JRRTolkien - A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter

Author:Humphrey Carpenter [Carpenter, Humphrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-30T23:00:00+00:00

His job also required him to supervise post-graduate students, and to examine within the University. In addition he undertook a good deal of ‗freelance‘ work as an external examiner to other universities, for with four children to bring up he needed to augment his income. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties he made frequent visits to many of the British universities as an examiner, and spent countless hours marking papers. After the Second World War he restricted this activity to examining regularly for various colleges in Ireland, touring Eire and making many friends there in the process. This was much to his taste. Less attractive, indeed an unredeemed chore, was the marking of School Certificate (the examination then set for British secondary schools) which he undertook annually in the prewar years to earn extra money. His time would have been better devoted to research or writing, but his concern for the family income made him spend many hours in the summer at this irritating task.

A good deal of his attention was also taken up by administration. It should be understood that an Oxford professor, unlike those in many other universities, is not by virtue of his office necessarily in a position of power in his faculty.

He has no authority over the college tutors who in all probability make up the majority of the faculty staff, for they are appointed by their colleges and are not answerable to him. So if he wishes to initiate some major change of policy he must adopt persuasive rather than authoritarian tactics. And, on his return to Oxford in 1925, Tolkien did wish to make a major change: he wanted to reform certain aspects of the Final Honour School of English Language and Literature.

The years since the First World War had widened the old rift between Language and Literature, and each faction in the English School - and they really were factions, with personal as well as academic animosities - delighted to interfere with the syllabus of the other. The ‗Lang.‘ side made sure that the ‗Lit‘ students had to spend a good deal of their time studying the obscurer branches of English philology, while the ‗Lit.‘ camp insisted that the ‗Lang.‘

undergraduates must set aside many hours from their specialisation (Anglo-Saxon and Middle English) to study the works of Milton and Shakespeare. Tolkien believed that this should be remedied. What was even more regrettable to him was that the linguistic courses laid considerable emphasis on the study of theoretical philology without suggesting that undergraduates should read widely in early and medieval literature. His own love of philology had always been based firmly on a knowledge of literature, and he determined that this state of affairs should be changed. He also proposed that Icelandic should be given more prominence in the syllabus; this latter hope was one reason for the formation of the Coalbiters.

His proposals required the consent of the whole faculty, and at first he met with a good deal of opposition. Even C.

S. Lewis, not yet a personal friend, was among those who originally voted against him.

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