1886 St Hugh’s was established in Oxford as a residential hall for women students who found the costs of residence at Oxford or Cambridge too extravagant. Another hall, St Hilda’s, opened at Oxford in 1893. Both grew in size and prestige, and like Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville Hall, long had little direct affiliation with the other colleges at Oxford. Once women were granted full University membership in 1920, the four colleges (the Home-Students were in a different category) were forced to incorporate by royal charter or act of Parliament and to change certain elements of governance. Of the four, only Lady Margaret Hall chose to retain its original name, including ‘hall’ rather than ‘college’.

UNIVERSITY INSTITUTIONS AND OFFICIALS

The University legislative body known as Convocation consists of all recipients of the degrees of Master of Arts, Doctor of Divinity, Doctor of Medicine, or Doctor of Civil Law whose names are on the college books – thousands all told. Unless the business at hand is controversial, however, only a few resident members of the University attend meetings of Convocation, and almost all of the functions of that body have passed over time to Congregation. Notable exceptions are the responsibilities to elect the Chancellor and the Professor of Poetry, and to consider statutes, and decrees containing a preamble, which have passed Congregation with a majority of less than two-thirds.

From 1913 voting rights in Congregation were restricted to academic residents, so that this body includes the teaching and administrative staff of the University and colleges, rather than past graduates in other occupations who had proved unsympathetic to various academic reforms. ‘Every enactment, whether general or particular, and most appointments to administrative offices, have to be approved by Congregation; reports and accounts are submitted to it; it elects members to the chief financial and executive committees of the University, and in particular it elects eighteen members to the Hebdomadal Council [see below], which is, roughly speaking, the Cabinet of this Parliament’ (Brierly and Hodson, p. 80). The initiation of a statute or a decree is the province of the Hebdomadal Council, a member of which introduces the measure to Congregation.

A statute always, and occasionally … a decree, contains a preamble stating shortly the principle of the measure. The preamble is submitted separately to the House [Congregation]; if it is passed the enacting clauses are submitted later. The clauses of a statute, but not those of a decree, may be amended by the House ….

Congregation elects eighteen of the twenty-three members of the [Hebdomadal] Council, and three of the twelve Curators of the [University] Chest; its approval is required for the election of the three chief university officers, the Registrar, the Secretary of the Faculties, and the Secretary to the Curators of the Chest. Congregation also has power, which it seldom exercises, to address questions to such university boards of curators and other bodies as are compelled to present annual reports to it, and it is required to approve the annual financial statement prepared by the Curators of the Chest. [Brierly and Hodson, pp. 83–4]

The Hebdomadal Council ‘proposes legislation for Congregation and in general constitutes the University cabinet, being responsible for the administration of the University and for the management of its finances and property’ (Hibbert, p. 169). During the time that Tolkien taught at Oxford the membership of the Hebdomadal Council was composed of the Chancellor (though he did not attend meetings), the Vice-Chancellor, two Proctors, either the previous Vice-Chancellor for the year following his vacation of office, or the future Vice-Chancellor, and eighteen members elected by Congregation, six every two years.

The business of [the Hebdomadal] Council covers the whole field of university affairs, and varies from trivial matters such as the terms of admission to the University of some particular student to vital questions of principle. It is largely organized by means of ad hoc or standing committees, which investigate each question in detail and report to the Council for decision. Besides its key power of legislative initiation, the Council has valuable rights of appointment to the various committees, including boards of electors to university teaching posts, and it also nominates the Registrar, subject to the approval of Congregation. [Brierly and Hodson, p. 85]

The handling of University finances was one of the duties of the Vice-Chancellor until 1868, when it was given over to a committee, the Curators of the University Chest. The University Chest derives its name from an actual chest in which University money was kept secure in medieval times. The Curators

are the Vice-Chancellor and the Proctors, two nominees of the Chancellor …, a member of Convocation elected by [the Hebdomadal] Council, three members of Council, and three members of Congregation elected by those bodies ….

The Curators of the Chest collect the revenues and pay the administrative expenses of the University; they have charge of its public buildings, estates, and other property, except whatever is specially provided for. They advise Council and other bodies on financial matters and prepare financial statements, returns, and reports …. An application by some university body for specific expenditure is made in the first place to the Hebdomadal Council, but has to be referred to the Curators of the Chest, whose sanction is likewise necessary for schemes contemplated by the Council itself. The Curators also have to prepare for Council an annual budget forecast. They appoint their Secretary, subject to the approval of Congregation. [Brierly and Hodson, p. 86]

The General Board of the Faculties was formed in 1912 and ‘later became the main forum for coordinating academic policy’ (Janet Howarth, ‘The Self-Governing University’, The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. VII: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2 (2000), p. 600). The General Board took over from the Hebdomadal Council its ‘functions in drafting curriculum changes and also the administration of the C[ommon] U[niversity] F[und]’ (Howarth, p. 608). Its composition was adjusted at various times; it always included the Vice-Chancellor and the Proctors, but the number elected by the several faculty boards and faculties as a whole, and by the Hebdomadal Council, has varied. In 1933 the other members were ‘two members of [the Hebdomadal] Council elected by Council, one member of Convocation elected by Council subject to the approval of Congregation, three persons elected by the Faculties of Science (voting together), and six by the Faculties of the Humanities (voting together) in either case from among their own members. Elected members hold office for three years’ (Brierly and Hodson, p. 90).

‘As one of its chief functions, the General Board is charged with the co-ordination and supervision of the work of the several Boards of Faculties’ (Hibbert, p. 152). It

exercises a general advisory supervision over the lecture lists …. It receives and makes proposals for the provision of facilities for advanced work and research, and for the maintenance of an adequate staff in all subjects; and it frames statutes and decrees on these matters for consideration by [the Hebdomadal] Council and the University. The Statutes lay upon the General Board certain further special duties in the same connexion, including the transmission to Council of any reports of the Boards of Faculties, with comments and recommendations, the appointment of most University readers, the advising of Council upon the regulations concerning the salaries of teachers, laboratory finances, duties of professors, &c.; and it is comprehensively authorized ‘to exercise a general supervision over the studies and examinations of the University’. [Brierly and Hodson, p. 90]

Tolkien served as an elected member of the General Board in 1929–32 and 1938–44. During 1944–7 he was on the Board not as an elected member, but on the nomination of the Vice-Chancellor and the Proctors, presumably because of the difficult circumstances during the Second World War and the postwar period.

When Tolkien returned to Oxford from *Leeds in 1925 there were eight faculties in the University. In 1926 English Language and Literature, previously part of Medieval and Modern Languages and Literature, including English, became a separate ninth faculty with its own executive faculty board. By 1945 there were fourteen faculties at Oxford. All teachers of the subjects of a faculty were considered members of that body, regardless of individual position or rank.

The faculty boards were required to meet at least once each term. The membership in 1925 comprised an equal number who served ex officio (professors and most readers) and members elected by the faculty; the board could also co-opt members. Elected members served two-year terms but could usually be re-elected twice. The 1945 statutes of Oxford lists the ex officio members of the English Faculty Board as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, the Merton Professor of English Literature, the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, the Professor of Poetry (though he rarely if ever attended), the Goldsmith’s Reader in English, the Vigfússon Reader in Icelandic Literature and Antiquities, and, by a decree in 1931, *C.T. Onions as long as he held the post of University Reader in English Philology.

The responsibilities of the English Faculty Board (as appropriate for the *Oxford English School) were defined in the 1945 statutes as the supervision, studies, and examinations on which it reported to and advised the General Board of Faculties; the preparing of lecture lists; receiving and considering reports and representations from the faculty and boards of examiners; presenting an annual report on its work in the previous year to the General Board of Faculties; appointing University Lecturers, and recommending to the General Board appointments of such University Readers who were not elected; making recommendations to the General Board on subjects such as the payment of University Lecturers, and the provision of faculty rooms and libraries; appointing members of various boards of electors to professorships; the general supervision of examinations, and suggesting changes in the regulations governing them (either major changes in syllabus or changes in some set book or books). On such questions the Board usually consulted the entire faculty and had to submit proposals to the General Board for approval.

The nominal head of the University of Oxford is the Chancellor, but his duties are now mainly ceremonial. He presides over occasions such as Encaenia. His former, more powerful functions, are vested instead in the Vice-Chancellor. The Chancellor is elected for life by members of Convocation, and is not required to be resident in the University. Most of the chancellors during Tolkien’s time at Oxford had studied there themselves, after which they pursued successful political careers.

The office of the Vice-Chancellor was originally, as the name suggests, that of a temporary deputy acting for the Chancellor when he was absent, but from the early sixteenth century he became the chief executive officer of the University. Although from the seventeenth century he was nominated annually by the Chancellor, by convention the office went to whichever head of the various colleges or halls had seniority of appointment. From 1923, following the report of the Asquith Commission, no Vice-Chancellor could hold office for more than three years. ‘Besides being Chairman of the [Hebdomadal] Council, of the Board of Curators of the Chest, and of all the chief boards, committees, and delegacies, the Vice-Chancellor can veto a statute or decree, though he does so only on rare occasions in order to prevent legislative errors, and he has statutory powers to rule as to their interpretation’ (Brierly and Hodson, p. 85).

