Tolkien's Lost Chaucer by John M. Bowers

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tolkien's Lost Chaucer by John M. Bowers John D. Rateliff Tolkien's Lost Chaucer, by John M. Bowers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xv, 310 pp. £21.99/$32.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-19-884267-5. "It is easier to plan a big book than to write it." —J.R.R. Tolkien re. The Canterbury Tales (Tolkien's Lost Chaucer 163) In the spring of 1922, J.R.R. Tolkien undertook a major scholarly project, on par with his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E. V. Gordon, then still in progress (Oxford University Press, 1925): The Clarendon Chaucer—or, as it was more formally known, Selections from Chaucer's Poetry and Prose. For six years Tolkien and his collaborator, George Gordon, struggled over the project, increasingly at loggerheads with each other and with their editor, Oxford University Press stalwart Kenneth Sisam. Finally, the project imploded and was abandoned, [End Page 208] forgotten by medievalists and Tolkien scholars alike, until rediscovered by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull in their researches into Tolkien's publishers' archives. Now John M. Bowers, medievalist and Chaucer scholar, has delved into the surviving draft material that would have gone into this attempted edition and presented excerpts and summaries to give us an idea of what the finished work might have been like. There are two ways to proceed with a project such as this: as author or as editor. The first is to write a history of the project, from conception (1922) to partial realization (1924–26) to abandonment (1928), followed with fleeting futile attempts at later times (1951, 1956, 1960) to bring the project out of abeyance and to some kind of satisfactory conclusion. The result would essentially be a highly focused piece of biography about specific events in Tolkien's life and career. Or one can put personalities aside and present all that is legible and coherent of Tolkien's and Gordon's unfinished and previously unpublished material as clearly as possible. Bowers has opted to take the first route, devoting several chapters to a history of the project, then following this with an account of Tolkien's engagement with Chaucer, including description of and quotations from Tolkien's draft text. He concludes by discussing in detail Tolkien's later work on Chaucer that grew out of the abandoned project: his major essay "Chaucer as Philologist" (1934) and his engagement with The Reeve's Tale (1939).1 Throughout, Bowers points out in passing many passages where he feels a case can be made for Chaucer influencing Tolkien's fiction and poetry on numerous specific points.2 This book's two strongest points are its inclusion of previously unpublished Tolkien material and the reevaluation of Tolkien's scholarly career it forces upon us. We have long known of his engagement with the Gawain-poet; now we can add to this evidence that he was deeply engaged with the work of the Gawain-poet's great contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer,3 the man widely considered to be the greatest of all English medieval writers. Bowers' account is discursive, and initial descriptions of his book made it difficult for those who had not yet seen it to judge its proportion of quotation to critique. Even now, having read the whole, I have only a vague sense of what proportion of Tolkien's unpublished work on the project is included herein—twenty percent? a quarter?—and how much still remains unpublished. Hence in evaluating Bowers' presentation of this material, and to get a better idea of the material itself, it is helpful to reconstruct the lost book and the two collaborators' respective roles. The most important fact about The Clarendon Chaucer, and the hardest [End Page 209] for a contemporary reader to fully grasp, is that Tolkien was very much the junior partner in this project. George Gordon seems to have been the one who proposed the Chaucer anthology to the press (Bowers 20–21). It was he who selected which of Chaucer's works would be included, and in what order. