What Was Tolkien Like As A Professor?
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- Опубликовано: 9 фев 2025
- In this video we explore the details of Tolkien's lengthy career as a professor, while examining the first hand accounts of his students!
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While a Biology student at Uni I was friends with a girl who was an English Literature student. One time as we were going to the student union bar, she said her English lecturer would be there who had been a student of Tolkien, adding "don't pester her about what Tolkien was like, it really annoys her". When we met her lecturer, I could see she was no-nonsense person. Small and slim in stature, wearing dark brown flared pants and a dark brown blouse (it was the 1970's) she was none the less a commanding presence as she talked at the centre of a small group.
My friend introduced me, and I made a great effort not to mention Tolkien. After about an hour of listening politely to the conversation I couldn't stand it any longer and much to the horror of my friend abruptly asked- "What was Tolkien like?". The lecturer gave me an amused look and answered "A hard marker!" She then said she had to go and left. That was it. That was all I was to ever know from her about what Tolkien was actually like.
Imagine being a student in WW2 and your teacher just ask you while leaving class: "Sorry, kid, but could you please give me some unused paper? I need to write the part in which Gollum bites Frodo's finger..." 😅
Or "Thank you student, your carence of writing make me made a greather fantasy world,, thank you, for not write much"
Heck, I’d save up my ration cards so he could have extra paper and when/if he thanked me I’d say “we fellow writers need to look out for each other.”
@@predatitor4183out. He not only insulted them, he insulted them in French…that’s just scorched earth.
@ that would hurt a lot...
I remember reading an eyewitness claim that Newton was required to lecture even if nobody came that day, so on slow days he just read his notes to an empty room, then left.
I bet he was phenomenally respected by the intelligence agencies listening in. I wonder if he knew?
A book about Lewis Carrol said, at Christchurch, in the 19th century, the Dons were obliged to eat their meals in the great hall. They were not obligated to teach classes. Professor Dobson, although a phenomenal writer, was an indifferent math lecturer. Concerning Tolkien, nothing was known of PTSD in old men at this time. But I saw it in WWII vets in the 60's. Normal family men would have peculiarities that only their wives and children saw. I cannot imagine that WWI veterans were exempt. Retreating into scholarship and fantasy is pretty common. Nightmares can become morbidly vivid. I had young math lecturers so Aspberger, they never faced the class.
@@thomasesau2376 Didn't most of Tolkien's friends die in WWI?
8:32
Ngl, watching footage of Tolkien writing in elvish is crazy af. It's like witnessing how Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa
In others words, some times it was gandalf, and sometimes, it was gandalf.
I remember listing to an old Desert Island Discs whilst driving home from Warwickshire to Devon late one night; it was the great actor Robert Hardy. On it he said he was swayed to read English at Oxford as he would have as two of his tutors JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. I would find it difficult to think of greater pairing to have had. Two of the "inklings", and by far the most famous of them.
My mother is both well-educated and well-spoken (when making the effort) and an absolute mumbler (something I suspectis one of the several things we've inherited from her father, my maternal grandfather) so I can absolutely believe Tolkien could behave in both ways depending on the situation. This is not the first time I've heard of the famous claim that Tolkien could be quite a mumbler. He also seems to easily slip into that mumbly way of speaking in some surviving footage of old interviews etc.
It was said at Columbia that Richard Hofstadter hated teaching undergraduate classes. Sometimes when he was forced to do it he would show up and read from the manuscript of whatever his current book project was. When he reached the end of the manuscript, the course was over.
It's always hard to see one of your heroes brought down to the earthly level. But now that I'm older, and possibly wiser, I understand how he could have just been done trying to lecture/teach and just want to do what made him happy. I love his Hobbit and LOTR so much that I've read them nearly every year since I was 13. Great video. Thank you. 🤩
From what I've read, his lecture content was excellent. The problem was that he tended to speak quite quickly and not very loudly.
I am always struck by the brightness of JRR's eyes and that little gleam of mischief 🙂
I love this man forever. Truly a master.
I feel the same way.
I suspect one would need to look at the timeline of his career and the dates that various people attended his lectures to make sense of this. It's nice to see something that does more that say how great he was, though!
Your last comment, i feel, is very important. And when i studied English Lit, Tolkien was degenerated in favour of Larkin and co - and yet studying their works made the experience most depressing. Doing Early English History with Archaeology was much, much better - and for that, Tolkien was seen as a positive influence!!
“…trying to convince his students that leprechauns existed”
I’d prank him back by making a pair of stamps shaped like really tiny shoes, wait until after the next hard rainstorm and have someone stamp the “shoes” into the mud outside his classroom window.
Then look out at the end of lecture and say “Hey, Professor? You were right about leprechauns. Look out the window.” Then sit back and watch his confusion.
Great video and a great subject, thank you very much!
So you think that graduating from Oxford, becoming an officer in the Great War and then getting a job with the Oxford University Press as an etymologist constitutes 'humble beginnings'?
Clearly you are a hard man to impress!
I think the ‘humble beginnings’ refers to the fact that he was a poor orphan without parents.
