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]
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