A Vision of C. S. Lewis

So, thanks to 'Brer' (Rabbit? Fox? Bear?), I now have the source for the story of CSL's punitive posthumous miracle: A. N. Wilson's 1992 biography (p. 305-306). Wilson in turn takes it from Canon J. B. Phillips' RING OF TRUTH (1967), which I don't have. But as 'Brer' points out, the episode is also referenced in Warnie's diary (entry for Th. Dec 5th 1968), which reproduces the original version of Phillips' account ("I Saw a Spirit") from that month's Parish Magazine (presumably the December 1968 issue).

Since my own recollection was so faulty, it seems appropriate to print Phillips' own account here. And, since Wilson's biography is easier to find than Warnie's diaries, I've provided the less-accessable account here, taken from an editorial footnote provided by the editors to Warnie's diaries:

"Many of us who believe in what is known 

as the Communion of Saints must have 

experienced the sense of nearness, at some time, 

of those we love after they have died. This has 

happened to me several times. But the late C. S.

 Lewis, whom I did not know very well and had 

only seen in the flesh once but with whom I had 

corresponded a fair amount, gave me an unusual 

experience. A few days after his death, while I 

was watching television, he appeared sitting in

a chair within a few feet of me, and spoke a few 

words which were particularly relevant to difficult 

circumstances through which I was passing. He 

was ruddier in complexion than ever, grinning all 

over his face and positively glowing with health. 

The interesting thing to me was that I had not been 

thinking about him at all. And I was neither alarmed 

nor surprised. He was just there. A week later, when 

I was in bed reading before going to sleep, he 

appeared again, even more rosily radiant than before, 

and repeated to me the same message, which was 

very important to me at the time. I was a little puzzled 

by this, and mentioned it to a certain saintly Bishop. 

His reply was: 'My dear J, this sort of thing is 

happening all the time.' The reason I mention this 

personal experience is that although 'Jack' Lewis 

was real in a certain sense it did not occur to me 

to reach out and touch him. It is possible that 

some of the appearances of the risen Christ were 

 of this nature, being known as versidical visions."

--BROTHERS AND FRIENDS, p. 288-289

Warnie's response was a mix of incredulity with despair. On the one hand, while not doubting Phillips' sincerity he wondered if he'd just "dreamt the whole thing", particularly since the vision spoke, wh. is not usually the case ("so far as I can recollect it is contrary to all stories of revenants, except the Witch of Endor; speaking ghosts are normally to be found only in literature or on the stage"). More bitter was the thought that his brother was able to manifest after death but not to him:

"why, oh why, if able to do so, should [he] never have come to me in the lonely study some evening with a word of comfort and good cheer? Is it that I am of such an earthly nature that to make contact with me is impossible for him? Perhaps he has so far outstripped me that I shall never see him again -- a horrible thought . . . Whatever the communication it seems to have been relevant and sensible, not the sort of slush by any means which is dealt out by mediums" (ibid.)

All in all, thin stuff to build a case for sainthood from, particularly since Phillips wdn't reveal the message. But in such matters it's often the case that those who want something to happen are far more dedicated and tenacious than those who don't want it, so I guess we'll see.

-JDR

Brer said...

This sounds like the story told by Canon J. B. Philips, in which he says Lewis actually appeared and spoke to him (incident related in A. N. Wilson's biography of Lewis). Warren Lewis, C.S.'s brother, wrote in his diary (Brother's and Friends, Thursday 5th December 1969) of reading the story and being disturbed and depressed by it for several reasons.

Was Tolkien "An Inveterate Meddler"?

So, for part of the research for my Kalamazoo piece on Tolkien and women's higher education, I had the library call up the 1984 volume of PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY from offsite storage at the Baker Auxiliary Stacks so as to be able to read the obituary of Dorothy Whitelock contained therein. The obit turned out not to be particularly helpful, though I'm glad I did the due diligence of checking it, since I thereby found an interesting article in that same volume: "Unideal Editing of Old English Verse", the 1984 Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture by E. G. Stanley.