In the modern day there are exceedingly few authors who are Titans in so many ways.
That's a very...interesting clause of a lecturer's job!
I honestly wonder what Tolkien would say about Frieren. Considering its themes are similar to the ones of LOTR and had a pretty good reception in christian communities, I think he would get interested in that fantasy anime
He would probably really love it once he got past the idea that anime is the devil, the man was very old school.
Madlad in every perspective
8:03 It may be noted that Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin were in the same set, comparable to, but not necessarily friendly to, the Inklings, also all of them jazz musicians, as far as I can tell.
It may also be noted Kingsley Amis was a Communist up to 1956. He had quit the university of Oxford in 1947. So, he was a Communist while studying for Tolkien.
In other words, Kingsley Amis may have found the man unintelligible because he wanted other people to find him unintelligible. From what I can hear on the interviews I can find on youtube, he was in fact (most words) intelligible. The faculty for hearing someone with an accent other than you are used to is uneven. Some people can't make out what I say in French, or so they say, and with some working class I can't make out all of what they say. It's not an objective measure of my capacity for French, it is an indication, I should prefer writing to podcasting, and I should note that a small shade in accent makes a big difference to some. But ... from my ear ... Kingsley Amis was overdoing it.
Thankyou for a balanced and well-researched analysis. I think it is also good to recall that all academics are as human as their students. I do not know Tolkien's situation. But in the present day, some academics may be required to take turns teaching a subject they do not like, simply because nobody else is available. It is also not unusual for some highly gifted research academics to have less well-honed teaching skills; I remember this was said of Sir Douglas Mawson. Nowadays with formal student feedback of teaching, there is far more pressure for academics to speak clearly etc in every subject they teach.
The ‘hard to understand/unintelligible’ thing scans if you listen to the 30 minutes or so of surviving interviews with him.
Both sides are correct. He’s fascinating and insightful, and really damned hard to understand. Honestly the video interview at Oxford where he’s talking about trees sounds like he’s speaking ancient Saxon or something 😂
I suspect how good he was as a professor depended on how well
You could untangle his speech. If you could, he was a fascinating guy.
Hay que leer sus cartas. Muchos se quedarán patidifusos al hacerlo.
This is brilliant, cheers!
"Grise" is pronounced gre-ze as one word and the last e as euh.
I love the video. Measured and nuanced, and bring forward details that many, myself included, did not .
But my only question to all those who found him unintelligible...did no one speak up and ask if he could speak a little louder, or slower, or towards the class, so he could be better understood?
Still, I would have liked to be in the room to hear him shout "Hwaet!", at the beginning of class.
And there is one tale that you have not mentioned....
It was the Sixties and LotR was everywhere in college campuses on both sides of the pond, and good olde Oxford was no exception.
One day, Tolkien is walking across campus and he spotted a young man with a backpack and his bike, Tolkien went over to the student and admired his Elvish calligraphy, but told he spelled something wrong and gave him the correct rune.
Very cool.
Thanks
Interesting and very well done video
Cheers from south of Middle Earth Chile 😁
🇨🇱🇬🇧
It sounds like Tolkien was somewhat bipolar, or subject to mood swings and alternated between enjoying teaching, being bored with it, happy and depressed, motivated or just getting the paycheck that day. And so in this manner they may all in fact be right. When you're dealing with a noteable or famous person, often your experiences with them are limited..... short glimpses on one given day....... or, in the case of students, they are going to tend to remember and relate the most noteable experience they had, whether bad or good.
The idea that Tolkien did by far his most memorable work in his spare time, and how he had to set aside, take up again, was stuck and resumed the Lord of the Rings repeatedly is rather unexpectedly inspiring to many imo.
One can look at him and say, like Tolkien, I have to make a living here and break rocks at my job. But you can still do what you love, even achieve great things, and be remembered by millions. In your free time. Its possible, if you stick with it.
Make a vídeo about what did toliken think of Kipling
I can definitely understand the criticism of his mumbling speech when I watch the few interviews of him - I can barely understand him either. Often the best researchers are the worst lecturers and teachers, which continues to be a problem in higher academia today. Researchers hate teaching as it pulls them away from what they love, and they tend to be extreme introverts. So even if they have a wealth of knowledge and regularly publish papers bringing prestige to the school, their classes can be quite miserable for both those professors and their students, which kind of defeats the purpose of higher learning. I wish universities would specialize professors into either researcher/publisher or teacher roles, according to their gifting and interests, and not try to force them to be something they are not.
Original title: "Why did Tolkien hate his students?"
I didn't know that he let his son read his writing for Lord of the Rings out to the Inklings at their meetings
High peaks low valleys
Tolkien's style depended on how far into writing the LOTR books he was.
PS. "eminence grise" is a French phrase used in English to describe someone important, and it's pronounced as in French.
I enjoyed his works very much as I read them many decades ago, when I was in my early 20's. Still, even then, I could see that The Lord of the Rings was an allegory for the First and Second World War.
Thanks
Interesting and very well done video
Cheers from south of Middle Earth Chile 😁
🇨🇱🇬🇧