*L.R. Farnell, who had been Rector of Exeter College during part of Tolkien’s time as an undergraduate (1913–1928), was Vice-Chancellor of the University from 1920 to 1923. The Vice-Chancellor who took part in the 1925 election of Tolkien to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon was Joseph Wells, Warden of Wadham. From 1938 to 1941 the office was held by *George S. Gordon, President of Magdalen and Tolkien’s former colleague at Leeds. The Vice-Chancellor at the time of Tolkien’s election to the Merton chair was Sir Richard Livingstone, President of Corpus Christi.

The Registrar of the University is nominated by the Hebdomadal Council, subject to the approval of Congregation. He is ‘secretary of [the Hebdomadal] Council, Congregation, and Convocation, and he has to keep, besides their minutes and other papers, a large number of registers and records, and see that the Statutes are regularly published. He is not secretary to the Vice-Chancellor, nor answerable to him, but to Council’ (Brierly and Hodson, p. 93). The position is subject to a statutory retirement age, but otherwise permanent. He is

aided by an assistant registrar appointed by Council after consultation with [the Registrar], and if the consent of Congregation is obtained he may also be provided from time to time, with other assistant officers. The assistant registrar is charged with attending such meetings as the Registrar, with the approval of the Vice-Chancellor, may direct, to prepare their business and to keep minutes of their proceedings. He is thus an important instrument for co-ordinating the work of the various committees. [Brierly and Hodson, p. 93]

Both the Secretary of the Faculties and the Secretary to the Chest are also permanent positions, subject only to a statutory retirement age, nominated by the General Board subject to the approval of Congregation. The Secretary of the Faculties is secretary both of the General Board and of the several boards of faculties, while the Secretary to the Chest keeps the University accounts as well as the records of the meetings of the Curators of the University Chest.

Two Proctors, elected annually in rotation by the colleges, sit on all University boards and committees. In Tolkien’s time they still retained many of their disciplinary powers over students when the latter were found to be breaking rules outside of their colleges.

The Proctors are primarily a co-ordinating link in University administration, and their main function is to serve as co-adjutors of the Vice-Chancellor on all the more important administrative boards, committees, and delegacies, besides representing the University at the conferment of degrees and on similar ceremonial occasions. But this side of their activities is not spectacular, and is of little interest to the undergraduate, who sees them only as ministers of admonition and correction. They regularly patrol the streets at night, accompanied by minions who have been known throughout the ages as ‘bull-dogs’ …. They wear a distinctive costume, and the effect of their presence in public places is cautionary rather than minatory; but it is their duty to challenge any member of the University, being in statu pupillari [in general, students who have not yet received their Bachelor of Arts degree], who is failing to wear a gown [academic dress] after nightfall – or a violation of (a somewhat liberally interpreted) propriety …. The delinquent is required, with the utmost politeness, to call upon the Proctor at a stated time, when his defence is heard and judgement delivered. [Brierly and Hodson, p. 113]

Professorial chairs (professorships) were established at Oxford from the early sixteenth century. In Britain the term Professor specifically applies to the holder of a professorship; it is not used, as in the United States, to refer to any teacher at a university. At Oxford the teaching staff consists of University professors, readers, lecturers, and demonstrators, and of college fellows, tutors, and lecturers. Professors ‘are the principal means whereby the university, as distinct from the colleges that compose it, teaches [through lectures and classes] and directs study’ (Brierly and Hodson, p. 90). Each professor is selected by a special board of electors,

composed, as a rule, of the Vice-Chancellor, the Head of the college to which the professorship is attached and another member appointed by that college, a person nominated by the Hebdomadal Council and one by every board of Faculty concerned, and occasionally one or two outside persons. The professors do not ordinarily give tutorial teaching though they may voluntarily open small seminar classes or informal discussions. Their statutory duties include original work by the professors themselves, and the general supervision of research and advanced work in their subjects or departments. Every professor must give to students in their studies by advice, informal instruction, examination or otherwise. [Brierly and Hodson, p. 91]

During the nineteenth century the number of professors at Oxford increased from twenty-one to fifty-four. Among reforms made in that century aimed at strengthening the University, from 1877 the colleges were required to make contributions out of their revenues to the Common University Fund for University purposes, including the support of existing professorships and the founding of new ones. From 1925, following the report of the Asquith Commission, the University also received a government grant. Other changes made as a result of the Asquith Commission were that from 1926 ‘every professor appointed by the university was to be found a place in a college and every tutor appointed by a college would … receive an appointment as a university lecturer’ (John Prest, ‘The Asquith Commission, 1919–1922’, The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. VIII: The Twentieth Century, ed. Brian Harrison (1994), p. 41). Some chairs were already attached to a particular college, but the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon held by Tolkien was not: it was assigned to Pembroke College. Also, professors, heads, and fellows of colleges now had to retire on reaching the statutory retirement age of sixty-five, but were to receive a pension.

Tolkien became the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in 1925, with the responsibility to ‘lecture and give instruction on the Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, and on the other old Germanic Languages, especially Gothic and Old Icelandic’ (Statuta Universitatis Oxoniensis (1925), p. 117). At that time there were only two other chairs in the English School: the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, with responsibility for the History of the English Language, and the History of English Literature through the period of Chaucer, and the Merton Professor of English Literature, responsible for post-medieval literature. No more chairs were added in the School until the Goldsmith’s Readership in English Language was converted into the Goldsmith’s Chair of English Literature in 1948. The Professor of Poetry is also attached to the English School, but has minimal duties. Since Tolkien’s retirement other chairs have been established, among them the J.R.R. Tolkien Professorship of English Literature and Language, in the field of Medieval English Literature and Language in the period 1100–1500.

Professors generally were required to give at least thirty-six lectures or classes in each year, though the statutes for 1925 state that the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor had 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), thus a minimum of 126 hours.

Next in importance after professors are readers, either elected by the University or appointed by the General Board to hold office for a specified number of years with the duty of lecturing and giving instruction. They are perhaps closest to the associate or assistant professors in American colleges and universities, positions which do not exist in Britain. In the Oxford English School during Tolkien’s day there was a Goldsmith’s Readership in English Language, until its conversion to a chair devoted to English Literature in 1948, when it was replaced by a new Readership in English Language; a Readership in English Philology from 1927 until c. 1950; the Vigfússon Readership in Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities, from 1941; and the Readership in Textual Criticism from 1948.

Although professors, readers, fellows, and tutors usually give lectures, ‘the separate boards of faculties have power to appoint to the status and title of university lecturers any recognized teachers in their faculties, as and when they may think fit, subject to the approval of the General Board and of Congregation’ (Brierly and Hodson, p. 92). These lecturerships were another result of the report of the Asquith Commission in 1922. Since the Commission also wanted to make it possible for college tutors and other teachers to undertake ‘specialized work of study and research in addition to their activities in College teaching, by freeing them from an excessive burden of teaching in term and from the necessity of seeking paid work in the vacation’, the University used the Common University Fund to create fifty lecturerships ‘for tutors who undertook to do specific research and limit their other commitments’ (J.P.D. Dunbabin, ‘Finance since 1914’, The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. VIII: The Twentieth Century, p. 652, partly quoting from the Commission report). These lecturers remained college tutors, but restrictions were placed on the number of hours they could spend teaching. The scheme having proved very successful, the number of CUF lecturers was gradually increased. In 1949, when their number had more than doubled, the Vice-Chancellor proposed that ‘all 286 “inter-collegiate lecturers”’ should be included in the scheme, and he managed to persuade the University Grants Committee to provide state support on the ground that the public ‘lecturing which was done in most Universities by persons employed by the University was, in Oxford, done by the College teachers’ (quoted in Dunbabin, p. 653). This went into effect in January 1950.

The faculty boards are responsible for scheduling the lectures given by both University and college teachers. ‘Practically all lectures, even those held in college lecture rooms, are open to all members of the University without conditions or payment of special fees …. No record is kept of attendance, but an undergraduate is expected to attend such lectures as may be recommended by his tutor’ (L.A. Crosby, ‘The Oxford System of Education’, Oxford of Today (1927), pp. 48–9). The most important form of study for the undergraduate, however, is the tutorial.

Immediately on arrival in the University, each undergraduate is assigned by his College to a tutor … a Fellow, Tutor, or Lecturer of his or some other College, subject to whose guidance, the undergraduate will pursue his studies (or ‘reading’, in the Oxford phrase) during terms and vacations throughout his course at the University. The tutor directs the student’s work, advises him to attend certain lectures, and to read certain books. One or twice weekly the student spends an hour or more in conference with the tutor; at which time he usually reads an essay or essays embodying the results of his reading since the last conference. The essay is followed by the tutor’s comments and criticism, and an informal discussion, in which the tutor aims to assist the undergraduate in the analysis and correct statement of the matter involved. [Crosby, pp. 49–50]

At Oxford the word lecture refers to a presentation to a potentially large audience, almost always open to all members of the University without condition or charge, at which attendance is not required and the speaker does not pause to discuss his or her subject or to take questions. Class, in contrast, refers to instruction with a more limited number of specially enrolled students, which may make use of written materials as well as discussion. Classes are sometimes referred to as group conferences or seminars.

