« I am sure that if Tolkien had been asked for a one-word description of himself, he would have said, “I am a philolo¬gist,” which he might have qualified by saying, as he did on at least one recorded occasion, “I am a pure philologist” (Letters, 264). His aim throughout his professional life was to establish a successful philological curriculum in British universities, and in this he failed. »

« Unfortunately (…), Tolkien’s argument, as tangled up with technical Oxford syllabus terms as it is, could not make much of an impact outside of Oxford. »

« Si la réforme qui m’a toujours tenu à cœur… si, comme je l’espérais jadis, on avait pu modifier les conditions de la licence de Littérature afin de permettre une autre approche par voie d’examen et de récompenser la lecture et la culture au moins autant que la recherche mineure, j’aurais quitté l’École d’anglais le cœur plus léger. »

« Il est en tout cas évident, je suppose, que notre programme de licence est surchargé et que, pour diverses raisons, les changements qui entrent en vigueur l’année prochaine n’ont pas fait grand-chose pour y remédier. D’ailleurs, concernant la situation du Master of Arts, on suppose dans ce pays qu’une durée de trois ans est largement suffisante pour s’amuser avec des livres dans une université, et quatre ans, une durée excessive. Mais alors que la vita académique se réduit, l’ars s’allonge : nous avons maintenant sur les bras mille deux cents ans de lettres anglaises attestées, une longue lignée ininterrompue, indivisible, dont aucune partie ne peut être ignorée sans dommages. Aux revendications du grand XIXe siècle vont bientôt succéder les bruyantes réclamations du XXe. Qui plus est, tout à l’honneur de l’anglais mais non du goût de ceux qui organisent les programmes, certains des tout premiers écrits font preuve d’une vitalité et d’un talent qui les rendent dignes d’être étudiés pour eux-mêmes, tout à [284] fait indépendamment de l’intérêt particulier que présente leur caractère ancien. Ce qu’on appelle l’anglo-saxon ne saurait être considéré seulement comme une racine : il est déjà en fleur. Mais c’est une racine (…) »

« In later years he became less adamant and, in 1967, Tolkien wrote a poem commending W. H. Auden [1907-1973], one of his eager pupils who received terrible grades for Lang., but excelled in and felt more comfortable with Lit. Although Tolkien did not shy away from taking a side in the Lit. and Lang. debate, it is also evident that he perceived much of the quarreling as counterproductive, and felt bewilderment over how the two came to be divided in the first place. »

« Certaines divisions au sein de notre École sont inévitables, parce que la longueur même de l’histoire des lettres anglaises rend leur maîtrise difficile de bout en bout sur toute la ligne, même quand on jouit du soutien et des goûts les plus vastes, ainsi que d’une longue vie. Ces divisions ne devraient pas se faire en fonction de la Langue et de la Littérature, l’une excluant l’autre : elles devraient se faire avant tout en fonction des périodes. Dans les limites de la période à laquelle ils se consacrent, tous les érudits devraient être à la fois Linguistes et Littéraires à un degré raisonnable, c’est-à-dire à la fois philologues et critiques.
(…) bien que je ne prétende pas être le plus savant de ceux qui sont venus jusqu’ici depuis l’autre bout du continent noir, (…) j’ai dans le sang la haine de l’apartheid et je déteste par-dessus tout la ségrégation et la séparation entre langue et littérature. Peu m’importe laquelle, d’après vous, est blanche. »

LIT’ AND LANG’

Once there were two little groups,
Once there were two little groups,
Once there were two little groups,
Called Lit’ and Lang’.
Lit’ was lazy till she died,
Lit’ was lazy till she died,
Lit’ was lazy till she died,
Of homophemes.
“I don’t like philology,”
Poor Lit’ said.
Psychotherapeutics failed,
And now she’s dead.

