Valedictory address to the University of Oxford Read online

  Valedictory address to the University of Oxford

  John Ronald Ruel Tolkien

  John Ronald Ruel Tolkien

  VALEDICTORY ADDRESS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

  It might be held characteristic that, though I have occupied two chairs (or sat uneasily on the edge of two chairs) in this university, I have not yet delivered an inaugural lecture: I am now about 34 years behind. At the time of my first election I was too astonished (a feeling that has never quite left me) to gather my wits, until I had already given many ordinary lectures as required by statute, and it seemed to me that an inaugural that would not inaugurate was a ceremony better omitted. On the second occasion, my ineffectiveness as a lecturer was already well known, and well-wishers had made sure (by letter or otherwise) that I should know it too; so I thought it unnecessary to give a special exhibition of this unfortunate defect. And, though twenty years had then gone by, during which this matter of the overdue inaugural had been much on my mind, I had not yet discovered anything special to say.

  Fourteen more years have now passed, and I still have nothing special to say. Nothing, that is, of the kind proper to inaugurals -as far as I can judge by those that I have read: the products of minds more sanguine, or more efficient and magisterial than mine. The diagnosis of what is wrong, and the confident prescription of the cure; the wide view, the masterly survey; plans and prophecies: these have never been in my line. I would always rather try to wring the juice out of a single sentence, or explore the implications of one word than try to sum up a period in a lecture, or pot a poet in a paragraph. And I am afraid that what I would rather do is what I have usually done.

  For I suppose that, at any rate since the golden days long past when English studies were unorganized, a hobby and not a trade, few more amateurish persons can ‘by a set of curious circumstances' have been put in a professional position. For thirty-four years my heart has gone out to poor Koko, taken

  from a county jail; though I had one advantage over him. He was appointed to cut off heads, and did not really like it. Philology was part of my job, and I enjoyed it. I have always found it amusing. But I have never had strong views about it. I do not think it necessary to salvation. I do not think it should be thrust down the throats of the young, as a pill, the more efficacious the nastier it tastes.

  But if the ranks of Tuscany should feel inclined to cheer, let me hasten to assure them that I do not think their wares are necessary to salvation either; much of what they offer is peddler's stuff. I have indeed become more, not less, bigoted as a result of experience in the little world of academic English studies.

  ‘Bigoted’ is for the Tuscans. Speaking to the Romans, defending the city and the ashes of their fathers, I would say ‘convinced’. Convinced of what? Convinced that Philology is never nasty: except to those deformed in youth or suffering from some congenital deficiency. I do not think that it should be thrust down throats as a pill, because I think that if such a process seems needed, the sufferers should not be here, at least not studying or teaching English letters. Philology is the foundation of humane letters; ‘misology’ is a disqualifying defect or disease.

  It is not, in my experience, a defect or disease found in those whose literary learning, wisdom, and critical acumen place them in the highest rank – to which so many in the Oxford School have in various ways attained. But there are other voices, epigonal rather than ancestral. I must confess that at times in the last thirty odd years I have been aggrieved by them; by those, afflicted in some degree by misology, who have decried what they usually call language. Not because they, poor creatures, have evidently lacked the imagination required for its enjoyment, or the knowledge needed for an opinion about it. Dullness is to be pitied. Or so I hope, being myself dull at many points. But dullness should be confessed with humility; and I have therefore felt it a grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance to be a human norm, the measure of what is good; and anger when they have sought to impose the limitation of their minds upon younger minds, dissuading those with philological curiosity from their bent, encouraging those without this interest to believe that their lack marked them as minds of a superior order.

  But I am, as I say, an amateur. And if that means that I have neglected parts of my large field, devoting myself mainly to those things that I personally like, it does also mean that I have tried to awake liking, to communicate delight in those things that I find enjoyable. And that without suggesting that they were the only proper source of profit, or pleasure, for students of English.

  I have heard sneers at certain elementary kinds of linguistic ‘research’ as mere spelling-counting. Let the phonologist and the orthographer have their swink to them reserved! Of course. And the same to the bibliographer and typographer – still further removed from the living speech of men which is the beginning of all literature. Contemplating the workings of the B.Litt. sausage-machine, I have at times dared to think that some of the botuli, or farcimina, turned out were hardly either tasty or nourishing, even when claimed to be ‘literary’. But, to use a perhaps more apt simile, the twin peaks of Parnassus are approached through some very dim valleys. If scrambling in these, without any climbing, is sometimes rewarded with a degree, one must hope that one of the peaks at least has been glimpsed from afar.

  However, that is not a matter which I wish to explore deeply: that is, ‘research’ and ‘research degrees' in relation to the ordinary courses of learning – the so-called ‘postgraduate’ activities, which have in recent years shown such rapid growth, forming what one might call our ‘hydroponic’ department. A term which, I fear, I only know from science-fiction, in which it seems to refer to the cultivation of plants without soil in enclosed vehicles far removed from this world.

  But all fields of study and enquiry, all great Schools, demand human sacrifice. For their primary object is not culture, and their academic uses are not limited to education. Their roots are in the desire for knowledge, and their life is maintained by those who pursue some love or curiosity for its own sake, without reference even to personal improvement. If this individual love and curiosity fails, their tradition becomes sclerotic.

  There is no need, therefore, to despise, no need even to feel pity for months or years of life sacrificed in some minimal enquiry: say, the study of some uninspired medieval text and its fumbling dialect; or of some miserable ‘modern’ poetaster and his life (nasty, dreary, and fortunately short) – NOT IF the sacrifice is voluntary, and IF it is inspired by a genuine curiosity, spontaneous or personally felt.

  But that being granted, one must feel grave disquiet, when the legitimate inspiration is not there; when the subject or topic of ‘research’ is imposed, or is ‘found’ for a candidate out of some one else's bag of curiosities, or is thought by a committee to be a sufficient exercise for a degree. Whatever may have been found useful in other spheres, there is a distinction between accepting the willing labour of many humble persons in building an English house and the erection of a pyramid with the sweat of degree-slaves.

  But the matter is not, of course, as simple as all that. It is not just a question of the degeneration of real curiosity and enthusiasm into a ‘planned economy’, under which so much research time is stuffed into more or less standard skins and turned out in sausages of a size and shape approved by our own little printed cookery book. Even if that were a sufficient description of the system, I should hesitate to accuse anyone of planning it with foresight, or of approving it wholeheartedly now that we have got it. It has grown, partly by accident, partly by the accumulation of temporary expedients. Much
thought has gone into it, and much devoted and little remunerated labour has been spent in administering it and in mitigating its evils.

  It is an attempt to treat an old trouble and a real need with the wrong tool. The old trouble is the loss of the M.A. as a genuine degree. The real need is the desire for knowledge. The wrong tool is a ‘research’ degree, the proper scope of which is much more limited, and which functions much better when it is limited.

  But the M.A. has become a reward for a small ‘postgraduate’ subscription to the university and to a college, and is untouchable. Meanwhile many of the better students – I mean those who have studied English for love, or at least with love as one of their mixed motives – wish to spend more time in a university: more time in learning things, in a place where that process is (or should be) approved and given facilities. What is more, such students are still at a time of life, soon to pass, and the sooner the less the

  faculty is exercised, when the acquisition of knowledge is easier, and what is acquired is more permanent, more thoroughly digested and more formative. It is a pity that so often the last of the growing, feeding, years are spent in the premature attempt to add to knowledge, while the vast existing storehouses remain unvisited. Or if they are visited, too often this is done after the manner of research-mice running off with little bits nibbled out of unexplored sacks to build up a little thesis. But alas! those with the more eager minds are not necessarily those who possess more money. The powers that hold the purse-strings require a degree; and those who allot places in an overcrowded university require one too. And we have only a so-called research degree to offer them. This is, or can be, better than nothing. Many would-be learners do well enough at minor research. Some take the chance of using much of their time in reading what they wish, with little reference to their supposed task: that is, in doing on the side, hampered and left-handed, what they should be doing openly and unhindered. But the system cannot be praised for this accidental good that may in spite of it occur within it. It is not necessarily the swifter or wider mind that it is easiest to ‘find a subject’ for, or to bring down to brass tacks and business to the satisfaction of the Applications Committee. The ability to tackle competently and within approved limits a small subject is, in the early twenties, as likely to belong to a small and limited mind as to a future scholar with the hunger of youth.

  If the reform that I always had at heart, if the B.Litt. regulations could have been altered (as I once hoped) to allow an alternative approach by examination, to reward reading and learning at least equally with minor research, I should have left the English School more happily. If even now the School could embrace the newer B.Phil, (an unnecessary and inappropriate additional degree-title), I should regard it as a far greater advance than any remodelling or ‘new look’ given to the Honour syllabus.

  As far as my personal experience goes, if I had been allowed to guide the further reading and study of those for whom the Honour School had opened vistas and awakened curiosity, I could have done more good in less time than in the so-called supervision of research, done by candidates who had essential territories yet to explore, and who, in the breathless march from

  Prelim, to Final Schools, had also left much country in rear, only raided and not occupied.

  There are always exceptions. I have met some. I have had the good fortune to be associated (the right word) with some able researching graduates, more of them than my small aptitude for the task of supervisor has merited. Some of them took to research like otters to swimming. But they were the apparent exceptions that prove the thesis. They were the natural researchers (the existence of whom I have never denied). They knew what they wanted to do, and the regions that they desired to explore. They acquired new knowledge and organized it quickly, because it was knowledge that they desired to have anyway: it and the particular enquiry were all of one piece; there was no mere mugging up.