I had long been aware, Medieval being one of my three periods when studying for the doctorate at Marquette,* that around 1983 there'd been an uproar in Old English scholarship whereby many standard assumptions were challenged and re-thought (similar to the debate about 'Celtic' origins going on today). Many of the ideas Tolkien had held were being overturned, or at least called into question -- such as BEOWULF's being an early work preserved through some two centuries of manuscript transmission before the copy that's come down to us was made, or the near-universal assumption that the scribes who wrote down the OE verse that comes down to us were careless and ignorant, knowing less about Old English prosody than the nineteenth and twentieth century scholars who were editing them. But I'd thought those making such arguments, such as Kevin Kiernan (BEOWULF AND THE BEOWULF MANUSCRIPT, 1981) were lone voices crying in the wilderness, iconoclasts v. much out of the mainstream.

Perhaps not so much, I'm now coming to realize.  Stanley's piece looks at changing editorial practices on editing OE verse, w. particular attention to BEOWULF, and charts an early period where the general trend was reluctance to editorially change what was in the actual manuscript, to a middle period (of which Tolkien was very much a part) where editorial changes became more and more intrustive, sometimes leading to re-arrangement of verses, editorial creation of new passages, insertions of proper names into the text (e.g., Eomer) or re-spelling names found therein (e.g. Hunferth > 'Unferth'). Finally, the recent trend is back to greater respect for the manuscript evidence and less editorial reworking of what's found therein. The rise and fall of the Sievers system,** which constructed a prescriptive prosody for OE verse and then advocating re-writing the verse to match the theory, was particularly illuminating.

I'd like to say that, having surveyed the problem and various scholars' contributions and practices (both those he approves of and those he does not), Stanley reaches some sort of useful conclusion, but he basically ends by taking the position that editors shd edit just enough, and no more; that they shd make the right decisions; that the more important the passage, the less they shd edit it. All true, no doubt, and a tribute to Pope-ian moderation, but decidedly unhelpful as a practical guide. In the end, Stanley is so concerned to be even-handed that he fails to make his point, or indeed any point, strongly. Perhaps that was his goal, and he wanted merely to survey and not to judge.

The reason all this is of interest to me in the here and now is that Tolkien comes up several times in Stanley's piece; Stanley uses him as a convenient figure exemplifying the now-descredited Old Way of Doing Things. In this, JRRT is partnered with Sisam, whose essays are cited as having provided rationale for carrying editorial interference to an excessive degree. As for Tolkien himself, his OLD ENGLISH EXODUS (ed. Joan Turville-Petre, 1981) provides a good example of changing editorial practices, the work having been done in the 1930s and 40s (when editorial interference was at its height) but not published until the 1980s (when the pendulum was starting to swing the other way). Tolkien even moves around sections of the poem to produce a more effective arrangement, on the assumption that he understands the poem better than the person who wrote it down -- which may be true, but is obviously open to all kinds of abuse. His was a tradition of intuitive sympathy, of engaging with the text the way a modern-day editor might when editing the work of a contemporary (e.g. Ezra Pound's editing of T. S. Eliot's THE WASTELAND). Hence the phrase "inveterate meddler", which according to Stanley comes in a 1983 NOTES AND QUERIES review of Tolkien's EXODUS.*** Despite which, Stanley repeatedly praised Tolkien's translation of EXODUS found in the same volume, calling it "elegant" and "highly satisfying". In fact, in a way that's exactly the problem: an editor of genius with a real feel for Old English poetry, like Tolkien, can produce a "correction" that's better than what the Old English poet actually wrote.

So, an interesting piece, and one that discusses an aspect of Tolkien that's badly neglected (JRRT as an editor and translator of medieval works), and a rare discussion of one of his lesser-known works (the edition and translation of THE OLD ENGLISH EXODUS). And a piece that places Tolkien within the context of his time, and casts light on his work as an enthusiastic transmitter of medieval works. For those not interested in reading Stanley's entire (forty-two page) lecture, with its overextensive footnotes (sometimes the 'footnotes' take up over half the page; in one extreme case, they cover four-fifths, leaving only a bare seven lines of text atop the page), the references to Tolkien come on pages 239-240,  252-254, 267, and 269.  Enjoy!

--John R.
current reading: THE WEB OF EASTER ISLAND by Donald Wandrei (Arkham House, 1948) -- not worth reading. does contain the 'green sun' story written twenty years earlier, embedded as Chapter XIII ['A Dream'] of this rambling short novel)

current audiobook: McGrath's new C. S. Lewis biography





*the other two being Modern (twentieth-century British), so I cd study Tolkien's contemporaries and also Woolf, and Nineteenth Century British, wh. included Austen. That third one wd have been Nineteenth Century American, including Twain and Poe, but Marquette's rules required two of yr periods be contiguous, so 19th British it had to be.

