English 9171
Tolkien & Old English
Instructor: Professor Jane Toswell.
Full-Year Course.
In 1908, a master at a public school in Birmingham gave his most promising student a recently-published primer of Old English, which he devoured with enthusiasm before turning to read Beowulf in Old English, then Middle English, Old Norse, and Germanic philology more generally. He was fascinated by medieval languages, and the next year invented a language based on the Finnish in the Kalevala. At Oxford, that student started in Classics but shifted to the English school partway through his degree, after which he served in the Great War on the front lines. He was already a poet and storyteller, and on his return became a lexicographer and then a medievalist. In 1930, while marking student papers for the UK government, he famously found a blank page and wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” In this course we will learn Old English, starting with the basics and practising a lot, while reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in the first term, looking also at some short passages, easy prose, and one or two poems. In the second term we will look at some Old English riddles and elegies, consider some of Tolkien’s scholarship and other works, read The Hobbit, and focus in the final six weeks on the Old English poem Beowulf which was at the centre of Tolkien’s intellectual and imaginative world.
