Fawlty Towers by Simon J. Cook

Fawlty Towers

In the decade following the death of J.R.R. Tolkien in 1973, three academic monographs were published on his art that have since served as pillars of wisdom, founding texts of modern Tolkien scholarship. Each author at some point addressed Tolkien's 1936 allegory of the tower, and together they established what I call "the late-Elizabethan consensus reading" of the allegory, an old-fashioned British division of ages by crown, intended to signal a hope that this age of the world is now behind us. This consensus rests on error and, for half a century, has served to hide the keys to Tolkien's Middle-earth.

This late-Elizabethan consensus marks a curious chapter in the reception of Tolkien's allegory. The lack of historical sense that it betrays was itself a historical phenomenon, reflecting a general retreat from the collective burden of our past in the decades after World War II. The intention of this post is not to explain this retreat but merely illustrate what it looks like, and so indicate what it means to us today, who still read Tolkien. To this end I sample the authoritative reading of Thomas A. Shippey, a professional descendant of Tolkien and a Beowulf scholar in his own right. 

Shippey's classic study The Road to Middle-earth (1982) sets out the kernel of his considered opinion on his predecessor's famous Beowulf essay. In a nutshell, the 1936 essay is held up as evidence that, in the five years or so before commencing The Lord of the Rings in the late 1930s, Tolkien went off the rails—a victim of his own profession, the man began to confuse philological speculation for historical reality.¹ This theme of Tolkien losing the plot in the 1930s was then developed in "Tolkien and the Beowulf-poet" (2007), which opens: "Did Tolkien ever wonder whether he might possibly be the Beowulf-poet reincarnated?"²

Now, the conditions in which Shippey can ask this question arise out of his reading Tolkien's lecture through the prism of an academic discipline that was revolutionized by it. "The 1936 lecture is generally accepted as the starting-point for almost all modern criticism of the poem", he explains to the lay reader. Just this conception of the lecture as marking a new beginning in effect divests Tolkien's performance of its context, opening the door to a profoundly confused reading. "Almost all critics now agree, following Tolkien, that [Beowulf] is the work of a literate, Christian, Englishman", Shippey notes. But before Tolkien, Shippey says, it was "common" to read the poem as a Christian reworking of ancient pagan oral tradition. In contrast to this common view, Shippey explains:

Tolkien had a different answer, which he put carefully if circuitously in his 1936 lecture. The problem with this—if one manages to pick one's way through Tolkien's immensely complex and engaging rhetoric—is that it depends on Tolkien's conviction that he knew exactly when the poet was writing, and why, and what the poet was thinking when he wrote. When was he writing? Tolkien says that he will "accept without argument throughout the attribution of Beowulf to the 'age of Bede'" (Essays, 20), that is to say approximately 700-730 AD. There has been much argument about this, and the general consensus at the moment puts the poem as much as 250 years later.³

As a matter of historical fact, in Interwar Britain, it was primarily in the windswept towers on the river Cam on the edge of the Fenlands of East Anglia that folk declared Beowulf ancient oral pagan tradition. These Cambridge scholars provide the local faces of the common "friends" of the allegory, though their ranks are surely swelled at the riots at rock garden and tower by various visiting scholars from Denmark and Germany and the like. The chief of the friends is H.M. Chadwick, Cambridge Professor of Anglo-Saxon, who reads Beowulf as a window on the ancient pagan past, the view out of which he combines with others (later Scandinavian myths, and also Homer) to advance an evolutionary theory of the matriarchal origin of ancient English society and a sociological explanation of the heroic ages of ancient Greece and the old North.

Meanwhile, in Glasgow, in Oxford, and in University College London we find the academic heirs of W.P. Ker: respectable if a little staid, they are declared "descendants" of the Anglo-Saxon poet. Ker and his students see a poem composed by a poet and so deem the poem a single design, albeit a pretty poor one. The considered opinion of the descendants, given canonical form by Ker in The Dark Ages (1904), is that a rare Anglo-Saxon poetic talent was wasted on a thin folktale. 

Tolkien’s allegory of the tower divides the opinions of Interwar British academics into two camps, and the criticism of the criticism that immediately follows establishes that it is Ker and his living representative R.W. Chambers with whom Tolkien is actually arguing. The friends are to be pitied, maybe cured one day of their delusions, but they are placed beyond the pale of sober discussion.