Doctors cut up all the corpse,
Doctors cut up all the corpse,
Doctors cut up all the corpse,
But searched in vain;
They couldn’t find it anywhere,
They couldn’t find it anywhere,
They couldn’t find it anywhere,
They couldn’ find the brain.
Did Lang’ go into mourning-weeds?
I don’t think!
He quickly wiped a tear away
And had another drink.

« By the end of his career, however, Tolkien was in a position to speak even more frankly, and this he did in his “Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford” characteristically he had never got round to an Inaugural delivered alter he had retired on 5th June 1959. By this time he was apparently in rather a bad temper with many of his Oxford faculty colleagues, and he coined a word to describe them: they were ‘misologists,’ the exact opposite of ‘philologists,’ not ‘lovers of the word’ but ‘haters of the word.’ Such people should not be in a university at all, as students or as teachers:

I do not think that [Philology] 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 disquali¬fying 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 […] But […] there are other voices […] 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 [ ... ] Dull¬ness is to be pitied. Or so I hope, being myself dull at many points. But dullness should be confessed with hu¬mility; 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 <144> their bent, encouraging those without this interest to be-lieve that their lack marked them as minds of a superior order.
(Essays, 225-6)
=
Je ne crois pas qu’il faille la [la philologie] faire avaler de force comme une pilule parce que je crois que si un tel procédé semble nécessaire, les patients ne devraient pas se trouver ici, tout du moins pas à étudier ni à enseigner les lettres anglaises. La philologie est le fondement des humanités ; la “misologie” est un défaut ou un mal disqualifiant.
D’après mon expérience, il ne s’agit pas d’un défaut ni d’un mal présent chez ceux dont la culture littéraire, la sagesse et le jugement critique les placent au plus haut rang, […] Mais il y a d’autres voix, […] Je dois avouer qu’au cours des trente dernières années, j’ai parfois été affligé par elles, par ceux qui, atteints d’un certain degré de misologie, ont discrédité ce qu’ils ont coutume d’appeler langue […] La médiocrité est à déplorer, tout du moins je l’espère, étant moi-même médiocre à divers endroits. Mais elle devrait être humblement avouée et j’ai donc ressenti comme une affliction le fait que certains parmi nous prennent leur médiocrité et leur ignorance pour la norme humaine, la mesure de ce qui est bon ; par ailleurs, j’ai aussi éprouvé de la colère lorsqu’ils cherchaient à imposer les limitations de leur esprit à des esprits plus jeunes, en détournant de leur penchant ceux qui ressentaient de la curiosité pour la philologie et en encourageant ceux qui ne s’y intéressaient pas à croire que cette lacune les distinguait comme esprits d’un ordre supérieur.
(MCE, p. 278-279)

Of course, he says (on this public occasion), he does not mean everyone, just “certain professional persons,” and those “not of the highest rank.” But I am sure they knew who they were. No doubt several of them were present, which accounts for Tolkien’s not very convincing display of tact. »

« One may suspect that Chaucer, (…) would prefer the Philological Society to the Royal Society of Literature, and an editor of the English Dictionary to a poet laureate. (…) Chaucer was interested in “language”, and in the forms of his own tongue. As we gather from the envoy to Troilus and Criseyde, he [110] chose his forms and probably his spellings with care, by selection among divergencies of which he was critically aware; and he wished to have his choice handed on accurately.
Alas! if the curse he pronounced on scribe Adam produced any effect, many a fifteenth-century penman must early have gone bald. We know the detail of Chaucer’s work now only through a fifteenth-century blur (at best). His holographs, or the copies impatiently rubbed and scraped by him, would doubtless be something of a shock to us, though a shock we shall unfortunately be spared. In our unhappy case, he would be the first to applaud any efforts to undo the damage as far as possible; and the acquiring of as good a knowledge as is available of the language of his day would certainly have seemed to him a preliminary necessity, not a needless luxury. One can imagine the brief burning words, like those with which he scorched Adam, that he would address to those who profess to admire him while disdaining “philology”, who adventure, it may be, on textual criticism undeterred by ignorance of Middle English.
Of course, Chaucer was the last man himself to annotate his jests, while they were fresh. But he would recognize the need, at our distance of time, for the careful exhuming of ancient jokes buried under years, before we shape our faces to a conventional grin at his too often mentioned “humour”. Chaucer was no enemy of learning, and there is no need to apologize to him for the annotating of one of his jests, for digging it up and examining it without laughing. He will not suspect us of being incapable of laughter. From his position of advantage he will be able to observe that most philologists possess a sense of the ridiculous, one that even prevents them from taking “literary studies” too seriously. »