MISCELLANEOUS

Tolkien entered Exeter College by virtue of having earned an Open Classical Exhibition offered by that college. (An exhibition is less prestigious, and usually of less value, than a scholarship.) But a student could not matriculate, or enrol in the University, without first having passed Responsions, an entrance examination in four subjects, or having already obtained (as had Tolkien) School Certificate passes in relevant subjects. The choice of these varied, but in earlier years Greek and Latin were essential. Responsions was converted into a University entrance examination in 1926. Later a student had to pass the First Public Examination, either Honour Moderations or Pass Moderations (with a choice of subjects), generally taken not earlier than the third term after matriculation, before continuing his studies. Until 1932 a student also had to pass an Examination in Holy Scripture (‘Divvers Prelim’). Since Tolkien was entered to study Literae Humaniores (‘more humane letters’), also called ‘Greats’ (i.e. Classics), he took Classical Honour Moderations, but had he intended to study English from the beginning he could have taken Pass Moderations. It was not until Michaelmas Term 1948 that a First Public Examination specifically for the English Honour School was enabled.

At the end of his time at Oxford the student took the Second Public Examination, or Final Examination, in one of a number of Honour Schools or in a Pass School. In Tolkien’s time candidates were awarded first-, second-third- or fourth-class Honours, generally referred to as having ‘taken a First’, a ‘Second’, and so forth.

The Oxford academic year consists of three eight-week terms, known as Full Terms, each beginning on a Sunday during which lectures are given. Students will arrive probably a little earlier, and faculty may also have duties outside of Full Term. The first of the terms is Michaelmas Term from early to mid-October through about the middle of December. Next, after a vacation of six weeks (Christmas vacation), is Hilary Term (sometimes called Lent Term), from around mid-January to mid-March. Finally, after another six-week (Easter) vacation, is Trinity Term (or Summer Term), from late April or the beginning of May until late June. Final Honours Examinations are taken at the end of Trinity Term of the student’s final year at the school, followed after an interval by a public viva voce (oral) examination, or ‘viva’. Between the end of Trinity Term and the beginning of Michaelmas Term is the ‘long vacation’ (or ‘long vac’). The Handbook to the University of Oxford warns that although the year is thus divided almost equally between term and vacation, ‘it is an essential part of the Oxford system that the undergraduate shall do a great deal of his reading in vacation, and anybody who relies solely on his work during term will certainly meet with disaster in his examinations’ (Carleton Kemp Allen, ‘College Life’ (1933), p. 121).

As an undergraduate Tolkien would have been expected to wear academic dress – a black gown and cap – at lectures and during tutorials, in the presence of University officials, at ceremonies, and during examinations, as well as on other occasions. Later, as a Master of Arts, Tolkien wore ‘a full-style black gown … reaching below the calf … with a full gathered yoke behind and closed sleeves with a crescent-shaped cut at the bottom and an opening at the elbow’ with a hood ‘made from black corded silk or art silk edged and lined with crimson or shot crimson silk or art silk’ and a square cap (D.R. Venables and R.E. Clifford, Academic Dress of the University of Oxford (8th edn. 1998), p. 30). As an Honorary D.Litt. his full academic dress was ‘a scarlet robe with bell-shaped sleeves, of which the body is made from scarlet cloth with facings and sleeves of grey silk’ (p. 18). At examinations and formal occasions, men were required to wear sub-fusc clothing underneath the gown: a dark suit, socks, and footwear, and a white shirt, collar, and tie. When lecturing Tolkien wore his gown, but over ordinary clothes.

Technically Encaenia is a meeting of Convocation, held in the Sheldonian Theatre on the Wednesday of the ninth week in Trinity Term (that is, the Wednesday following the end of the Full Term), which is presided over by the Chancellor and at which honorary degrees are conferred and prize compositions read. In the morning before the ceremony the Chancellor, those being honoured (the honorands), Doctors, Heads of colleges, and other University dignitaries in full academic dress are entertained in the college of the Vice-Chancellor to enjoy strawberries and champagne provided by the benefaction of Lord Crewe in the early eighteenth century. They then walk in procession to the Sheldonian. The honorands wait in the Divinity School, and after the Chancellor has opened the proceedings are escorted into the Theatre, where each is introduced by the Public Orator with a speech in Latin and admitted to his or her new degree. The Orator then delivers the Creweian Oration on events of the past year, and either he or the Professor of Poetry commemorate the University’s benefactors. In the afternoon is an Encaenia garden party.

See further, The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. VII: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2, ed. M.G. Brock and M.C. Curthoys (2000). See also *Examinations; *Libraries and archives; *Oxford English School; *Societies and clubs. The Chronology volume of the Companion and Guide illustrates by example the flow of the Oxford academic year and Tolkien’s duties on the college and University levels.

Oxford English Dictionary. The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, sometimes cited as NED, or Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to give it its later and more familiar title, traces the meaning and usage of English words from their earliest appearance and illustrates them with quotations. Work on it began in 1858, under Herbert Coleridge (1830–1861) and F.J. Furnivall (1825–1910) successively, along lines suggested in 1857 by Richard Chenevix Trench, then the Dean of Westminster. Its most eminent editor, James A.H. Murray (1837–1915), succeeded Furnivall in 1879, and the first fascicle of the dictionary, A–Ant, was published at last in 1884. Murray was followed at his death by his associate *Henry Bradley, who was later joined by *William Craigie and *C.T. Onions. The dictionary proper was completed in 1928. This has been followed by supplements and by shorter, concise, and other versions, as well as new editions in print and electronic form.

At the end of October or the beginning of November 1918 Tolkien returned to *Oxford following military service, not yet demobilized from the Army but authorized to seek civilian employment. Prospects of an academic appointment were poor; but within a short time, his former tutor in Old Icelandic, William Craigie, promised him work on the staff of the Dictionary. Tolkien was placed, however, not under Craigie himself (who kept his staff small, the better to supervise) but as an assistant to Henry Bradley.

Salary records in the Oxford University Press archives suggest that Tolkien began work on the Dictionary at or near the start of 1919, having settled with his family at 50 St John Street in late 1918. The offices of the Dictionary were only a short walk away, in the Old Ashmolean building in Broad Street. Within them was the Dictionary Room, a ‘great dusty workshop, that brownest of brown studies’, as Tolkien called it in his appreciation of Bradley after the latter’s death (*Henry Bradley, 3 Dec., 1845–23 May, 1923). One of his earliest duties there was to take illustrative quotations in Old and Middle English submitted to the Dictionary by volunteer researchers, against which he would write the forms of words to be defined. Later he drafted dictionary entries themselves, detailing pronunciation, spelling, and etymology, writing definitions, and selecting and copy-editing quotations. His work was then examined and, as necessary, revised by Bradley.

Tolkien contributed to entries for words beginning with the letter W, such as waggle, waistcoat, wallop, walnut, walrus, wampum, warm, wasp, weald, wild, and wold. As Simon Winchester has said, W is ‘reckoned an interesting letter – there are essentially no Greek or Latin derivatives that begin with W, and its words are generally taken, as Bradley put it, “from the oldest strata of the language”’ (The Meaning of Everything (2003), p. 206). The original fascicles of the Dictionary pertinent to Tolkien’s work are W–Wash (published October 1921), Wash–Wavy (May 1923), Wavy–Wezzon (August 1926), Whisking–Wilfulness (November 1924), and Wise–Wyzen (April 1928). Peter M. Gilliver has determined, in his thorough ‘At the Wordface: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work on the Oxford English Dictionary’, in Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight (1995), that the first bundle of word-slips with which Tolkien was concerned was sent to press on 3 April 1919.

On the whole, Bradley was pleased with his assistant’s work. He singled out walnut, walrus, and wampum in his introduction to the fascicle W–Wash as containing ‘etymological facts or suggestions not given in other dictionaries’. And he wrote of Tolkien in support of the latter’s application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon (succeeding Craigie): ‘His work gives evidence of an unusually thorough mastery of Anglo-Saxon and of the facts and principles of the comparative grammar of the Germanic languages. Indeed, I have no hesitation in saying that I have never known a man of his age who was in these respects his equal’ (*An Application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford by J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor of the English Language in the University of Leeds, June 25, 1925). But Tolkien and his editor did not always agree. In a review of the Whisking–Wilfulness fascicle of the Dictionary for the *Year’s Work in English Studies for 1924, Tolkien noted that in the etymology of wild ‘the connexion with *walþus (wold, weald, forest) is rejected …’ (p. 48). He had asserted this connection in his draft of the entry for wild, and would not be dissuaded.

Tolkien joined the Dictionary staff just as the work was nearly complete (in its original form) through the letter T, with U and W in hand and the editors looking ahead to the end of the alphabet. Work on U and W, however, took longer than expected, there was tension between the editors at the Dictionary and officials at Oxford University Press (*Publishers) over excessive ‘scale’ (the increase in words in the Dictionary relative to those in Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language (1864), a convenient yardstick), especially, at this moment, words in Un-, and there were tensions also among the editors themselves which may have been apparent to their assistants.

