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.
