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.