While Tolkien’s work for the Dictionary lasted it was a fruitful experience for one who loved language. He once said that he ‘learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life’ (quoted in Biography, p. 101) – although in fact, according to official records, it was a term of fewer than eighteen months. It must also have been a great relief to him, after years in the Army and months in military hospitals, to be again among people with similar interests, and doing something that he enjoyed: digging among the roots of words. But he did not earn enough from this work to support his family, and therefore accepted English students for tutoring (it was common for Dictionary staff to function also within the University). Before long, evidently by the end of May 1920, he earned enough in tuition to give up his post at the Dictionary. By now, he was also writing the glossary, *A Middle English Vocabulary, for *Kenneth Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose. In 1923 he was considered for the editorship of the Dictionary’s Supplement, but apart from already having a job, was thought to not yet have ‘enough driving power’ (Robert Chapman, Oxford University Press, quoted in Peter Gilliver, The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016), p. 360).

In the course of his research for A Middle English Vocabulary Tolkien found uses of words antedating the earliest illustrative quotations given in the Dictionary. He also suggested, for future addition to the Dictionary, at least a quotation from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll, illustrating the word smirkle. These and other notes left by Tolkien, some in the working copies of the Dictionary used by staff, have aided, or will someday aid, the lexicographers who prepare supplements to the Dictionary. In 1969–71, in correspondence with *R.W. Burchfield, Tolkien was concerned with the definition of hobbit to be published in the second supplement to the OED.

On 20 January 1922, at the University of *Leeds, Tolkien gave a lecture on the Dictionary to a joint meeting of the Yorkshire Dialect Society and the English Association (*Societies and clubs). The Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society for January 1922 reported that ‘the lecture was extraordinarily interesting, and the attendance of members of the Yorkshire Dialect Society was unaccountably poor. Members are not to be congratulated on missing this opportunity of hearing an account of the aims of the “N.E.D.” by one who was until lately a distinguished member of its staff of philologists’ (p. 5).

Peter Gilliver notes in his history of the Dictionary that in January 1929 C.T. Onions gained an assistant, Monica Dawn, a graduate of the Leeds English school, where Tolkien ‘had apparently given her special training in the [dictionary] work. She was to be joined in July by another former pupil of Tolkien’s, Stefanyja Olszewska’ (p. 391). Another graduate of Leeds, *Stella Mills, also joined the staff in summer 1930 on Tolkien’s recommendation.

For comic effect in his story *Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), Tolkien quoted the Oxford English Dictionary definition of blunderbuss, attributing it to the ‘Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford’. The reference is presumed to be to the Dictionary editors Murray, Bradley, Craigie, and Onions.

J.S. Ryan noted in ‘Lexical Impacts’, Amon Hen 76 (November 1985) and 77 (January 1986), that numerous quotations from Tolkien’s writings are used as illustrative examples in the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (1972–82), ed. R.W. Burchfield. Deirdre Greene has argued that Tolkien’s predilection for historical lexicography influenced the plot structures and logic of *The Hobbit and *The Lord of the Rings: see her ‘Tolkien’s Dictionary Poetics: The Influence of the OED’s Defining Style on Tolkien’s Fiction’, in Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight (1995).

On Tolkien’s work on the Oxford English Dictionary, and his passion for words reflected in his fiction, see further, Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (2006). On the OED in general, see also Charlotte Brewer, Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED (2007), and Peter Gilliver, The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016).

Oxford English Monographs. Oxford University Press series established in the 1930s, under the aegis of faculty in the Oxford English School, for the publication of B.Litt. (today D.Phil.) theses of outstanding merit. The Press had earlier disdained the publishing of theses, considering them unprofitable. Tolkien served as a general editor from the beginning of the series through 1958, originally with *David Nichol Smith and *C.S. Lewis, later with *F.P. Wilson and *Helen Gardner. By 1954 he is referred to in correspondence as chief editor, though there is evidence that he acted in this capacity as early as 1938, when Víga-Glúms Saga was in press. Altogether he is named as a general editor in seven volumes, in order of publication:

Víga-Glúms Saga, ed. *(E.O.) G. Turville-Petre (1940) was originally a thesis produced under Tolkien’s supervision. In this Turville-Petre wrote: ‘It would be difficult to overestimate all that I owe to Professor Tolkien; his sympathy and encouragement have been constant and, throughout the work, I have had the benefit of his wide scholarship’ (p. vi).

Elizabethan Acting by B.L. Joseph (1951) includes a brief acknowledgement to Tolkien, among others.

Þorgils saga ok Hafliða, ed. Ursula Brown (1952) thanks Tolkien and *Alistair Campbell for ‘valuable criticism and advice’ (p. vi). The chief guide of the original thesis was Gabriel Turville-Petre.

Sir Orfeo, ed. *A.J. Bliss (1954) records a debt to Tolkien, the editor’s B.Litt. supervisor, ‘whose penetrating scholarship is an inspiration to all who have worked with him’ (p. vi).

The Peterborough Chronicle 1070–1154, ed. Cecily Clark (1958) includes no acknowledgement to Tolkien, but correspondence indicates that he was concerned with its publication.

*The Old English Apollonius of Tyre, ed. Peter Goolden (1958), for which Tolkien wrote a brief prefatory note, includes thanks to Tolkien for suggesting ‘revisions in presentation and style’, though the ‘prime mover of the work’ was *C.L. Wrenn (p. vi).

Sonnets by William Alabaster, ed. G.M. Story and Helen Gardner (1959), includes no acknowledgement to Tolkien.

Oxford English School. A chair of Anglo-Saxon was established at the University of *Oxford as early as 1795; from 1873 English was among the subjects that could be taken in the lesser pass examination; from 1881 English Language and Literature was one of the special examinations for women; and in 1885 the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature was created. It was not until 1894, however, that an English Final Honour School was established by statute.

Several earlier attempts had failed, partly because of the competing interests of *Philology and Literature, resulting in different views as to what the School should teach. There was a deep feeling that the study of English Literature might be a ‘soft’ option compared with other subjects, and therefore Philology and Language studies, which would provide a more exacting discipline, should form a substantial part of the English syllabus. The statute that eventually established the English School laid down that only those who had already obtained Honours in another school, or had passed the First Public Examination (either Classical Honour Moderations or Pass Moderations) would be admitted. D.J. Palmer points out in The Rise of English Studies (1965) that this ‘meant in effect that apart from the women candidates, the English School recruited largely from undergraduates who had passed Honour Moderations’ (p. 112). This was still the case when Tolkien transferred to the Oxford English School after taking Honour Moderations in 1913.

The syllabus introduced in 1894 was intended to provide a balance between Language and Literature. All candidates were required to take papers on Old English Texts; Middle English Texts; *Chaucer and Piers Plowman; *Shakespeare; Authors from 1700 to 1832; History of English Literature to 1800 (including criticism); History of the English Language; and (together) Gothic and unseen translations from Old and Middle English. Only two papers devoted to Special Subjects allowed any choice. The first Honour Examination was held in 1896. The committee that drafted the syllabus had hoped that at least some of the examination papers would cover both literary and linguistic matters (for example, literary as well as linguistic aspects of *Beowulf), but in most cases this did not happen. In 1898 History of English Literature to 1800 (including criticism) was replaced by two papers devoted to a general History of English Literature (including criticism) before and after 1700.

Palmer notes that the new school was dominated by philologists who did not adapt their teaching to the wider view encompassed by the syllabus, and for many years there was only one teacher on the Literature side, due to lack of support by the University and the colleges. It was not until the appointment of *Walter Raleigh in 1904 to a newly created Professorship of English Literature that there was any real development of the Literature side. Raleigh also introduced an important change in the syllabus which came into effect in 1908, and

recognized the de facto division between ‘literature’ and ‘language’ created by the nature of the available teaching, and which therefore abandoned the original principle that literature and language should not be identified with modern and medieval periods respectively. Raleigh’s notion … was that those who wished to specialize in either literature or language should be allowed to take separate papers …. [Palmer, p. 128]

In submitting proposals to the Board of Studies Raleigh and his colleague *A.S. Napier stated that ‘the [Oxford English] School has to provide for the needs of two classes of students – those who are primarily students of language, and those who are primarily students of literature. Experience has shown that the existing scheme is too rigid, and does not allow sufficient freedom for the development of excellence in either branch of the subject’ (quoted in Palmer, p. 129). Palmer calls this division ‘a recognition of defeat so far as a genuine combination of “English Language and Literature” was concerned’, and places the blame mainly on ‘the failure of the philologists to treat medieval texts as literature … their neglect of literature after the age of Chaucer, and … the inadequate provision of teaching on the literature side’ (pp. 129–30).

Four papers on Beowulf and Old English texts, *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and other Middle English texts, Chaucer, and Shakespeare remained compulsory. Otherwise students could choose to take papers devoted to Literature (with the exception of a compulsory paper on the History of the English Language) or to Language (with the exception of a compulsory paper on the History of English Literature). With minor adjustments, this scheme was the one Tolkien followed as an undergraduate.