**summarized with great skill by JRRT in his Introduction to the Clark-Hall BEOWULF.

***I have not yet had time to search out this review (by P. J. Lucas) myself, but plan to do so this next week

ADDENDUM

THE WIFE SAYS: 

Footnotes!

Pot!

Kettle!

Black!

Canonizing C. S. Lewis

So, I've known for a good while now that there's a sort of movement underway to have C. S. Lewis canonized as an Anglican saint, having first learned of this through discussion w. some of Lewis's admirers during the planning for the 1998 Centenary Mythcon in his and Barfield's honor (I was on the con committee, focussing on making sure Barfield was represented and not lost in the Lewis-centric event). At first I assumed this was some kind of joke, since CSL, although devout, seemed as unlike a saint as cd easily be imagined, but it turned out to be quite serious; its advocates already had one potential miracle lined up,* and some explanations of how Anglican canonization, although rare, was still possible.

What I hadn't known, and only recently learned through reading Rbt Boenig's C. S. LEWIS AND THE MIDDLE AGES, is that Lewis himself was opposed to Anglican canonizations. The evidence comes in a letter Lewis wrote to THE CHURCH TIMES (October 24th 1952) in which he raises strong objections to a proposed system to canonize Anglican saints. His objections are essentially twofold: first, that this wd require sure knowledge that specific dead people are in fact in Heaven, knowledge which anyone among the living lacks; and second, that it wd compel veneration of specific individuals as part of every living Anglicans' duty. He strongly opposes any such scheme, and seems to feel that attempts to implement it might even result in schism. (COLLECTED LETTERS, Vol. III. 241-242).

What I'm curious about now is whether those who support the idea of a Lewis canonization are (a) aware of this letter, and (b) if they are, on what grounds they reject or set aside Lewis's own strongly stated opposition to the idea of newly canonized Anglican saints. The idea may have fallen by the wayside in the past fifteen years or so since I first heard of it -- though I rather doubt it, given the fast-tracking of canonizations that's been going on during the past thirty years among the Roman Church. Just got the new McGarth biography of CSL on audiobook yesterday; perhaps it'll at some point address, and answer, these questions.

--John R.

current book: THE WEB OF EASTER ISLAND by Donald Wandrei (1948, Arkham House)
current audiobook: THE JEFFERSON BIBLE








*I've forgotten the details, but the essential story was that someone who had known Lewis slightly said that, while deeply depressed and highly medicated, he suddenly had a feeling that CSL was in the room with him and everything was going to be alright (all this occurring several years after CSL's death). A bit dubious from my Calvinist perspective -- but then as an extreme Protestant I don't recognize most of the 'saints' already approved by the Anglican or Roman communions anyway, Francis of Assisi being the one exception I can think of.

Picture of Me

So, for some reason I'm always surprised when I run across pictures of myself online, forgetting that the fact I have friends who blog means I v. occasionally show up in their blogs. Case in point: the following picture of me (I'm the decrepid-looking one), taken at Trout Lake during our recent vacation and get-together with some friends. Here's the link:

http://calimac.livejournal.com/667749.html

current audiobook: THE JEFFERSON BIBLE
currently reading: THE FALL OF ARTHUR (still)

Helen Haines

So, as part of the work for my Kalamazoo piece ("The Missing Women: JRRT's Lifelong Support for Women's Higher Education"), I wrote up by way of contrast a short section depicting his friend C. S. Lewis's views towards women's higher education, insofar as they can be determined from comments in his letters, most significantly in his first letter to E. R. Eddison. Here he described the woman through whom he learned of Eddison's work as

"som poore seely wench that seeketh a B.Litt or a D.Phil, 

when God knows shad a better bestowed her tyme 

makynge sport for some goodman in his bed 

and bearing children for the stablishment of this reaulme 

or els to be at her beeds in a religyous house" 

(CSL to ERE, Nov. 16th 1942; COLLECTED LETTERS Vol. II p. 535).

That's appalling enough. But when Eddison, in his response, asked the name of the person who'd written about him and the title of her book, Lewis professed ignorance, saying he'd forgotten both.

