from Medieval Academy News

Wrong about almost everything: Editing J. R. R. Tolkien
by Michael Drout

Manuscripts in the Modern Papers Reading Room at the Bodleian Library are brought to readers in green cardboard boxes that look like something sent through the inter-office mail. The fluorescent lights and cinder block walls create an atmosphere quite unlike the grandeur of Duke Humphrey’s library on the other side of Broad Street. But in 1996, as I examined an unimpressive, twentieth-century manuscript written on cheap, yellowing paper, my hands were shaking much more than they had been just a few hours before when, after swearing the famous oath “not to bring into the library or kindle therein any fire or flame,” I had handled my first Anglo-Saxon manuscript.

I was leafing through a text handwritten by my intellectual hero with the slow realization that I had in my hands an entire unpublished book by J. R. R. Tolkien, a book he had only excerpted for his famous British Academy Lecture, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” By the end of my visit to the Bodleian I was certain the manuscript should be published: nearly all of the material was previously unknown, the book-length treatment cleared up opaque passages in the essay, and Tolkien was in this version—which began as a series of Oxford lectures—far less cagey about touchy subjects like the date of the poem. But when I asked the librarians how to go about making copies, I was told that the Tolkien Estate almost never allowed copies to be made, though I was given the address of an Oxford solicitor to whom I could write.

Thus began what I can only describe as a saga. As a medievalist (and callow graduate student), I was sure that editing a twentieth-century manuscript would be simple. The text was in my native tongue, the date of the manuscript was known, the script—while in places difficult—was familiar, and the author’s own son was available to answer questions. It would all be so much easier than working with, say, the Old English translation of the Rule of Chrodegang. The real hurdles would be convincing the Tolkien Estate that I was qualified to take on the project and convincing my dissertation director and my potential future employers that editing an unpublished manuscript by a twentieth-century author was a proper use of my time.

I was wrong about almost everything.

Five years later, with an end finally in sight (the copy-edited manuscript is at the printer), I now know more than I ever wanted to about the difficulties of editing a twentieth-century manuscript, about copyright regulations, about the strange personal and academic resentments that still lurk in various quarters nearly thirty years after Tolkien’s death, about some wonderful non-medievalists in the field of Tolkien studies—and, unfortunately, about some of the loonies whose attention one attracts by working on anything related to Tolkien. Taken all together, it has been the most joyful and fulfilling experience I’ve had in academia, but the learning curve was very, very steep.

The first step, getting permission from the Tolkien Estate, was much less difficult than I’d been led to expect. I took things incrementally and worked up from including some of the manuscript material in my dissertation, to presenting my conclusions at a conference, to requesting permission to do the entire edition. All of the letters back and forth were marked by extreme formality, and so, when I was back in Oxford to proof my edition against the manuscript, I was surprised that my meeting with Cathleen Blackburn, the solicitor, was not just cordial but very pleasant. And I learned why the Estate has a reputation for being prickly about copyright issues: that week alone, Ms. Blackburn told me, she had had to deal with one proposal for bringing out a line of Hobbit-foot slippers and another for naming a series of coffins (!) after characters in The Silmarillion. The sheer number of people who were trying to profit from Tolkien’s work was astonishing, and the problems with copyright violation and outright theft were like nothing I had ever encountered in medieval studies.

From Judith Priestman at the Bodleian I learned how obsessive people can be about Tolkien. She receives hundreds of e-mails and letters about the Tolkien materials (most of which she answers by pointing out that the manuscripts of The Lord of the Rings are at Marquette University, not Oxford), and she warned me that some fans were, well, aggressive. I learned for myself that mere mention of Tolkien’s name still triggers resentments. While I was in Oxford, someone whom I had never met before (I don’t know how he knew I was working on Tolkien material) took the time to inform me, with some heat, that Tolkien “misused” a research leave to write The Hobbit. That someone could still be incensed at the very idea (false) suggests how emotionally fraught everything to do with Tolkien seems to be.

Then word got out to a wider audience that I was editing the manuscript. A friend forwarded an e-mail from an electronic discussion list where someone wrote: “somebody named Mike Drout has gotten ahold of”a Tolkien manuscript (as if I had stolen it). Someone else put me on a list of the Estate’s “lackeys.” Soon thereafter I began to receive e-mails from people I’d never met requesting or demanding electronic copies of the manuscript. When I had to decline, I received vituperative e-mails questioning my “right” to “selfishly” keep material “bottled up.” I found this last comment ironic, since at the time I was desperately seeking a publisher (but that is another saga).

But it was fairly easy to ignore (mostly) this controversy, because I had the wonderful challenge of actually editing the manuscript and figuring out what to say about it. Having gone through college and graduate school in the late 80s and the 90s, at the height of the poststructuralist, political approach to criticism, I found myself in an awkward spot when dealing with Tolkien. The standard post-structuralist approach, as we all know, is to examine the text for putative political content and then criticize these politics. But I was dealing, not with an anonymous or long-dead author, but with someone whose living students, friends, and relatives would be reading my edition. It is one thing to score points off Chaucer for not living up to contemporary political pieties; it’s another to criticize J. R. R. Tolkien when I knew his son Christopher would read the book. This is not to say that Christopher Tolkien ever asked me to change a word, even when I pointed out mistakes his father had made in the first draft (these are admittedly minor: Ælfric for Alfred or a misattribution of an Old Norse passage presumably made because Tolkien was quoting from memory). But while (I hope) I maintained my scholarly integrity and was not unduly influenced by my reverence for the manuscript’s author, I was not willing to play “gotcha!” with errors or with politics. I think I am a better scholar for it, but it is difficult to move away from one’s training.

I also found that my knowledge of early twentieth-century British cultural references was sorely lacking. I did not know what a “Brock-effect” was, or who a “plough-candidate” might be, and the name J. J. Jusserand—whose criticism Tolkien truly despised—meant nothing to me. Eventually, by reading Tolkien’s sources and then following their sources, I was able to identify the literary and cultural references that Tolkien wove through the text (though I’d be grateful if anyone can identify an exact source for “So deadly and so ineluctable is the theme that those who play only in the little circle of light with the toys of wit and refinement, looking not to the battlements, either hear not the theme at all, or recoiling shut their ears to it. Death comes to the feast, and they say He gibbers”—I think the quotation is a pastiche of a number of sources, including Hamlet and a poem by Richard Barnfield).

It was a slow process. I spent much time with now-obscure books of semi-popular medievalism and second-rate histories of English literature written in the early twentieth century. There were also some hideous textual puzzles, but for these, at least, I was prepared by my medievalist training (though I must admit that at times I wished that Tolkien had been more thorough in his cross-outs, relieving me of the duty of figuring out what lay beneath them).

Now the project is done, and I can say in all honesty that I am perfectly trained to edit unpublished twentieth-century works of medieval scholarship: surely a skill-set that must be in demand somewhere—if only I knew where! It was a wonderful project. I miss my daily contact with Tolkien’s thought, and I’m grateful for the joy of understanding how his beautifully constructed argument changed and grew. In fact all my trial and error was not for naught: I am now working with the Estate, figuring out how best to edit Tolkien’s unpublished translation of Beowulf (which C. S. Lewis edited for him) and his various unpublished commentaries on the poem.

I think I’ve even convinced my department chair and my dissertation director that this Tolkien stuff is “real” medieval work and might even be as worthwhile as studying the Old English translation of the Rule of Chrodegang.