To deal with the lack of suitable tuition provided by the colleges, a Committee of English Studies was formed, which put forward a proposal to establish a ‘pool’ of teachers who would provide adequate lectures, classes, and tutorials in return for the payment of a fee for each student of English by his college. Most colleges welcomed this offer, and the English Fund was established. During the years that Tolkien was an undergraduate, those lecturing and teaching in the English School included *H.F.C. Brett-Smith, lecturer and tutor in English; *W.A. Craigie, Taylorian Lecturer in Scandinavian Languages, for those who chose Scandinavian Philology as a special subject; *George S. Gordon, fellow of Magdalen College; A.S. Napier, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Rawlinson Professor of Anglo-Saxon; *David Nichol Smith, Goldsmiths’ Reader in English; Sir Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature, from 1914 attached to Merton College; *Percy Simpson, lecturer in English; Napier’s assistant *Kenneth Sisam; and *Joseph Wright, the Professor of Comparative Philology.

From its inception the English School was also intended to foster graduate studies. It attracted a large number of B.Litt. students, and from 1917, when the degree was introduced, a smaller number of students working towards the D.Phil. David Nichol Smith defined the difference between the B.Litt. and the D.Phil. in his paper ‘The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy’ delivered to the Fourth Congress of the Universities of the British Empire in Edinburgh on 8 July 1931:

All B.Litt. Probationers attend classes in such subjects as Elizabethan handwriting, the relation of manuscripts, the establishment of texts, the history of English editing of English Studies, bibliography, the resources of the Bodleian. In these classes they are instructed in the use of their tools, and after three terms’ instruction they are examined. They have then to submit a specimen piece of prentice work – their dissertation. They have to pass this double test before they get the B.Litt. in English Literature.

A very good man who has been placed in 1st Class in an Oxford Honour School, or who comes with high qualifications from another University, may start on his work for the D.Phil. in English without taking what we now regard as the preliminary degree, but he is well advised to attend the preliminary course of instruction …. The man who gains the B.Litt. is understood to be competent to research, the man who gains the D.Phil. has researched so successfully as to have made contributions to his subject which deserve to be made known to other scholars. [offprint of Proceedings of the Congress, in Oxford University Archives FA 4/5/2/1]

Napier died in 1916, but his successor to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, another philologist, *Henry Cecil Wyld, did not take the chair until 1920. Also in 1920 *C.T. Onions was appointed to a new lecturership in English, and in 1927 became Reader in English Philology. The number of students in the English School increased greatly after the First World War (fifty men and fifty-two women took the Final Honour Examination in 1923, versus twelve men and twenty-five women in 1913), and gradually the colleges began to provide their own teachers in the discipline.

On his return to Oxford in 1925, after being elected to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, Tolkien found among his colleagues several who had taught him as an undergraduate. Over the years many of his own students also became colleagues, and by the time he retired in 1959 many on the English faculty had studied under him at Oxford as undergraduates or had been supervised or examined by him for the B.Litt. or D.Phil.

In 1925 the English School was still part of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Literature, but in Michaelmas Term 1926 became a separate faculty, of English Language and Literature, with its own board. One of the board’s first actions, in an attempt to improve the quality of the Language papers submitted in the Final Honour Examination, was to request a separate English First Public Examination. A committee which included Tolkien suggested that this should include papers on English History; Old English and Chaucer; Greek or Latin set books; books to be prescribed by the same board; and unprepared translation from not fewer than two nor more than three languages (Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Spanish). Although the request for a separate examination was refused, in 1930 a paper in Old English and one on English History and Literature from 1603 to 1688 were added to the existing Pass Moderations.

By then the division of the course of study into a Language side (which attracted about ten per cent of the students) and a Literature side was not working as well as hoped, and Tolkien was the leading force in working for a change in the syllabus which would provide a greater choice. He put forward various suggestions to this end to the English Faculty Board in February 1930, and promoted them in his article *The Oxford English School, published in the Oxford Magazine for 29 May 1930. In the latter he noted that ‘owing to the accidents of history, the distinction between philology and literature is notoriously marked’. He thought the titles ‘language’ and ‘literature’ loosely used to define these were inaccurate, and ‘A and B would be preferable’. He pointed out that

in current use ‘language,’ A, must, if one refers to what is studied under that head, mean (i) anything concerned with English letters before A.D. 1300 – whether literary, historical, critical or linguistic; and (ii) exclusively one thing after 1400, linguistic history. The fourteenth century remains an awkward moment in our national history. On the other hand, ‘literature,’ B, would appear to mean (i) a cursory, sometimes reluctant, notice of the first six hundred years of recorded English – so cursory in fact that it must perforce be either almost entirely linguistic or deplorably inaccurate; and (ii) a purely ‘literary’ – perhaps best defined as a ‘consciously non-linguistic’ – interest in the remaining centuries, or some of them. This is further modified by a required, but seldom achieved, knowledge of the outlines of the history of the English language during twelve centuries, an enormous field as intricate at least as the whole history of the literature, examined in one paper ….

The ‘literature’ student may learn a little Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, but it is precisely at the point of his linguistic effort that his literary effort is least or absent. He is not allowed by the regulations to take a paper in literature up to 1300, even if he wishes to. That is a ‘language’ subject. (On the other hand, a real study of the history of the modern language is [compulsory for] the ‘language,’ A, student, who is scarcely required to study any ‘books’ in the modern period.

The divergence of interests is such that no one person can be expected to deal adequately with both of the ‘sub-schools’. [pp. 778–9]

Tolkien suggested for B that the literature of the nineteenth century should be replaced by ‘a scholarly study of worthy Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English texts, with a paper of unseen translation, for the extracts and the meagre “philology”’, though nineteenth-century literature might be an additional subject. For A he suggested that the history of the language from 1400 to 1900 be abandoned, pointing out that

philology goes hand in hand with as full a study from all points of view of the old and mediæval periods as is possible in two years. The centre of the curriculum is actually Anglo-Saxon and parts of Middle English; while the place occupied by the additional cognate language or languages is probably increasing, and rightly so. Among the latter Old Icelandic is naturally and deservedly most prominent. [p. 779]

He admitted that few first-class Anglo-Saxon texts survive, and among the advantages of studying Old Icelandic was the language’s ‘philological value of an intimate relationship with English’ and its ‘literary and historical value of the highest rank’ (p. 779). In support of Gothic, he said that it ‘introduces its student to many diverse things, the textual history of the Gospels, Greek, the history of Italy, and of north-eastern Europe, and the background of Gothic legend and tradition which was a main source of the poetic inspiration of ancient England and the North’ (pp. 779–80).

After discussion and negotiations during English Faculty Board meetings in 1931, significant changes were made in the syllabus, which was first examined in 1933. This allowed candidates more choice in the nine papers to be taken, with basically three main areas of study. Candidates who wished to do so could also take a tenth paper. Here we describe this syllabus in detail, since with minor changes it remained in force for most of Tolkien’s working life at Oxford, and it expresses his ideas of what English studies should cover.

SYLLABUS

Course I was for those whose interest was mainly in Medieval Philology, but also covered Literature in the period up to Chaucer. Students took papers on Old English Philology; Middle English Philology; Old English Texts – Beowulf, The Fight at Finnesburg (*Finn and Hengest), Deor’s Lament, and Exodus (*The Old English Exodus); Old English Literature; Middle English Texts – The Owl and the Nightingale, Sawles Warde (*Katherine Group), Havelok, *Sir Orfeo, and *Pearl; Middle English Literature; Chaucer, Langland, and Gower; and had a choice of two papers, each devoted to a subsidiary language: Gothic, Old Saxon, Old High German, Middle High German, Old Norse and Old Norse Texts (two papers), or Old French and Old French Texts (two papers). Candidates wanting to offer a tenth paper could take another of the subsidiary Language papers, or choose from the following Special Subjects: Elements of Comparative Indo-European Philology; Old English Palaeography; Runic Epigraphy; Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic Literature; Old French Literature to c. 1400; an historical subject studied in relation to linguistic history (Germanic Origins; the English Conquest of Britain; the Scandinavian invasions of England; the Norman Conquest; Mediaeval London); or a literary subject studied in relation to political or social history.

Course II was a more modern philological course which also covered Literature up to Milton. Candidates had to take the same papers on Old English Philology, Middle English Philology, Old English Texts, Middle English Texts, and Chaucer, Langland, and Gower as in Course I. They also took papers on Modern English Philology from c. 1400 to c. 1800; English Literature from 1400 to 1550; Shakespeare and Contemporary English Dramatists; and another paper chosen from Old English Literature, Middle English Literature, Spenser and Milton, Old Norse, or Old French. Candidates wishing to offer a tenth paper could choose a second from the first three options for their ninth paper, or one of the first, second, or sixth Special Subjects listed for Course I.

Course III was for those whose main interest was literature. Candidates took papers on Modern English; on Old English and Middle English with set texts different than those in Courses I and II; Chaucer and his contemporaries; Shakespeare and Contemporary English Dramatists; Spenser and Milton; and three papers covering English Literature from 1400 to 1830. Candidates wishing to offer a tenth paper could choose from English Literature from 1830 to 1900; a literary subject studied in relation to political or social history; Greek Literary Criticism; Virgil and his relation to English Literature; Roman Satire; the influence of Italian Literature on English Literature in the sixteenth century; or French Classical Drama.