Thanks to the good work of Eddison scholar Paul Thomas, who shared his discovery with me, I now know both name and title: Helen E. Haines' WHAT'S IN A NOVEL (1942). Far from being a graduate student, Haines was seventy at the time, and a distinguished figure in the field of library science (a discipline she helped establish), making Lewis's dismissive comments all the more jarring (and thus relevant to my essay).

But now having gotten my own copy of her book (which was v. popular in its day, and hence easily available on abebooks or bookfinder.com), I find it interesting in its own right. For one thing, she does not just mention Eddison's WORM, as I'd assumed from Lewis's letter, but all three of Eddison's novels: THE WORM OUROBOROS, MISTRESS OF MISTRESSES, and A FISH DINNER IN MEMISON, the last of which having only been published the year before. The context, too, is significant: Haines, who's recommending books for the typical library, devotes an entire chapter to fantasy, called "Spells, Signs, and Symbols" and including therein science fiction, utopias, et al.

Of modern fantasy writers, she says two stand out: James Branch Cabell and E. R. Eddison. After discussing Cabell's Poictesme novels and ERE's three books, she immediately segues into Rbt Nathan, who shd probably be considered the third in her unofficial pantheon at the core of modern fantasy -- not at all a bad choice, though I wd have included Dunsany.  His being sidelined (appearing only in the opening paragraph to this chapter in her general overview of the field's range, and in a line about his minor late novel MY TALKS WITH DEAN SPANLEY in her penultimate paragraph) shows just how much his star had fallen since his glory days in the late teens.

So far, so good. Yet it's that penultimate paragraph that ultimately turns out to be the most interesting thing about her whole book.* As she's wrapping up, she pauses at the end to single out two bright young talents: T. H. White's THE SWORD IN THE STONE** and J. R. R. Tolkien's THE HOBBIT. I've asked around, and so far as I've been able to find out so far, this marks the first critical discussion of THE HOBBIT in a book, all previous known references having been in book reviews and the like. So Haines is near the well-head of Tolkien criticism. And let's not forget that her book was popular, widely read and widely influential. Her praise of JRRT no doubt helped spread word that here was a good book you ought to consider having in your town library.

Here's what she has to say about Tolkien:

. . . the whole sequence [by T. H. White] is a unique,

many-faceted commentary on Arthurian legend and

on the deep-rooted, traditional English way of life. 

To many readers they may seem books for children,

but in reality they are full-fledged fantasy at play for 

old as well as young.  So is The Hobbit, or, There 

and Back Again, that adventure into the land of Faerie, 

where dragons, elves, goblins, dwarves, and creatures

of magic still challenge the dominion of men. Written by

 J. R. R. Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford,

for his own children, it fuses legend, tradition, and the 

dim beginnings of history into a robust imaginative

creation that mingles homely simplicity, humor,

drama, pictorial beauty, and a truly epic quality.

--Haines, p. 217

I think that holds up pretty well, seventy-odd years later. Now I'm curious what Haines has to say about other genres and categories of fiction, such as the detective novel, the subject of her next chapter, "The Lure of Crime" (curiously enough, she credits Woodrow Wilson with a role in its rise to popularity).

--John R.
current reading: C. S. LEWIS AND THE MIDDLE AGES by Boenig (2012)



*caveat: at least as much as I've read of it so far.

**and its first two sequels, which again were v. recent books at the time Haines was writing, the three volumes having been published in 1938, 1939, and 1940, respectively.

More Vacation (Astoria, Seaside, Trout Lake, petroglyphs)

So, our second day in Astoria (Thursday) we went to museums. First, to the local marine heritage museum (the Columbia River Maritime Museum), which highlighted the work of the coast guard (the one of our military services of which even a pacifist can, by and large, approve). It was a nice museum, but about two-thirds of its exhibits I found distressing. We started off by watching a 3-d film about sharks, which was a mistake (though the part about mantas was wonderful, and I learned that sawfish are rays that have evolved to look like sharks, not sharks that have evolved to look somewhat ray-like). Then there were all the exhibits about how the locals had massacred the once-florishing marine life in the area. Particularly unnerving was the harpoon gun (which pointed out into the room) and a sample of the harpoons it fired to kill whales, along with a sample  o the tools used to butcher the whales once slain. Melville wd have been delighted, but it gave me the fan-tods. The final third or so of the displays were devoted to naval warfare, which was also distressing in its own way (one room contained the complete bridge of a warship (WWII era, I think), having been built around the display rather than the other way around. The parts I liked best came in the middle: a sequence of maps charting the discovery and slow mapping of the NW coastal region, including one that seemed to indicate that Bellingham was named long before Seattle, Tacoma, or Olympia existed, which I hadn't known; also that Mt Adams didn't appear on maps that did have Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Rainier, and Mt. Baker. That, and a diving suit that had obviously seen a lot of use. Janice noticed that the hand-gloves were semi-mittins, with thumb, two fingers together, other two fingers together. I noticed that the man who wore the suit must have been quite tall (over six feet).

After some lunch we went on to our next stop, the Flavel House. This was the Queen Anne style mansion built by the town's leading citizen back in the 1880s. Both Janice and I enjoy seeing old houses, manors, mansions, and the like, both because they're beautiful and functional and because of what they reveal about the times. This one had the largest pocket doors I ever remember seeing (though Janice says the ones at HighClere Castle must have been larger) -- I love pocket doors, never having lived in a place that had them. It also had a sequoia growing in the yard that was a sight to behold. We didn't get to see the off-limits basement or the attic, with the servants' rooms and the access to the tower lookout, but I was struck by the tin bath (apparently claw-foot tubs, like the great one at our b-and-b, came along slightly later). Janice was struck by the doors upstairs that set off the family's rooms from the rest of that floor (guest room, bath room, nursery, et al). These didn't reach all the way to the ceiling (that space being given over to wooden tracework above the doorframe), so it didn't block noise, and the family had no staircase on their side of the divide leading down, which seemed an inconvenient arrangement.

On the walk back, we passed by the house where the present-day descendents of the Flavel family live (or at least lived until recently): the Other Flavel House, a huge mansion now in a dilapidated and abandoned state that was diagonally across from our b-and-b. Badly in need of being painted, with all doors and windows boarded up and the lawn left to its own devices, it wd have done the Addams family proud. I'd have much rather toured it than the other house, but unfortunately it's not open, being stuck in litigation between the city of Astoria and Captain Flavel's great-grandchildren (the recently deceased 'Hatchet Harry', who twice tried to murder neighbors and fellow townsfolk, and his sister, who's now in her eighties).* Given the family's history of delaying tactics in their many legal disputes, it seems likely the house is doomed and will fall to pieces before any one, the Flavels or the town, can established legal title to it. At any rate, here's the link to a picture of it I found online --one of many, it seems; I'm not alone in finding it fascinating:

http://www.cultofweird.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/flavel-house-astoria.jpg


By now it was getting later in the day than we'd planned, so we decided to skip Fort Clapsit (a Lewis and Clark site, where they ended their long march west by reaching the Pacific) and go on to Seaside, where we walked along the beach (long, smooth, flat, and sandy), found the Lewis and Clark saltworks, where three men boiled five kettles of seawater day and night for six weeks to collect four bushels of salt for the Expedition to use on their way back. I was skeptical that anyone cd know where the exact spot is in order to put up the little reconstruction that's there now, but a nearby sign explained that around the centenary of the event, a very old woman (Native American) who was ninety or so said her father had told her when she was a little girl about the white men's strange behavior and pointed out the spot. So it's not so much documented as based on oral tradition, which might well be right (I'm thinking here of the famous example in Bede). We had supper in a Finnish restaurant (never eaten in a Finnish restaurant before, that I know of; wasn't ethnic Finn cuisine, but tasty enough), then it was back along the promenade to the car and then back to Astoria.


The next morning we packed up and were off to Trout Lake, though before going I did get the story of the current status of the (Other) Flavel House. Over the next few days we had lots of good company, good conversation, and hospitality. Astoria was great, what followed towards the end of our trip was great, but getting together with friends was the highlight of our trip.