« Tolkien asserts that the Reeve’s Tale is an extended dialectal joke. Since his paper was meant for oral delivery, the idea was that all the philologists in the room could have a laugh at the expense of the literature crowd (if indeed any were present). »

« It is appropriate that Tolkien brought up Chaucer again and again to emphasize his thoughts about Lit. and Lang. since Chaucer’s works were commonly regarded as a dividing line, the place where philologists and medievalists were reputed to end their literary pursuits, and where modernists would not venture further into the past. »

« À l’époque où [291] j’étais un examinateur jeune et enthousiaste, pour soulager mes collègues littéraires de leur fardeau (dont ils se plaignaient bruyamment), j’ai proposé de préparer le sujet d’examen sur Chaucer ou d’aider à corriger les copies. J’ai été fort surpris par la véhémence et l’hostilité avec lesquelles je fus repoussé. J’avais les mains sales : j’étais Lang.
Par bonheur, cette hostilité s’est aujourd’hui apaisée. Il arrive que l’on fraternise entre les barbelés. Mais c’est cette hostilité qui, dans la réforme du programme du début des années trente (encore en vigueur, pour l’essentiel), a rendu obligatoire la rédaction de deux compositions sur Chaucer et ses principaux contemporains. Litt refusait de laisser Lang souiller le poète de ses doigts avides ; Lang ne pouvait tolérer les copies bien minces et superficielles de Litt. »

« Despite Tolkien’s role in the Lit. and Lang. dispute he had plenty of friends on both sides of the aisle. By 1931, he continued to work diligently with C. S. Lewis among others to remake the curriculum. »

« Among other things, thery [Tolkien et Lewis] plotted in establishing a coherent undergraduate syllabus for the English School at Oxford. “Perhaps one of the most significant of [Lewis’s] contributions to the study of English literature at Oxford,” wrote Dame Helen Gardner, after his death, “was the part he played with his friend Professer J. R. R. Tolkien in establishing a syllabus for the Final Honour School which embodied his belief in the value of medieval (especially Old English) literature, his conviction that a proper study of modern literature required the linguistic training that the study of earlier literature gave, and his sense of the continuity of English literature and the syllabus, which remained in force for over twenty years, was in many ways an admirable one.” Tolkien’s reformed syllabus was accepted, in fact, by 1931, bringing together “Lang.” and “Lit.” »

« As to “English School politics”, these became less turbulent after 1931 when – chiefly thanks to Lewis’s part in the campaign – Tolkien’s syllabus reforms were accepted by the Faculty, with the result that the Anglo-saxon and Middle English parts of the course became much more attractive to undergraduates, and the study of Victorian literature was virtually abandoned. Lewis was delighted at this victory, which as he put it “my party and I have forced upon the junto after much hard fighting”. »

« A few years later Tolkien, by now securely in place, wrote a rather franker piece in The Oxford Magazine for 29th May 1930 [pp. 778-782], a proposal for reforming “The Oxford English School.” You will see that Tolkien here wastes no time on “friendly rivalry” or “neighbourliness,” but admits that the opposite is true:

In the English School, owing to the accidents of its history, the distinction between philology and literature is <142> notoriously marked […] its branches are customarily but loosely dubbed the “language” and “literature” side – titles which never were accurate, fortunately for both. History may explain their arising, but provides no defence for their retention. Their banishment is probably the first need of reform in the Oxford School, even A and B would be preferable [ ... ]
There is also “philology” – the special burden of Northern tongues, even of classical Icelandic, yet in fact the special advantage they possess as a discipline. From their study philology cannot be eliminated. It is essential to the critical apparatus of student and scholar. The poems and prose they study – the senses of their words, their syntax, their idiom, metre, and allusion – were res- cued from oblivion by philologists.