After the Second World War there was again pressure on the English School for a change of syllabus. Jose Harris comments that

the faculty of English … was dominated by the principle that the evolution of English both as a living and a literary language should be studied from its earliest roots in the Anglo-Saxon period. This principle generated a powerful and fertile school of Old and Middle English scholarship; but it also led to an undergraduate degree course dominated by philology and language studies, within which even the most ‘literary’ options included no writing after 1830. Moreover the rise of the powerful new genre of twentieth-century literary criticism was virtually ignored …. [‘The Arts and Social Sciences, 1939–1970’ in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 8: The Twentieth Century (1994), p. 239]

Harris points out that *C.S. Lewis in particular firmly set himself against the new criticism. His

towering personality exerted great influence over colleagues and students alike, but from the start of the post-war period there were murmurings of dissent, partly against the monopoly of philology, partly against the exclusion from the syllabus of any echo of the new criticism, partly against the permeation of the faculty’s intellectual life by values that were deemed not literary but religious and moral. [p. 240]

In the years immediately after the war the English Faculty Board again sought to create a Preliminary Examination in English Language and Literature (First Public Examination). This was finally established by statute coming into force in Michaelmas Term 1948. Tolkien was a member of the committee that drafted the statute, and dealt with various emendations. In a reply to the General Board in March 1948 the committee said that ‘the English Preliminary is as wide as any examination of this kind can be for it asks for a knowledge of a classical, a medieval and a modern language (other than English) as well as a study of some important critical problems’ (Oxford University Archives FA 4/5/1/2).

In 1954 there was an attempt to make ‘English Literature from 1830 to 1920’ a compulsory rather than optional paper for students taking Course III in the Final Honour Examination. A committee comprising Tolkien, *J.N. Bryson, *Lord David Cecil, Humphry House, and *F.P. Wilson considered the question and recommended the change, but the proposal was rejected at a meeting of the English Faculty on 18 May 1954 (see entry in Chronology for that date, and note to the entry). Another committee, of which Tolkien was not a member, was set up on 21 January 1955 to discuss both the Final Honour School and the Preliminary Examination. Its report eventually led to changes in the syllabus, but these came into effect after Tolkien’s retirement.

During the latter half of the twentieth century Philology and the Language side of the Oxford English School gradually declined in popularity. Although a campaign to abolish compulsory Old English for students on the Literature side failed in 1991, it was eventually successful. Old English ceased to be a compulsory part of the First Public Examination for students who matriculated in Michaelmas Term 2002. According to Tom Shippey, these actions ‘removed a vital tool from literary study …. More disastrous has been the pedagogical failure. Most students of English leave university … with no knowledge of their own language …. It prevents them from improving their own ability to write, except of course what they learn by trial and error.’ Also lost is ‘a sense of the depth of time, and of the continuous never-broken links between one generation and other, which takes us back from modern to Middle and Old English …’ (Patrick Curry, ‘Patrick Curry Interview with Tom Shippey’, Journal of Tolkien Research 2, no. 1 (2015), article 4, p. 2).

FACULTY

From a series of reports or submissions made by Tolkien and others on behalf of the English Faculty Board, the Oxford English School seems to have been chronically short of lecturers and tutors, imposing a heavy burden on all its members. In May 1928 Tolkien typed and was one of five signatories to the report of the Committee on Tuition in Linguistic Subjects in the English School.

The Committee desire to point out that at present neither the University nor the colleges are able to provide for Male candidates special tuition in the linguistic subjects of the English School that is comparable in range or thoroughness to that given in literature, or sufficient in amount or quality to enable these candidates to satisfy the minimum requirements of the statutes.

The lack of such tuition has been responsible in the past for the low standard of philological knowledge shown by candidates in the examinations: a serious defect to which the examiners have repeatedly drawn the attention of the Board ….

The Committee wish to record, also, the view that the linguistic and literary subjects of the curriculum are intended to be simultaneous and complementary studies, and that, it is very undesirable that candidates should be allowed to relegate either the one or the other (according to their specialization) to a brief portion only of the period of their reading, whatever may be, now or in the future, the practical necessities of tutorial arrangements. [Oxford University Archives FA 4/5/2/1]

On 20 May 1929 Tolkien seems to have been involved with H.C. Wyld and C.T. Onions in drafting a request to the General Board of Faculties for the appointment of a lecturer to teach English Language for the Honour School of English Language and Literature.

The official teachers of these subjects are at present three: the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of A-S, and the Reader in English Philology. The two Professors normally give from two to three times the amount of public instruction required by statute, not infrequently dealing with elementary parts of their subjects. The Reader from time to time also gives courses beyond the statutory requirements, as he is doing, by special request, in the present Trinity Term. All three, if they are to consider the needs of the School, are obliged to neglect considerable sections of the subjects which ought to be adequately represented in the University, and still the linguistic syllabus of the School is not covered. [Oxford University Archives FA 4/5/2/1]

*C.L. Wrenn was appointed Lecturer in English Philology for one year from 1 October 1930, and then to a University Lecturership in English Language for five years from 1 October 1931; and *Dorothy Everett to a University Lecturership in the Middle English for five years from 1 October 1930.

On 15 May 1931 Tolkien and Nichol Smith submitted to the English Board a draft on the needs of the English Faculty for submission to the General Board. As submitted after emendation this listed three main needs: the establishment of a statutory University Lecturership in English Literature; the endowment of a readership or lecturership in (medieval) Scandinavian languages; and a new building for the English Faculty library. Tolkien surely drafted the justification for the second request, for the burden of Scandinavian studies fell on him: ‘Norse literature and philology are of central importance in the mediaeval curriculum of the English School. Adequate provision for the teaching of these subjects, and for the direction of advanced studies is urgently required. No provision for Scandinavian studies has been made by the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages since 1916’ (Oxford University Archives FA 4/5/2/3). It was not until 1941 that the first election to the newly created Vigfússon Readership in Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities relieved Tolkien of those duties.

The Second World War produced added problems and burdens. There might have been fewer male students in Oxford, but several members of the English Faculty left to take up war work, and University restrictions made replacing them difficult. In addition, the English Faculty were asked to provide short courses for Navy and Air Force cadets during their training, which not only needed new lectures but successive courses continued through traditional university vacations; and a special course for undergraduates who took part of their course of study before military service, and would later return to complete their degree. It was national policy in Britain that soldiers, sailors, and airmen were better for having experienced, even for a brief time, the enlargement of their mental horizons provided by a university education (alongside more specific military training). Oxford offered short courses of six months’ duration to service probationers from 1941, beginning with Army signallers and Royal Air Force cadets; Navy cadets joined the programme at Oxford in 1943. Although Army cadets were restricted to the science and technical curriculums, the Navy and Air Force not only permitted but encouraged their cadets to read in other subject. (See further, Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, ‘Oxford Cadets’, Too Many Books and Never Enough blog, 27 December 2011.)

With the end of the war in sight, Tolkien submitted on 26 March 1945 a statement on the ‘Needs of the English Faculty’ drawn up by himself and Nichol Smith to H.M. Margoliouth, Secretary of Faculties. They asked for more University Lecturerships and pointed out that the English School

receives small support in the way of fellowships from the men’s colleges as a whole, least of all in linguistic and mediaeval subjects; and it can never count on reappointment in the same subject, if one of its few male teachers that hold fellowships either retires or dies. An important part of the lecturing has in recent years been provided without fee or emolument.

In spite of this shortage the tendency appears to be to reduce the number of men supported either by fellowship or university appointment, and those that remain are over-worked. In order to conduct a Cadet Course all the resident men, fellows and professors (with the exception of the late Professor Wyld, whose sight and health were failing), had to take part, and most of these have now had no break in teaching and examining since January 1943.

At present there are not enough men and women with a fellowship or appointment to provide for the proper relief and change of examiners in those examinations of which the English Board has charge …. The Professor of Anglo-Saxon [i.e. Tolkien] has for years been obliged to take a large share in the examination of Pass Moderations and Sections. [Oxford University Archives FA 4/5/2/7]

*Lord David Cecil and *Dorothy Whitelock were appointed to University Lecturerships from 1 October 1946.

The report of a committee (of which Tolkien was a member) on the needs of the faculty for the quinquennium 1947–1952, approved by the English Faculty Board in October 1946, addressed

the immediate and pressing need of the School of English … for an increase in teaching staff. This has never been adequate; it is now gravely deficient. There are not enough teaching members of the Faculty to cover the linguistic and literary tuition, or the supervision of advanced students, or the requisite changes of examiners in the preliminary and final examinations.

When the Faculty of English was separated from Modern Languages in 1926 the School possessed: 3 Professors: 1 English Literature; 1 Language; 1 Anglo-Saxon. 1 Goldsmiths’ Reader. 4 University Readers: 3 Literature; 1 Language.

In spite of the growth of the School the provision remains much the same. Instead of the 4 University Readerships the School now has:

1 University Reader. Language.

1 Statutory Lecturer. Language.

*1 Lecturer. Literature. [Lord David Cecil].

*1 Lecturer. Mediaeval English. [Dorothy Whitelock]

(* These last two have only recently been established. For most of the intervening period the School has been deprived of the equivalent of 2 of the Readerships with which it started its independent existence.)

The only increase has been the recent appointment of Mr Ker as Reader in Palaeography. His services, mainly in the graduate (‘postgraduate’) department, are shared with History.