Departing on Monday, we headed to east up the river to look at petroglyphs (and two pictographs as well). I'd only known about these previously through Beth and Ray Hill's INDIAN PETROGLYPHS OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST (1974), which I'd seen at the Antiquarian Book Fair a few years ago but missed the chance to pick up then and so hunted down a copy for myself later. The Hills wrote about the thousands of petroglyphs that once lined the Columbia river gorge near The Dalles, almost all of which were destroyed when they built the big dam there. What I hadn't realized was that a handful of these petroglyphs were chiseled out of the rock wall and thus survived; in recent years, these were set up in a display in Columbia Hills State Park.  It was a great display, in which three figures particularly stood out: a (humming?)bird, an owl, and a demon-face. All three can be seen among the photos at the following website:


http://columbiariverimages.com/Regions/Places/horsethief_butte_petroglyphs.html

We didn't get to see the 'She-Who-Watches' figure, because the petroglyph trail is now closed except by appointment -- apparently due to vandalism you can now only enter the petroglyph area under ranger supervision. Still, they've propped a few dozen petroglyph-stones up in a long line opposite the parking lot, so we cd get a good view of those at least.**

After a night in Ellensburg, we backtracked a bit by driving east on I-90 to Vantage, where we visited the Gingko Petrified Forest state park. The name is a bit misleading, it turns out: these is not a forest of standing stone trees, like the stone-tree-in-a-case we saw at Yellowstone, but petrified logs buried by a eruptions and excavated in modern times. Only three or four gingko trees have been found, but since these were the first pieces of petrified gingko wood ever found,*** they named the park after it. I've been in a lot of museums and a fair number of art galleries over the years, but I don't think I've ever seen an art gallery as beautiful as the display they had there of all the beautifully polished petrified woods, many of which they've been able to identify by tree (douglas fir, redwood, magnolia, cypress, spruce, etc etc). It was truly a stunning sight. After viewing the displays inside, we went outside and round by the side, where it turns out (as Janice knew, but I didn't), there was another petroglyph display. Once again these had been rescued when their site, down near the Columbia where it flows down from the north and turns west, had been flooded by yet another of the river's many dams. There weren't many of them (perhaps two dozen or so), but they were all cemented together into one great wall, which was thus crammed with petroglyphs. Among my favorites were the one I dubbed The Grail, the one of two halo'd figures together, and the ten-legged bug. V. impressive, and a nice finale to the trip. On our way out of the park, we stopped by a rock-and-gem shop (whose name I forget) which was very like Jerry's Rock and Gem right here in Kent: beautiful pieces of petrified wood (both polished and unpolished, many of them identified by tree-type), other fossils, from a (large!) dinosaur bone to a fossil turtle, many polished stones or all kinds (I got one from Greenland as a present), and a very friendly shop cat named Mr. Wiggles, whose company it was a pleasure to make.

 From there it was the long drive back home, greeting the cats, settling back in, and getting ready for a regular working day tomorrow.

Thus endeth the vacation: it was a good one, but it's nice to be home again.

--JDR

current reading: C. S. LEWIS AND THE MIDDLE AGES, by Rbt Boenig (2012)

*for more on Hatchet Harry Flavel, see Calvin Trillin's 1993 article in, I think, the New Yorker, a copy of which was available in our b-and-b as a part of local history

**There were Beware the Rattlesnakes signs all around, which I thought was pretty clever of the park rangers -- people might ignore a Do Not Trespass sign, but a Snakes Warning sign is likelier to inspire good behavior.

***before that they'd found leaf-impressions and, I gather, seeds and nuts, but no wood.

More on G. S. G.

So, I meant to make a second post re. the Tolkien references in Geo. Gordon's LETTERS and biography, then got too caught up in other things to make good on that. Accordingly, now that I have a quiet moment, thought I'd get back to that.


First, from THE LIFE OF GEORGE S. GORDON 1881-1942, by M. C. G. [=Mary C. Gordon, Mrs. G.S.G.], 1945:

[Chapter] Six 1919-1922

The years after his return to Leeds were full of activity. By 1920 he had almost recovered his health [from his wartime exhaustion and subsequent long  illness*], except for the occasional recurrences of fever, and he was deep in plans for the development and improvement of the English School . . . The number of graduate and undergraduate students attending courses in his Department increased from 116 to 263. He created a new and prosperous Honours School . . . It grew rapidly until it became the largest Honours School in English Literature outside Oxford, the number of those reading in it increasing from seven to sixty-nine. This, it was considered, was due to his personality, and to his constant interest in the work and fortunes of the English school. 

