Valedictory address to the University of Oxford by John Ronald Ruel Tolkien

Author:John Ronald Ruel Tolkien [Tolkien, John Ronald Ruel ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nonf_publicism

I have said enough, perhaps more than enough for this occasion. I must now get out of the chair and finally stand down. I have not made any effective apologia pro consulatu meo, for none is really possible. Probably my best act in it is the leaving of it – especially in handing it on to its elected occupant, Norman Davis. Already one of the chair-borne, he will know that in the cosy cushions, which legend furnishes for professorial seats, many thorns lurk among the stuffing. He can have those too, with my blessing.

If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

But even as I step off — not quite the condemned criminal, I hope, that the phrase suggests – I cannot help recalling some of the salient moments in my academic past. The vastness of Joe Wright's dining-room table (when I sat alone at one end learning the elements of Greek philology from glinting glasses in the further gloom). The kindness of William Craigie to a jobless soldier in 1918. The privilege of knowing even the sunset of the days of Henry Bradley. My first glimpse of the unique and dominant figure of Charles Talbut Onions, darkly surveying me, a fledgling prentice in the Dictionary Room (fiddling with the slips for WAG and WALRUS and WAMPUM). Serving under the generous captaincy of George Gordon in Leeds. Seeing Henry Cecil Wyld wreck a table in the Cadena Café with the vigour of his representation of Finnish minstrels chanting the Kalevala. And of course many other moments, not forgotten if not mentioned; and many other men and women of the Studium Anglicanum: some dead, some venerable, some retired, some translated elsewhither, some yet young and very much with us

still; but all (or nearly all — I cannot say fairer than that and remain honest) nearly all dear to my heart.

If then with understanding I contemplate this venerable foundation, I now myself fród in ferðe [4] am moved to exclaim:

Hwǽr cwóm mearh, hwǽr cwóm mago? Hwér cwóm máððumgyfa?

Hwǽr cwóm symbla gesetu? Hwǽr sindon seledréamas?

Éalá, beorht bune! Éalá, byrnwiga!

Éalá, þéodnes þrym! Hú seo þrág gewát,

genáp under niht-helm, swá heo nó wǽre!

(Where is the horse gone, where the young rider? Where now the giver of gifts?

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