Читать книгу The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien - Christopher Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien - Страница 37

[Masefield, then Poet Laureate, together with Nevill Coghill organised an entertainment in Oxford during the summers of 1938 and 1939, entitled Summer Diversions. In 1938 he invited Tolkien to impersonate Chaucer and recite from memory the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. He wrote to Tolkien enclosing some lines of verse with which he proposed to introduce him.]

27 July 1938

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Mr Masefield,

I have no prelude of my own to fire off, and no objection as a performer to being preceded by the lines you send. In any case you are Master of the Diversions, and I am under your good authority.

Privately, as one student of Chaucer to another, I might perhaps say that these lines seem to me to allude to the erroneous imagination that Chaucer was the first English poet, and that before and except for him all was dumb and barbaric. That is of course not true, and is perhaps, even as a way of emphasizing the fact that he possessed a peculiar genius, which would at any period have produced work having a novel flavour, rather misleading. I do not personally connect the North with either night or darkness, especially not in England, in whose long 1200 years of literary tradition Chaucer stands rather in the middle than the beginning. I also do not feel him springlike but autumnal (even if of the early autumn) and not kinglike but middle-class. However, as I say, these are professional matters, about which the present occasion is hardly one to join battle.

I am not at all happy about the effect of Chaucer in general, or the Nonnes Prestes Tale in particular, in a supposed 14th. C. pronunciation. I will do my best, but I hope it will be sufficiently intelligible for some of the sense to get over. Personally I rather think that a modified modern pronunciation (restoring rhymes but otherwise avoiding archaism) is the best – such as I once heard you use on the Monk’s Tale a good many years ago.

Yours sincerely

J. R. R. Tolkien.