The 1936 Beowulf lecture is an episode in an Interwar British War of the Chairs. For sure, it is easy to recruit a motley crew of  foreign  scholars to swell out the ranks of both friends and descendants, but the allegories of rock garden and tower are set in the British Isles, and a local map is helpful. As a rule, the English Chairs of Oxford and London are in harmony on Old English Literature because Ker, the founding father of the London tradition, was of and remained at home in Balliol College, Oxford, and so the Chair at University College London (UCL) was, even when occupied by his student R.W. Chambers, another Baliol colony in the metropolis. (Don't mistake London for the lesser institution in those days—UCL was England's first modern university, a model for the reformed Oxbridge professoriate represented by Tolkien and Chadwick. Prior to the 1870s, the teaching and research of Oxbridge professors was a national joke as well as scandal.)

In this newly modernized academic England (the Scottish universities were always powerhouses), Oxford and London are natural allies, their Chairs sharing a mutual detestation of the mob of enthusiasts in Cambridge. On this particular occasion, however, the Oxford Professor of Anglo-Saxon is taking issue with the critical verdict of W.P. Ker that is upheld with veneration and memorable rhetoric of his own by Ker's student and successor in the London Chair, R.W. Chambers. 

I take it that all this was moderately clear to most of the audience back on that Wednesday in November 1936 at the British Academy, and not just the Anglo-Saxon scholars in the room. The speaker was clearly attempting a delicate maneuver, one requiring tact and diplomacy as well as intellectual pyrotechnics.

Half a century later and this Interwar map of the local academic scene has vanished from the disciplinary gaze of the community of Anglo-Saxon scholars and Germanic philologists. Caught up in a new dating controversy of his own day, Shippey simply does not notice the pivotal role of Chambers in what Tolkien was up to, and in general fudges the descendants of the allegory, a title the racial connotations of which worries him. The picture of history at ground zero that he draws in "Tolkien and the Beowulf-poet" in effect leaves Tolkien alone in Oxford beset by the mad friends in Cambridge, who have now escaped their windswept towers and taken over the whole world of Beowulf scholarship to make the showdown on the last day of pre-history, when the sun dawned on a primordial daze but, by the evening of that celebrated Wednesday in 1936, the flat world of Beowulf criticism had been made round.

And with the vanishing of the descendants, the mischief begins. Tolkien dates the poem to the "age of Bede" without argument because it is the date established by Chambers in 1921. But Shippey takes Tolkien's declaration that he is not arguing about the date as evidence of Tolkien's conviction that he, alone among Beowulf scholars, can see the truth in a private crystal ball! Something similar happens to the notion of "fusion", which is the term that Chambers, in his lecture at the British Academy in May of 1936, had used to describe the literary monuments of the age of Bede, among which he named Beowulf. Elsewhere, however, Chambers complained that Beowulf was rather confusion than fusion, thereby providing Tolkien a center stage for his assault on the London position, namely the mythical monsters that Beowulf battles, whose genealogy the Anglo-Saxon poet connects with the biblical story of Cain and the subsequent tale of the Flood. Not noticing the origin in Chambers, Shippey takes Tolkien's talk of "fusion" as further mystical babel and evidence of Tolkien's conviction of a privileged connection with the mind of a dead poet.

Here I only touch on my real point, which I will return to in later posts. But this obfuscation of Tolkien's scholarship serves to obscure the art of Tolkien! In effect, Shippey charges Tolkien with apprehending Anglo-Saxon historical reality through a palantír, which is to say that Tolkien's scholarship is deemed to lack rational grounds. Had Shippey actually put his criticism so it would have been helpful, because someone would long ago have pointed out that he was putting the cart before the horse. An Elvish Seeing Stone is of course a scholar's fantasy. One who wishes to survey the depths of time and space and finds the available philological apparatus insufficient to fully realize the desire, naturally turns to the Elves. Shippey's criticism is on the verge of unpacking Tolkien's art as well as his scholarship, but ends up charging Tolkien, a master of both scholarship and fantasy art,  with confusing reality and fantasy—and he smells necromancy in this fantasy.

With the local history vanished, the horror has begun. But the real horror of the 2007 essay is that Shippey only hints at what he really thinks. By the end of his essay the curtain of mysticism has been drawn back sufficiently to reveal that behind "reincarnation" stand racially loaded notions like "gene-pool", "descent", and the native soil of England. But Shippey declines to unpack these notions.

The story takes a final turn (for this post) with the co-edited volume Beowulf: the Critical Heritage (1998), a compendium of the pre-history of modern Beowulf scholarship. Beginning with a long introduction, the volume provides a tour from the first known modern reference in 1700, in the wake of the old poem's rediscovery, down to 1935, the eve of Tolkien's British Academy lecture. From this impressive survey of the pre-history of a modern discipline (a small yet instructive slice of the modern intellectual history of northern Europe), Shippey acknowledges a shameful past, advances our understanding of the wider context of "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics", and once again obscures what is actually going on in Tolkien's British Academy lecture:

The most immediate question arising from the account above is a potentially embarrassing one for the history of scholarship: how much responsibility, or guilt, should the early Beowulfians and their colleagues in Germanistik bear for the development of Nazi ideology?⁴

Tolkien told a story  in which mad enthusiasts who glimpse the primordial Teutonic Forest in the stones of an Anglo-Saxon tower destroy that tower. That was in 1936. Then things got worse, unbelievably so. And only in 1998 are Tolkien's academic heirs talking aloud about the "potentially embarrassing" antics of their disciplinary ancestors? 