  I said that I did not wish to explore the matter of the organization of research deeply; but I have nonetheless spoken (for such an occasion) too long about it. Before I stand down finally, I must say something about our main business: the Final Honour School. Not that the topics are unconnected. I think that the possibility of taking a higher, or at least a further, degree for learning things, for acquiring more of the essential parts of the English field, or for digging deeper in some of them, might well have good effects on the Honour School. In brief: if the abler students, the future scholars, commonly took a third public examination, it might no longer be felt necessary to arrange in the second public examination a four-year syllabus for the reading-time of two years and a bit.[1]

  It is in any case, I suppose, obvious that our Honour syllabus is over-crowded, and that the changes that come into force next year have not done much to cure this. The reasons are various. For one thing, related to the situation of the M.A., three years is supposed, in this land, to be quite long enough to play with books in a university, and four years is extravagant. But while the academic vita is shortened, the ars gets longer. We now have on our hands one thousand and two hundred years of recorded English letters, a long unbroken line, indivisible, no part of which can without loss be ignored. The claims of the great nineteenth century will soon be succeeded by the clamour of the twentieth. What is more, to the honour of English but not to the convenience

  of syllabus-planners, some of the earliest writings show vitality and talent that makes them worthy of study in themselves, quite apart from the special interest of their earliness. So-called Anglo-Saxon cannot be regarded merely as a root, it is already in flower. But it is a root, for it exhibits qualities and characteristics that have remained ever since a steadfast ingredient in English; and it demands therefore at least some first-hand acquaintance from every serious student of English speech and English letters. This demand the Oxford School has up to now always recognized, and has tried to meet.

  In such a range divergence of interests, or at any rate of expertise, is inevitable. But the difficulties have not been helped, indeed they have been bedevilled, by the emergence of two legendary figures, the bogeys Lang and Lit. So I prefer to call them, since the words language and literature, though commonly misused among us, should not be thus degraded. Popular mythology seems to believe that Lang came from a cuckoo-egg laid in the nest, in which he takes up too much room and usurps the worms of the Lit chicken. Some believe that Lit was the cuckoo, bent on extruding her nest-fellow or sitting on him; and they have more support from the actual history of our School. But neither tale is well-founded.

  In a Bestiary more nearly reflecting the truth Lang and Lit would appear as Siamese Twins, Jekyll-Hyde and Hyde-Jekyll, indissolubly joined from birth, with two heads, but only one heart, the health of both being much better when they do not quarrel. This allegory at least resembles more closely our older statute: Every candidate will be expected to show a competent knowledge of both sides of the subject, and equal weight in the examination will be attacked to each.

  What the ‘sides' were was to be deduced from the title of the School which we still bear: The Honour School of English Language and Literature. Though this becomes in the running headline of the Examination Statutes: English Language, etc. And that I have always thought a more just title; not that we require the etc. The full title was, I think, a mistake; and it has in any case had some unfortunate results. Language and Literature appear as ‘sides' of one subject. That was harmless enough, and indeed true enough, as long as ‘sides' meant, as it should, aspects and emphases, which since they were of ‘equal weight’ in the subject as a whole, were neither of them normally exclusive, neither the sole property of this or that scholar, nor the sole object of any one course of study.

  But alas! ‘sides' suggested ‘parties', and too many then took sides. And thus there entered in Lang and Lit, the uneasy nest-fellows, each trying to grab more of the candidates' time, whatever the candidates might think.

  I first joined the School in 1912 – by the generosity of Exeter College
to one who had been up to then an unprofitable exhibitioner; if he learned anything at all, he learned it at the wrong time: I did most of my undergraduate work on the Germanic languages before Honour Moderations; when English and its kindred became my job, I turned to other tongues, even to Latin and Greek; and I took a liking to Lit as soon as I had joined the side of Lang. Certainly I joined the side of Lang, and I found the party-breach already wide; and unless my recollections are mistaken, it went on widening for some time. When I came back from Leeds in 1925, WE no longer meant students of English, it meant adherents of Lang or of Lit. THEY meant all those on the other side: people of infinite guile, who needed constant watching, lest THEY should down US. And, the rascals, so they did!

  For if you have Sides with labels, you will have Partisans. Faction fights, of course, are often fun, especially to the bellicose; but it is not clear that they do any good, any more good in Oxford than in Verona. Things may to some have seemed duller in the long period during which the hostility was damped; and to such they may seem livelier if the smoulder breaks out again. I hope not. It would have been better if it had never been kindled.

  Removal of the misunderstanding of words may sometimes produce amity. So though the time left is short, I will now consider the misuse of language and literature in our School. I think the initial mistake was made when The School of English Language and Literature was first adopted as our title. Those who love it call it the School of English or the English School – in which, if I may intrude a Lang remark, the word English is not an adjective, but a noun in loose composition. This simple title, School of English, is sufficient. And if any should say ‘English what?’, I would answer: ‘For a thousand recorded years English as a noun has meant only one thing: the English Language.’

  If the title then is made explicit, it should be The School of English Language. The parallel formula is held good enough for our peers, for French and Italian and others. But lest it be thought that this is a partisan choice, let me say that actually, for reasons that I will give, I should be well content with Literature – if Letters is now too archaic.