The sub-text of this – noticed I should think by no-one at the time, and few lacer – is that Tolkien wanted to replace the Oxford syllabus by the one he was used to at Leeds, where the “Two Little Schemes” of his poem mentioned above were in fact called “the A-scheme” and “the B-scheme.” <…> Opinions differ as to how far Tolkien’s 1930 plan was successful: by the time I arrived to teach at Oxford in 1972 the philological option within the School of English (which is what Tolkien seems to mean by the scheme he wished to label “B”) was effectively moribund, taken by fewer than ten students a year out of around 250. On the other hand, it is assumed by Gross (1999: 440) that the Tolkien/Lewis plan of reform was in fact accepted, though I do not know on what evidence. It is <143> also by no means clear what Tolkien meant by his talk of “special burden” and “special advantage”: there is a sense that the whole piece is as it were ‘coded,’ with particular meaning only to insiders. »

« (…) Tolkien did try to “fight his corner” (to use Shippey’s words; [“Tolkien’s Academic Reputation Today”, Amon Hen no100 (1989), p. 21]) for philology and the integrated lin¬guistic and literary-critical approach to literature. This argument is most famously (and, in concrete matters of syllabus and course of study, most successfully) made in “The Oxford English School,” published in The Oxford Magazine in May of 1930, in which Tolkien advocates the creation of another course of study at Oxford that would emphasize Scandinavian languages and literature as well as philological study. Tolkien also defends philology thus: “the student who follows” the poems of the Northern tongues “is expected not only to know the results of this [philological] work, but to understand the methods, even to share in the labour. Bereft of an ancient tradition, he has the advantage of building a new” (780). His proposed course of study provides a “fairly solid block of balanced literary and linguistic” interest and would train new scholars in the essentials of the field. »

« Tolkien recommended, in an article in the Oxford Magazine, “jettisoning certainly the nineteenth century (unless parts of it could appear as an ‘additional subject’)”, and suggested that the compulsory papers should stop at 1830.
The notion of improving the study of ancient literature by curtailing the reading of modern writers had a certain appeal at Oxford. The English Faculty had always been embarrassed by those in the University – and there were many – who alleged that undergraduates could read English literature in their baths, and did not need dons to teach it to them any more than they needed nursemaids to wipe their noses. (Lewis himself shared this view.) The study of recent writers was particularly open to this charge; so there was some attraction in amputating the nineteenth century from the syllabus, particularly if it was to give place to what was indubitably a more scholarly pursuit in Oxford’s eyes, the reading of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. This is perhaps why, though Tolkien’s proposal to finish the syllabus at 1830 was strongly resisted by many of the “literature” dons, it was not quashed, but became the subject of considerable argument in the English Faculty (…). »

« That sense of defeat [dans la vie universitaire de Tolkien] may be demonstrated by looking at three docu¬ments from Tolkien’s own life. The first comes from Tolkien’s application for the Oxford Chair of Anglo-Saxon vacated by W.A. Craigie [1867-1957], dated 27th June 1925. Its literary genre is obvious: the application for a future job which is also an extended boast about how well you have done in the current one. Tolkien says that at Leeds University, where he had been Reader since 1920 and Professor since 1924 :