The immediate question, to my mind, is why Shippey did not pose his question explicitly of Tolkien back in 1982 in The Road to Middle-earth. Because in retrospect, it is obvious what he was getting at with his suggestion that Tolkien lost his grip on reality in the mid-1930s as he discovered some private artistic gateway that took him out of sober scholarship and into The Lord of the Rings. I quite understand that Tolkien fans wish to talk about Elves and Hobbits free from the shadow of the Holocaust. But if this idea occurs to an academic writing on Tolkien, then sooner or later it will probably occur to other friends of Tolkien, some of whose thoughts may be informed by a sense of history that is not only flawed but also diabolical, and it would have helped to have been prepared.

This 1998 compendium does advance the modern critical reading of Tolkien's "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics". Having waded through a lot of antiquated scholarship, and some more of Tolkien, Shippey restates his earlier account of the world before 1936. We now learn of a new international consensus on dating, emerging rapidly after 1900, which by 1933 had won over even German scholarship. This anticipates Tolkien’s account in the earlier version of the British Academy material (published in 2002).⁵   From this new reading, Shippey now situates Tolkien’s 1936 lecture against the background of an international consensus arising after 1933 and embodied in a "reigning triarchy" of Chambers, F. Klaber, and W.W. Lawrence, Tolkien’s English friend drawn for our eyes in German and North American company. The London Professor R. W. Chambers, the "best friend" of the original allegory, has finally stepped into Shippey’s picture, yet he appears without Ker and is still not recognized as Tolkien's primary interlocutor. 

You see what has happened here?

Shippey does not like to mention the War when talking of Tolkien, but privately is troubled by what he reads in Tolkien. He is allusive as to his real fears in The Road to Middle-earth but drops hints in "Tolkien and the Beowulf-poet", both of which are aimed at a popular market. But talking as an academic to other academics in his Beowulf compendium as he nears the end of a respectable career as a popular intellectual, Shippey is candid. Not only does he say what he sees, he takes up a well-intentioned editorial stance, proper to a new-Elizabethan Englishman who sets his gaze in resolute opposition to the blinkered nationalist perspectives of his professional predecessors. And of course, this internationalist perspective, if noble, is precisely not Tolkien’s. For his part, Tolkien thought that Chambers made too much of the fact that Klaeber and Lawrence had sided with him over Chadwick and, in his own lecture in London, his focus was simply and solely on overturning the critical judgment of the late W.P. Ker.

Shippey still does not get that Tolkien was talking to his friend Chambers about the spatial metaphor deployed against Beowulf by Chamber's teacher Ker, and drawing the Cambridge Professor of Anglo-Saxon and other friends into the picture to make a point about the potency of the unrecognized art of the unnamed poet.

Works Cited

1. Tom A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982). See p. 16 for the erosion of "the philologists’ sense of a line between imagination and reality", and pp. 36-7 for the particular case of Tolkien in his study of Beowulf, in which the "fusion" that Chambers and Tolkien speak of is misconstrued as a certainty of when and where the poem was composed.
2. Tom A. Shippey, Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien (Zollikofen: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007). The question about reincarnation is on page 1, while the situating of Tolkien against the pre-historic scholarship before 1936 is spun out from pages 4 to 7, before coming to rest on the "fusion" that Shippey deems mysticism and non-scholarly.
3. Ibid.
4. Tom A. Shippey and Andreas Haarder, Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (Routledge: London & New York, 1998). My quotation is taken from the Introduction that (all credit to him!) Shippey hosts as a Word document on his Academia.edu page (page 71 in original and 50 on the Word document, the first paragraph of the Conclusions). The report of the newly identified international triumvirate that includes Chambers is found just above, in the section "The beginning of the new consensus".
5. J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf and the Critics, ed. Michael Drout (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 105 reflects on the internationalist perspective underlined by Chambers (who was happy especially to have Klaeber come down on his side against Chadwick as to the Christian authorship of the poem).

Editor's Note: The article originally stated that Beowulf: The Critical Heritage was published in 2014; this incorrectly cited the 2014 reprint, and the volume was in fact published in 1998. The article has been corrected to reflect the correct publication date. The original version of the article can be found here.