The similarities between responses to Beowulf (as analysed by Tolkien) and to The Lord of the Rings do not end there. If one looks at Tolkien’s remarks about the Beowulf critics, one can see that the thing he found worst about them was their monoglottery: they seemed able to read only one language, and even if they knew a bit of French or some other modern tongue they were quite incapable of reading ancient texts, ancient English texts, with anything like the degree of detailed verbal insight that was required. They relied on translations and summaries, they did not pay close attention to particular words. ‘This is an age of potted criticism and predigested literary opinion’ Tolkien wrote in 1940 in apologetic preface to a translation of Beowulf which he hoped would only be used as a crib; ‘in the making of these cheap substitutes for food translations unfortunately are too often used’ (p. ix). Now this could hardly be said about The Lord of the Rings, which is after all mostly in modern English. Or could it? Were people really paying close attention to words, Tolkien must have wondered as he read through the reviews? Or were they just skipping through for the plot again?
His irritation surfaced in the 1966 Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, where he wrote, rather cattily:
Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer. (LOTR, p. xvi)
Probably this was, strictly speaking, unfair. All the reviewers I have come across do seem to have read the book right through with no more than a normal run of first-reading miscomprehensions. However it is a surprising fact that Edmund Wilson, who declared that he had not only read the book but had read the whole thousand pages out loud to his seven-year-old daughter, nevertheless managed consistently to spell the name of a central character wrong: ‘Gandalph’ for ‘Gandalf’. Edwin Muir in the Observer preferred ‘Gandolf’. This may seem purely trivial; but Tolkien would not have looked at it that way. He knew that ‘ph’ for ‘f’ was a learned spelling, introduced sporadically into English from Latin from about the fourteenth century, mostly in words of Greek origin like ‘physics’ or ‘philosophy’. It is not used for native words like ‘foot’ or ‘fire’. Now in the rather similar linguistic correspondences of Middle-earth (they are laid out in Appendices E and F of The Lord of the Rings, for those who haven’t already noticed) it is clear that ‘Gandalf’ belongs to the latter set rather than the former. ‘Gandalph’ would accordingly have seemed to Tolkien as intrinsically ludicrous as ‘phat’ or ‘phool’ or come to that ‘elph’ or ‘dwarph’. He could hardly have conceived of the state of mind that would regard such variations as meaningless, or beneath notice. As for ‘Gandolf’, that is an Italian miscomprehension, familiar from Browning’s poem ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ but wildly inappropriate to a work which does its best to avoid Latinisms.
No compromise is possible between what one might call ‘the Gandalph mentality’ and Tolkien’s. Perhaps this is why The Lord of the Rings (and to a lesser extent Tolkien’s other writings as well) makes so many literary critics avert their eyes, get names wrong, write about things that aren’t there and miss the most obvious points of success.4 Tolkien thought this instinctive antipathy was an ancient one: people who couldn’t stand his books hadn’t been able to bear Beowulf, or Pearl, or Chaucer, or Sir Gawain, or Sir Orfeo either. For millennia they had been trying to impose their views on a recalcitrant succession of authors, who had fortunately taken no notice. In the rather steely ‘Preface’ to their edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in which the word ‘criticism’ is conspicuously shunned), Tolkien and his colleague E. V. Gordon declared that they wanted to help people read the poem ‘with an appreciation as far as possible of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired’ (p. v). Doing the same job for Tolkien ought to be easier, since he is so much more our contemporary than the Gawain-poet; on the other hand Tolkien’s mind was one of unmatchable subtlety, not without a streak of deliberate guile. However nothing is to be gained by applying to it the criteria of ‘correct and sober taste’ of the great but one-sided traditions of later English literature, of those ‘higher literary aspirations’ so haughtily opposed by Anthony Burgess to ‘allegories with animals or fairies’ (Observer, 26 November 1978). These lead only to the conclusion that there is nothing to be said and no phenomenon to consider. Still, something made Tolkien different, gave him the power so markedly to provoke these twin reactions of popular appeal and critical rage. The Nature of Philology
Whatever it was, it almost self-evidently had something to do with his job. For most of his active life Tolkien taught Old English, Middle English, the history of the English language; in doing so he was competing with teachers of English literature for time, funds and students, on the whole a thankless task since for all that Tolkien could do the current was setting firmly away from him and from his subjects. Tolkien was by all accounts as capable of keeping up a grudge as the next man, and his minor writings often show it. The anthology of Songs for the Philologists which he and E. V. Gordon compiled, later to be privately printed in 1936, contains at least two poems by Tolkien attacking teachers of ‘Lit.’; one of them, titled variously ‘Two Little Schemes’ and ‘Lit. and Lang.’ the worst he ever wrote; so bad indeed that it makes me think (or hope) that something must have gone wrong with it en route between poet and printer. Meanwhile he was from the start of his learned career barely able to use the word ‘literature’ at all without putting inverted commas round it to show he couldn’t take it seriously, which suggests that Ms Shulevitz’s ‘death to literature’ remark would not have disturbed him. Thus his famous article on ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’,* published in 1929, opens with the remark that: ‘The Ancrene Wisse has already developed a “literature”, and it is very possible that nothing I can say about it will be either new or illuminating to the industrious or leisured that have kept up with it. I have not’ (‘AW’, p. 104). There are variants on the same innuendo at the start of the Beowulf lecture of 1936 and in the Sir Gawain ‘Preface’ of 1925. Of course there is a reason (of characteristic deviousness) for this repeated Tolkienian joke, and one which can easily be extracted from the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary, on which Tolkien had himself worked in youth. There one can find that the meaning which Tolkien foisted on to ‘literature’ is indeed recognised, under heading 3b: ‘The body of books and writings that treat of a particular subject’. But why should Tolkien insist on using that one when heading 3a is less narrow and much more generally pertinent: ‘Literature’ meaning ‘literary productions as a whole … Now also, in a more restricted sense, applied to writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect’? The sting for Tolkien lay in the illustrative quotations which form the backbone of the definition, of which the sixth reads ‘The full glory of the new literature broke in England with Edmund Spenser’ i.e. in 1579. The true mordancy of that opinion may not appear till later. It is enough to note that if you took the OED seriously you could argue (a) that the valueless accumulation of books about Beowulf and the Ancrene Wisse and Sir Gawain were all ‘literature’ under heading 3b, but (b) the original and creative works themselves, all very much pre-1579, were not, under 3a. Naturally no one would be stupid enough to put forward such a proposition seriously and in so many words. Still, Tolkien did not think these semantic tangles entirely fortuitous; the OED might not mirror truth but it did represent orthodox learned opinion. It was typical of him to note the confusion and the slur it implied, to use the one to avenge the other – ‘literature’ was ‘books about books’ the dead Latin ‘letter’ opposed to the ancient English spirit.