I began with five hesitant pioneers out of a School [ ... ] of about sixty members. The proportion today is 43 literary to 20 linguistic students. The linguists are in no way isolated or cut off from the general life and work of the department, and share in many of the literary courses and activities of the School, but since 1922 their purely linguistic work has been conducted in special classes, and examined in distinct papers of special standard and attitude [ ... ] Courses are given on Old English heroic verse, the history of English, various Old and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic [ ... ] and Medieval Welsh. [ ... ] Philology, indeed, appears to have lost for these students its connotations of terror if not of mystery. An active discussion-class has been conducted [ ... ] which has borne fruit in friendly rivalry and open debate with the corresponding literary assembly [ ... ] [If elected] I should endeavour to advance, to the best of my ability, the growing neighbourliness of linguistic and literary studies, which can never be enemies except by misunderstanding or without loss to both; and <141> to continue in a wider and more fertile field the encouragement of philological enthusiasm among the young.
(Letters, 12-13)

The sub-text of this is again obvious. Note the remarks, “in no way isolated [ ... ] friendly rivalry [ ... ] growing neighbourliness,” and of course no more “connotations of terror.” Other evidence suggests that this was by no means completely true, and that the philologists and the critics at Leeds were as usual at daggers drawn – the Songs for the Philologists published in 1936 contains at least one poem by Tolkien cruelly mocking the literary students and the literary faculty. But Tolkien knew that the selection committee at Oxford would be looking for someone who was not going to cause trouble, who would co-operate with his modernist colleagues, and he made out that he was just the right person (as one does in such circumstances). He really could not have expected to be appointed to the Oxford Chair. He had only been in the business for five years, he had published little except the edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, co-edited with E.V. Gordon, and Kenneth Sisam [1887-1971] had also applied: Sisam was older than Tolkien, had been his tutor, and already had an Oxford job. It is a mystery why Tolkien won, by a single vote. »

« Lorsque je suis rentré de Leeds en 1925, NOUS ne signifiait plus les étudiants en anglais, mais ceux qui adhéraient à Lang ou à Litt : EUX signifiait tous ceux qui étaient dans l’autre clan, gens infiniment rusés qu’il fallait constamment surveiller, de peur qu’ILS ne l’emportent sur NOUS. Et c’est ce qu’ils ont fait, les gredins !
En effet, si vous avez des Partis avec des étiquettes, vous obtenez des Partisans. Les combats entre factions sont bien sûr amusants, surtout pour ceux qui aiment la bagarre, mais il n’est pas dit qu’ils fassent aucun bien (…). »

« It should be understood that an Oxford professor, unlike those in many other universities, is not by virtue of his office necessarily in a position of power in his faculty. He has no authority over the college tutors who in all probability make up the majority of the faculty staff, for they are appointed by their colleges and are not answerable to him. So if he wishes to initiate some major change of policy he must adopt persuasive rather than authoritarian tactics. And, on his return to Oxford in 1925, Tolkien did wish to make a major change: he wanted to reform certain aspects of the Final Honour School of English Language and Literature.
The years since the First World War had widened the old rift between Language and Literature, and each faction in the English School - and they really were factions, with personal as well as academic animosities - delighted to interfere with the syllabus of the other. The “Lang.” side made sure that the “Lit” students had to spend a good deal of their time studying the obscurer branches of English philology, while the “Lit.” camp insisted that the “Lang.” undergraduates must set aside many hours from their specialization (Anglo-Saxon and Middle English) to study the works of Milton and Shakespeare. Tolkien believed that this should be remedied. What was even more regrettable to him was that the linguistic courses laid considerable emphasis on the study of theoretical <185> philology without suggesting that undergraduates should read widely in early and medieval literature. His own love of philology had always been based firmly on knowledge of literature, and he determined that this state of affairs should be changed. »