A Readership in Ancient Icelandic was established in 1940 (by a legacy) and attached to the English School. This has been of assistance to the professor of Anglo-Saxon, whose work has very greatly increased since 1926; but Scandinavian studies are a separate subject, of which the English School has become the caretaker.

In addition to the general growth of the School, in scope and numbers, there has been a considerable growth in the department of advanced (‘post-graduate’) studies. For the last twenty years this department has had the services, at small cost, of Mr S.R. Gibson. If the bibliographical work is to be maintained, the loss of his services will have to be replaced.

Since 1926 a few of the men’s colleges have assisted the School by tutorial fellowships and lectureships (other than those held by Readers and Lecturers). There has recently been (balanced against losses) some slight increase in this assistance. It is still inadequate, even on the tutorial side, and there appears to be small prospect of any substantial increase. A large part of the tuition, lecturing, and supervision, will still have to be provided by the School independently …. [Oxford University Archives FA 4/5/2/8]

The Board asked for the Goldsmiths’ Readership to be upgraded to a second chair of English Literature, and for two additional lecturerships in English Literature and one in Old and Middle English, and a readership or lecturership in Textual Criticism.

Raymond Edwards in Tolkien (2014) comments that Tolkien’s standing in the English Faculty at Leeds ‘had meant real authority over all who taught his subject in the University, and the capacity, funds permitting, to hire and fire staff’, but at Oxford ‘the faculties were comparatively insignificent, particularly in their responsibility for personnel other than the handful of professors and readers. Tutorial fellows were hired by, responsible to, and under the authority of, their colleges above all, and the colleges were jealous of their autonomy.’ At the same time, the shortage of teaching staff ‘had a significant effect on Tolkien’s scholarly productivity’, as he was overworked as a lecturer and in setting and marking examinations (p. 135). Under Oxford’s collegiate structure,

the vast majority of tenured staff are hired not by the University (as Tolkien was) but by individual colleges according to an almost infinitely variable, and unpredictable, schedule of their own private priorities. Thus, if a particular college had a fellow who was able and willing to teach undergraduates a particular part of the English course, he might be able (and willing) to do so only for undergraduates from his own college, or for his own and one other; and should he die or retire or become incapacitated, there was no guarantee or even likelihood that his position would be filled by a man similarly qualified …. Few if any of the tutorial fellows at individual colleges made any effective contribution to teaching the philological basics of the course; which meant that the burden of teaching the subject fell on to Tolkien and his salaried collegues, who were obliged to do so by lectures and classes, rather than the more effective individual tutorials that remain the foundation of Oxford undergraduate teaching. One immediate consequence of all this, in turn, was that many candidates did not learn much philology, and the examiners noticed. For the next twenty years, Tolkien and his allies made repeated efforts to persuade the University to hire more people to teach linguistic subjects, but with very limited success. If a subject is both compulsory and, for whatever reason, not very well taught (and it was a frequent complaint that Tolkien did not lecture well, or at least audibly), it is likely to become unpopular, certainly when compared with flashy and less demanding topics; and this, undeniably, is what happened to the philological side of the Oxford course. An exception to this was the women’s colleges, which, for historical reasons, were all well provided with English dons … and so they were usually able to give their undergraduates a good foundation in the technical side of the course in the more congenial, and more effective, environment of the college tutorial, allowing them to take from the professorial lectures the broader and more synthetic knowledge they were designed to impart, rather than attending lectures by world authorities so as to mug up the basics of sound-changes. [pp. 135–7]

TOLKIEN AND THE OXFORD ENGLISH SCHOOL

The Statuta Universitatis Oxoniensis (1925 edn.) defines the general duties of a professor as ‘to give instruction to Students, assist the pursuit of knowledge and contribute to the advancement of it, and aid generally the work of the University’. It further states that the lectures he gives must conform to the Regulations specific to his Chair, and ‘it shall be his duty to give to Students attending his Ordinary Lectures assistance in their studies by advice, informal 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 Professor spent a highly contentious hour inducing us to believe that The Owl and the Nightingale was one of the great humorous poems of European 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]

Some fifty students supervised by Tolkien are listed in Chronology, over thirty of these in the period 1945–59. In addition, Tolkien generally interviewed all prospective B.Litt. and D.Phil. students wishing to write a thesis on a language or medieval literature subject, and as a member of the Applications Committee he took part in allocating supervisors, approving subjects of theses, and appointing examiners of the completed theses. Each thesis was considered by two examiners, first as a written text and then in a viva (viva voce). Tolkien examined over thirty theses during his time at Oxford. Roger Lancelyn Green wrote that he first met Tolkien

when he and David Nichol Smith were putting me through the oral examination for my B.Litt. Degree, my thesis being on Andrew Lang and the Fairy Tale. The thesis was ‘referred back’ to me – which Nichol Smith, who had been my supervisor, kindly explained was no reflection on its merits, in fact rather the reverse as it was obviously nearly good enough to be the basis of a published book but could be improved; and that I must spend another term over it – with Tolkien as my supervisor.

Accordingly, once a week for that term I made my way to 20 Northmoor Road [*Oxford] for a delightful hour with Tolkien. ‘It was my fault that your thesis was referred back – you must blame me!’ were his first words. ‘But I wanted to know more about the Fairies!’ In consequence of which, besides a good deal of revision, I wrote an additional chapter on the Fairies – of which I treasure the original draft written all over by Tolkien with comments and suggestions. [‘Recollections’, Amon Hen 44 (May 1980), pp. 6–7]

Early in 1946, when John Lawlor returned to Oxford after war service to work on an edition of Julian of Norwich as a B.Litt. thesis, Tolkien was appointed his supervisor. Lawlor wrote that his ‘first and abiding impression’ of Tolkien ‘was one of immediate kindness. Tutored by [C.S.] Lewis I had expected to be tested with a few falls, so to speak. But the gentle creature who sucked his pipe and gazed meditatively along its stem seemed interested only in what he could do to help’ (C.S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections (1998), pp. 30–1). Robert Burchfield began, but did not complete, a D.Phil. on the Ormulum under Tolkien:

I saw Tollers (as he was known) at weekly intervals in the academic years 1951–2 and 1952–3, sometimes in Merton College, sometimes at his home in Holywell. He puffed at his pipe while I told him of my work. He made many acute observations. I followed them all up. He beamed when I made some discoveries. Now and then he mentioned the hobbits, but he didn’t press them on me, spotting that my interest lay in the scraped-out o’s and double consonants of the Ormulum rather than in dwarves … Orcs, and Mr Bilbo Baggins. [‘My Hero: Robert Burchfield on J.R.R. Tolkien’, p. 50]

In a long letter to a Mr Burns on 15 November 1952 Tolkien remarked that he had been able to write at a greater length because of ‘unexpected freedom and exhilaration. I was “cut” by two researchers this morning who normally occupy between them over two hours of every Saturday morning: freedom’ (private collection).

Since Tolkien was a professor employed by the University and not by a college, he did not have to undertake the tutorial work that imposed a heavy burden on members of colleges. He did, however, teach classes, including those established during the Second World War for Navy and Air Force cadets, Anthony Curtis, a Royal Air Force cadet, contrasted Tolkien and C.S. Lewis:

At the end of an hour with Lewis I always felt a complete ignoramus; no doubt an accurate impression but also a rather painful one; and if you did venture to challenge one of his theories the ground was cut away from beneath your feet with lightning speed. It was a fool’s mate in three moves with Lewis smiling at you from the other side of the board in unmalicious glee at his victory. By contrast Tolkien was the soul of affability. He did all the talking, but he made you feel you were his intellectual equal. Yet his views beneath the deep paternal charm were passionately held. At the first of these classes he handed round some sample passages of medieval English he had typed out. One of them was an English translation of the first verses of the Gospel According to John. ‘You see,’ he said triumphantly, ‘English was a language that could move easily in abstract concepts when French was still a vulgar Norman patois.’ [‘Remembering Tolkien and Lewis’, British Book News, June 1977, p. 429]

Eric Stanley, later Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, described his experience as an undergraduate in 1948–51, of attending Tolkien’s weekly seminars for four or five terms;

We were less than a dozen …. Our papers, read out to the seminar, were not supposed to go on for longer than 15 or at most 20 minutes on the subject Tolkien had chosen. His patience was not infinite. [A] German graduate student went on and on, exemplifying ad nauseam some point of grammar, syntax I think. After about half an hour, it may have been more … Tolkien stopped him, saying something like, ‘Thank you very much. Now what conclusion have you arrived at?’ …

Tolkien was usually very patient, very encouraging, very polite, very friendly, except when some fundamental philological mistake had, in his eyes, ruined some student’s paper …. Tolkien treated philology not as an end in itself but as the handmaid of literature. Literature is what he knew, Old English and Middle English, Old Icelandic, the medieval literatures in the Celtic languages, and of course he knew Greek and Latin ….

Tolkien did not usually need to prepare his seminars. To provide evidence for views that he expressed, he pulled down books from his well-stocked shelves in Merton …. [‘C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as I Knew Them (Never Well)’, Journal of Inklings Studies 4, no. 1 (April 2014), pp. 137–8]

Another major demand on Tolkien’s time was examining, mainly the Final Honour School papers, but also Pass Moderations, and in the Second World War examinations set for cadets. He was an examiner in the Final Examinations in 1927–9, 1932–3, 1940–2, and 1952–3, and several times was chairman of the examiners. The papers were usually set by the examiners in the spring, then from about mid-June to the end of July examining involved ‘a 7-day week, and a 12-hour day’ (letter to *Rayner Unwin, 22 June 1952, Letters, p. 162).

