Birth of a Medievalist

This is a slightly different tack for DailyMedieval, but many fans of his fiction are unaware of his career as a medievalist.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (3 January 1892 - 2 September 1973) graduated college with a specialty in Old Norse before he went not fight in World War I. After the war, his first job was working for the Oxford English Dictionary, reviewing the history and etymology of Germanic words. He became an expert in Old Norse, Old English, Middle English, Old Icelandic, Gothic, and Medieval Welsh. He also taught himself some Finnish.

Later, at the University of Leeds, he produced A Middle English Vocabulary and a translation of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that is still in print.

One of his most significant additions to medieval studies was his long essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Delivered as a lecture in 1936, it argued for the beauty of the poem as Early English literature. Up to this point, Beowulf had been used largely as a primer on the language of Old English/Anglo-Saxon, and picked apart for its references to places and names that could be matched to historical facts.

He describes the attitude toward the poem with a parable:

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material.

His essay created an atmosphere in which Beowulf could be seen as a poem worthy of being treated as a poem, not as an old document to be studied simply for clues to language and criticized as a dish-mosh of paganism and Christianity, mingled stories of heroism and monsters, history and myth.

Death of a Medievalist

Tolkien in his study

Time to break one of my rules and discuss a 20th century event.

Today is the 41st anniversary of the death of J.R.R.Tolkien. Born 3 January 1892, he learned to read and write by the time he was four, even learning a little Latin from his mother. Among his literary preferences were the fairy stories of Andrew Lang and the fantasy of George MacDonald. In his teens he added the Anglo-Saxon language to his Latin studies. He and his cousins played with inventing languages of their own, a pursuit that would help him lend artistic verisimilitude to his literary masterpiece The Lord of the Rings.

A career in World War I brought him home as an invalid, after coming down with trench fever. In 1920 he became the youngest professor at the University of Leeds, on the strength of his linguistic knowledge. His first academic publication was a Middle English Vocabulary in 1922. A few years later, this was followed by an edition/translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that is still in print.

Although his focus was more on language than literature, he produced two scholarly works in the 1930s that bridged (what some would call) the gap between the two. His 1934 article "Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale" showed that Chaucer was well aware of dialects and deliberately gave some of his characters a different dialect to make their status plain to the audience

Then, in 1937, he published a lecture (given the year before) called Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. In it, he argued successfully that the poem Beowulf had value not just as a repository of Anglo-Saxon language and northern European history that could be used to cross-reference other references to history It was also a poem of literary merit. This essay continues to be fundamental to any modern study of the poem. His own translation of the poem was published a few months ago.

Current culture equates his name with a series of blockbuster adventure movies, but long after those have fallen out of favor, his academic work will still be fundamental to future scholarly endeavors.

Robert Cotton's Hobby

Sir Robert Bruce Cotton was born 22 January, 1570 (or 1571). Too late to be part of the Middle Ages, but still a subject for this blog; you'll see why presently. He attended the Westminster School on the grounds of Westminster Abbey in London, considered one of the finest schools in England. From there he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in 1585.

In 1601 he was made a Member of Parliament and started a successful political career. He helped King James I develop a new fund-raising scheme with the invention of the title/position "baronet." A baronet (like a knighthood) did not confer on the bearer a right to attend Parliament (and therefore be a potential nuisance), but it was a lovely and impressive title that could be inherited; many wealthy men would willingly pay large sums to be made a baronet, which gave them a hereditary title for their childfren but no real power.

Robert Cotton, painted in 1626.

Despite Cotton's friendship and value to the king, he began to become a concern when his views about the importance of parliament over the monarch were expressed in his published essay The Dangers wherein the Kingdom now standeth, and the Remedye. The monarchy considered this a threat, and they decided to take action to prevent Cotton from becoming the center of discontent. The monarchy had a simple solution to pull the rug out from under Cotton: confiscate his library.

The assumption was that his library held documents that might provide historical precedents for his political views. Why was his library such a concern? Robert Cotton had a hobby: for decades he had been collecting documents, manuscripts, books, records. He had an insatiable desire to collect and preserve the history of the written word in England, and he created a library with more documents (it was said at the time) than the Records Office in London. It was confiscated by the king in 1630. Cotton died in 1631. The library was eventually returned to his family; his grandson gave it to the British Library.

The Cotton Library was, of course, pre-Dewey Decimal and pre-Library of Congress. He had his own scheme for organizing documents. His library was lined with bookcases, each of which was topped by the bust of a classical figure. Each bookcase had up to 6 shelves, designated by letters. Each shelf was filled with documents, counted from left to right. Items in the library were designated by bust/shelf/#document. For instance, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (one of nine surviving manuscripts) is designated Cotton Domitian A.viii. Many works of literature from the Middle Ages, such as Beowulf (Cotton Vitellius A.xv) or Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight (Cotton Nero A.x) exist today only because they were collected and preserved thanks to Robert Cotton's hobby.