JRR Tolkien by Colin Duriez

Author:Colin Duriez
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Lion Hudson
Published: 2012-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

8

Leeds and dragons

Leeds University lacked the bright, ancient splendour of Oxford. The sooty air from its manufacturing industry made its mock Gothic Victorian buildings grimy. A short walk from its Great Hall there were rows of terraced houses, within one of which the English Department was housed. Today, the large modern buildings making up the frontage of the university hide the Great Hall and other main buildings of the original institution, which reveal that smaller colleges had existed here – most recently the Yorkshire College – before the university’s formation in 1904, sixteen years before Tolkien’s arrival. The English Department location of the time has long been demolished.

Tolkien was soon made to feel at home. The English Department was rapidly expanding under Professor George S. Gordon, who had come from Oxford University for this purpose. He extended a free hand to Tolkien to form a School of English Philology within the English Department, in which literary and linguistic interests would work together. Gordon introduced the Oxford English School syllabus, in which students could choose between some specialist courses in medieval English language and literature, and some in more modern literature. This task was a challenge to inspire a person of Tolkien’s precocious gifts. Though the Yorkshire students at first seemed dull and stodgy, he soon found them hard-working and quick to make progress. Eventually, from only a small proportion taking specialist courses involving English language, a much larger number were attracted.

Before Tolkien began teaching in his new position at Leeds, the family had taken a holiday cottage on the North Wales coast at Llanbedrog for part of the long summer vacation. (Much of the vacation was taken up for Tolkien by marking school examination papers for extra income to pay medical bills, and similar.) The resort combined Tolkien’s love of the sea and some exposure to the Welsh language. What was not pleasant were the spiders that fell from the ceiling onto Edith’s bed. She was fairly well advanced in pregnancy at the time, and did not appreciate such shocks. Edith was carrying their second son, Michael, and she and Tolkien would tell him in later years that his fear of spiders sprang from Edith’s experience. As usual, Tolkien painted and sketched on holiday, and at Llanbedrog he composed a couple of impressions of the Irish Sea coast.

Edith remained in Alfred Street with John, and Jennie Grove, while Tolkien began his first term as Reader in English and started to look around for suitable accommodation for his growing family. At weekends he became familiar with the railway route from Leeds to Oxford. In October 1920 the family celebrated the successful birth of Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien. Then Christmas that year, which was spent in Oxford, saw the beginning of Tolkien’s Father Christmas letters, annual letters he wrote and illustrated for his children until 1943. These were eventually collected and published after his death. Tolkien was very much a family man.

It was not until March the following year that Tolkien found accommodation for the family in Leeds.

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