An increase of staff became an urgent necessity. G. H. Cowling, now a Professor in the University of Melbourne, was already on the English staff. Gordon chose his new colleagues well, and soon led a strong team. Two of his old pupils in Oxford were the first to come as lecturers -- R. Knox, now a Professor in Toronto, and Herbert Davis, who became, a few years ago, President of Smith College in the U.S.A.  They were presently joined by J. R. R. Tolkien as a Reader in English Language: he now holds the Chair of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford.   E. V. Gordon, who also came as a lecturer in English Language, later became Professor in that subject in Leeds. It was a very happy community; -- 'not so much staff', said G.S.G., 'as a Club!'  And the work went well.

(p. 67; I've introduced the paragraph break to make the long passage more readable)

*shades of JRRT!



Second, THE LETTERS OF GEORGE S. GORDON 1902-1942 (ed. M.C.G., 1943) is much more forthcoming, with several references.

(1) [?May or June 1920; GSG to C. T. Onions]
"I have now a staff of 4 instead of 2: all good. And I may take Tolkien** from you: but only, I hope, to give him leisure to do texts. On the other hand, having thought it necessary, after 5 years' absence [i.e., due to wartime service and illness], not to appear to avoid University business, I find myself, as I was telling Raleigh,*** not only God's Own Head of a Department, but Dean of the Faculty, Chairman of the Board of Arts, a Member of Council, O/C O.T.C., President of the Association of University Teachers, etc., etc., --

**"J. R. R. Tolkien became one of my husband's colleagues in the English School at leeds: later professor of Anglo-Saxon in Oxford." [Mrs. Gordon's note]

***i.e., Prof. Walter Raleigh of Oxford.

-- the interesting thing here is that the reason given for Tolkien's leaving the OED here is to allow him time to publish, and he did indeed over the next few years publish the MIDDLE ENGLISH VOCABULARY, his edition of SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT (w. EVG), and worked on THE CLARDENDON CHAUCER (w. GSG).


(2) 25 July 1920, GSG to MCG, from Magdalen College, Oxford
"The Chapmans are delightfully kind . . . D.N.S.**** is dining with me here to-night. Saw Tolkien. I lunch with him on Tuesday. Also Onions, who hailed me from a bus: and almost leaped off the roof, but finally decided (with the speed of thought) to descend the stairs. I like him more every time I see him."

**** = David Nichol Smith


(3)   18 October 1921, GSG to DNS [David Nichol Smith]
"I am overwhelmed here with students, and have now an Honours School of nearly 120. I hope to prune it at Christmas. A committee has been appointed to see what can be one to find me Seminar accommodation, and I am urged to an increase of staff. Two more will be necessary: one a mature scholar if I can get him: a man of Readership or Tolkien standard in 'the other humanities'. 

-- here the interesting thing is Gordon's hoping to find "a man of . . . Tolkien standard" to supplement his staff alongside Tolkien himself, wh. suggests considerable satisfaction in the job Tolkien was doing.


(4) 29 October 1921, GSG to DNS
"Tolkien suggested a graduate called Gordon [i.e., E. V. Gordon], --at present B-Litting. His name is a disadvantage, but we could get over that. Do you know anything about him?

The rapid development of our Honours Schools, and more especially of my own, which is the extreme case, is being considered, and if an increase of staff is thought necessary, I should have authority to recruit my 2 men by the end of this term . . . 

[F. P.] Wilson of Birmingham, now with you, is the type for the senior post; and of course it is rare. I should be very glad of suggestions here. 

[Herbert] Davis will probably go to Toronto next session: which will mean another vacancy. I can't speak too highly of Davis's whole performance here.

-- the takeaway here is the role Tolkien played in getting EVG his Leeds job, which I had been previously unaware of. Reminds me a bit of the role Tolkien played in getting his friend C. S. Lewis the Cambridge post thirty-plus years later.

(5) 12 June 1923, GSG to H.D. [=?Herbert Davis], from Oxford
I don't go to Leeds till the 25th. This is sad news about Tolkien -- his illness; but E.V. says he's safe now, and pulling through.

-- as I've previously written about a few days ago, this was the passage that made me realize just how close Tolkien came to dying that summer of 1923, and how near we came to not having THE HOBBIT or THE LORD OF THE RINGS or even THE QUENTA.

So, there it is: not much material, but it rounds out some corners and provides a few suggestive glimpses into a period of Tolkien's life and career about which we know relatively little.

--John R
current reading: ORIENTAL TALES by Marguerite Yourcenar