In addition to lecturing, teaching, supervising, and examining Tolkien carried a heavy administrative burden. By virtue of his successive professorships he was always a member of the English Faculty Board which met twice a term. At almost every other meeting he was appointed to a subcommittee to consider some matter, such as changes to the syllabus or set books, candidates for a lecturership, and the need for more staff. The subcommittee was usually required to report at the next meeting of the Board, and no doubt meetings of the subcommittee were required in the interim. Tolkien was elected chairman of the Board at the beginning of Michaelmas Term 1939, and in the difficulties imposed by the war was re-elected several times, serving until Michaelmas Term 1946. On the unexpected death of the chairman (R.F.W. Fletcher) in October 1950, Tolkien served a further two years, from 1950 to 1952. The chairman of the Board was always also a member of the English Faculty Library Committee, and ex officio of any English Faculty Board subcommittees. During the academic years 1929–32 and 1938–47 Tolkien also served on the General Board, which met about every two weeks in term time, but from Michaelmas Term 1946 every week.

To these duties were added many other calls on Tolkien’s time: organizing lecture lists, writing references for colleagues and former students, taking part in elections to various chairs and readerships, answering questions sent to him by his colleagues, and thanking those who sent him offprints of articles they had written, inter alia.

In letters to his sons Tolkien commented generally about Oxford University, teaching, and students. On 1 November 1963 he wrote to Michael:

I remember clearly enough when I was your age (in 1935). I had returned 10 years before (still dewy-eyed with boyish illusions) to Oxford, and now disliked undergraduates and all their ways, and had begun really to know dons. Years before I had rejected as disgusting cynicism by an old vulgarian the words of warning given me by old Joseph Wright. ‘What do you take Oxford for, lad?’ ‘A university, a place of learning.’ ‘Nay, lad, it’s a factory! And what’s it making? I’ll tell you. It’s making fees. Get that in your head, and you’ll begin to understand what goes on.’

Alas! by 1935 I now knew that it was perfectly true. At any rate as a key to dons’ behaviour. Quite true, but not the whole truth …. I was stonewalled and hindered in my efforts (as a schedule B professor on a reduced salary, though with schedule A duties) for the good of my subject and the reform of its teaching, by vested interests in fees and fellowships ….

The devotion to ‘learning’, as such and without reference to one’s own repute, is a high and even in a sense spiritual vocation; and since it is ‘high’ it is inevitably lowered by false brethren, by tired brethren, by the desire of money (or even the legitimate need of money), and by pride: the folk who say ‘my subject’ & do not mean the one I am humbly engaged in, but the subject I adorn, or have ‘made my own’. Certainly this devotion is generally degraded and smirched in universities. But it is still there. [Letters, pp. 336–7]

On 15 December 1969 he wrote to Christopher:

I had once a considerable experience of what are/were probably England’s most (at least apparently) dullest and stodgiest students: Yorkshire’s young men and women of sub-public school class and home backgrounds bookless and cultureless. That does not, however, necessarily indicate the actual innate mental capacity – largely unawakened – of any given individual. A surprisingly large proportion proved ‘educable’: for which a primary qualification is the willingness to do some work (to learn) (at any level of intelligence). Teaching is a most exhausting task. But I would rather spend myself on removing the ‘dull’ from ‘stodges’ – providing some products of β to β + quality that retain some sanity – a hopeful soil from which another generation with some higher intelligence could arise. Rather – rather than waste effort on those of (apparently at any rate) higher intelligence that have been corrupted and disintegrated by school, and the ‘climate’ of our present days. Teaching an organized subject is simply not the instrument for their rehabilitation – if anything is. [Letters, pp. 403–4]

In an article by Penny Radford shortly after Tolkien’s death, his colleague Nevill Coghill remembered him as ‘always the most accessible of men’ who ‘gave unstinted help to all who asked for it. I have known him plan a set of lectures for another don who was a beginner’ (‘Professor Tolkien Leaves an Unpublished Book’, The Times (London), 3 September 1973, p. 1).

The Oxford English School. Essay, published in the Oxford Magazine for 29 May 1930, pp. 778–80, 782, one of a series by a variety of authors concerned with different schools at the University of *Oxford. In this Tolkien took the opportunity to examine the failings of the English syllabus as it stood at the time (see *Oxford English School), and to suggest improvements. His comments were ‘purely personal’, and if one part of the English School receives more notice, it is because it was Tolkien’s

principal concern, not because I regard it as the most important – though I do not measure importance by counting heads in final examinations. The length of the comment may be excused by those who reflect that the position of an English School in an English-speaking University is peculiar, and presents special problems too seldom considered ….

‘English’ plainly belongs by nature to a group of schools whose primary concern is with ‘books,’ written in one of the literary languages of Europe, ancient, medieval or modern, and with that language itself. Yet its ‘books’ are not in a foreign tongue, the language is the vernacular – although it may be held that for all the related schools the fact that the language studied is precisely not English is of fundamental importance.

The divergence between the two ‘sides’ of the English School, its ‘sub-schools,’ may be regarded as the result of different attempts at solving the special problem of an English English School. [p. 778]

He notes that the two sides are generally dubbed, not entirely accurately, as ‘language’ and ‘literature’, the latter more popular being preferred by more than ninety per cent of the English students. He proceeds to criticize the current regulations of the School, which mean that the ‘literature’ student who wishes to gain a knowledge of Old and Middle English (a ‘language’ subject) cannot do so in depth, while a ‘language’ student is ‘scarcely required to study any “books” in the modern period.’ ‘No one person’, therefore, ‘can be expected to deal adequately with both of the “sub-schools”’ (pp. 778–9).

Tolkien surmises that the ‘literature’ curriculum ‘is felt unsatisfactory by all’ because it allows for only an elementary linguistic component; though ‘it is probable that some would prefer its equivalent (e.g., “Latin and Greek without tears”) rather than its re-ordering and revival.’ Personally he favours

curtailing the thousand years at the modern end, jettisoning certainly the nineteenth century (unless parts of it could appear as an ‘additional subject’); and the substitution of a scholarly study of worthy Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts, with a paper of unseen translation, for the extracts and the meagre ‘philology.’ If real philology is required it should deal with the periods also studied as literature, and be examined in the same connection; otherwise it is valueless. [p. 779]

In contrast, he praises the ‘language’ curriculum and extols the importance of a study of Old English, Middle English, and Old Icelandic (Old Norse): Philology ‘is essential to the critical apparatus of student and scholar’ and ‘language is more important than any of its special functions, such as literature. Its study is profound and fundamental’ (p. 780). Old Icelandic, Tolkien believes, should ‘be prescribed for all and made more central.’ Texts in the three languages should be increased, with definite books prescribed. ‘The specialised history, especially the phonetic history, of modern English should disappear as a compulsion from this branch of the School.’ Chaucer should be recovered as a mediaeval author, ‘and part of his works become once more the subject of detailed and scholarly study. The pretence that no “English” curriculum is humane which does not include Shakespeare must naturally be abandoned, since that author lies quite outside the purview of such a course’ (p. 782).

Related to the theme of this essay is Tolkien’s poem Lit’ and Lang’, written while he was at *Leeds and later published in *Songs for the Philologists. In this there are ‘two little groups, / Called Lit’ and Lang’’, i.e. the Literature and Language sides of an English school curriculum. Lit’ does not like philology and ‘was lazy till she died, / Of homophemes’ (words of different meaning or spelling which require the same position of the lips – that is, Lit’ was too lazy to look at the words themselves). When doctors cut up the corpse of Lit’ ‘they couldn’t find the brain’. Lang’ does not mourn her death.

Oxford Letter. Letter apparently written at the editor’s request, published as by ‘Oxon’ in the King Edward’s School Chronicle n.s. 28, no. 202 (December 1913), pp. 80–1. Tolkien’s authorship is revealed in his papers. The letter contains news of Old Edwardians (former pupils at *King Edward’s School, Birmingham) now at the University of *Oxford. *G.B. Smith is prominently mentioned.

Oxford Poetry 1915. Third in a series of annual volumes of verse written by undergraduates or graduates of *Oxford (the first covered 1910–13), published December 1915 in Oxford by B.H. Blackwell (*Publishers). See further, Descriptive Bibliography B1.

The 1915 volume, edited by Gerald Crow and *T.W. Earp, includes Tolkien’s poem *Goblin Feet. Altogether the volume contains fifty-two poems by twenty-five authors. Among the latter, in addition to Tolkien, are several poets who had or were later to have personal connections: T.W. Earp, Naomi M. Haldane (*Naomi Mitchison), *Leonard Rice-Oxley, *G.B. Smith, and *H.T. Wade-Gery. Other contributors include Aldous Huxley; Dorothy L. Sayers; and *H.R. Freston, soon to die in the Somme, about whose poems Tolkien delivered a paper to an Oxford student society in May 1915.