« It is hard to tell if the Lit. and Lang. feud had a distinct origin. In The Rise of English Studies (1965), D. J. Palmer documents that as far back as 1887, the split between philology and literature was, in reality, a split between those who studied the literature of the Middle Ages and those who read classical and modern literature. As for the anxiety surrounding language studies, one extreme of this attitude is expressed by John Churton Collins: “An English school will grow up, nourishing our language [42] not from the humanity of the Greeks and the Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons. We are about to reverse the Renaissance” (Palmer 101). Attitudes such as this one were not uncommon, and only forced philology into a category that grew increasingly synonymous with the pejorative connotations of the “dark ages” in the following decades. Yet, despite all the apparent drama, professors like D. B. Monro [1836-1905], W. P. Ker [1855-1923], Henry Nettleship [1839-1893], and C. H. Firth [1857-1936] were actively concerned about giving equal weight to both language and literature. Nettleship published a pamphlet arguing that “whatever temporary misunderstandings may arise between them [philology] is a necessary adjunct to the study of literature” (Palmer 104). His argument fell on deaf ears, however, and was shortly followed up by [J. C.] Collins’ rebuttal titled, “Philology versus Literature.” [1848-1908]
In 1905, W. A. Raleigh [1861-1922] and A. S. Napier [1853-1916] oversaw a structural reorganization of the English School at Oxford with the intention of keeping Lit. and Lang. from being exclusively identified with medieval and modern periods respectively. Their system aimed to provide English majors with something equivalent to modern “concentrations.” The reform proposal, known as “bifurcation,” allowed separate schemes for those perusing language study and “those who chose to specialize in literature (the great majority)” (Palmer 128). It was submitted in 1905, and subsequently passed in 1906 (129). But questions over how to balance Lit. and Lang. never went away entirely. By Tolkien’s time, lines had been conspicuously drawn. »

« Ce qu’on appelle l’anglo-saxon (…) manifeste les qualités et les caractéristiques qui sont toujours restées depuis une composante permanente de l’anglais. Par conséquent, il requiert au moins une connaissance directe de la part de tous les étudiants sérieux en langue et en lettres anglaises. Jusqu’à présent, l’École d’Oxford a toujours reconnu cette exigence, qu’elle s’est efforcée de satisfaire.
À une telle échelle, les divergences d’intérêts ou en tout cas les écarts de compétences sont inévitables. Mais les difficultés (…) ont été embrouillées par l’émergence de deux figures légendaires, les diablotins Lang et Litt, comme je préfère les appeler, puisque les termes de langue et littérature, bien que nous ayons coutume de les malmener, ne devraient être ainsi déshonorés. La mythologie populaire semble croire que Lang est sorti d’un œuf de coucou pondu dans le nid, où il prend trop de place et vole ses vermisseaux au poussin Litt. Certains croient que le coucou, c’était Litt, disposé à expulser son compagnon du nid ou à s’asseoir dessus. Ils sont davantage soutenus par la véritable histoire de notre École, mais aucune de ces deux légendes n’est fondée.
Dans un bestiaire reflétant davantage la vérité, Lang et Litt apparaîtraient comme des frères siamois, Jekyll-Hyde et Hyde-Jekyll, indissociables depuis leur naissance, avec deux têtes mais un seul cœur, tous deux en bien meilleure santé lorsqu’ils ne se disputent pas. Du moins cette allégorie se rapproche-t-elle davantage de notre ancien statut : Il sera exigé de chaque candidat qu’il fasse preuve de connaissances satisfaisantes des deux parties de la question et il sera accordé à chacune d’elles un poids égal lors de l’examen.
La nature des “parties” devait être déduite de la dénomination de l’École que nous portons encore : L’École de langue et de littérature anglaises, (…).Langue et littérature apparaissent comme des “parties” d’un seul sujet, ce qui était assez inoffensif et assez exact (tant que “parties” signifiaient, comme il se devrait, aspects et manifestations), et dont chacune, ayant un “poids égal” dans l’ensemble de la [285] question, n’était normalement ni exclusive de l’autre, ni la propriété exclusive de tel ou tel érudit, ni l’unique objet d’un programme d’études donné.
Mais hélas ! “Parties” suggérait “partis” et trop nombreux furent ceux qui prirent parti. Et c’est ainsi qu’entrèrent Lang et Litt, compagnons de nid mal à l’aise, chacun essayant de s’accaparer davantage du temps des candidats, quoi que les candidats puissent penser. »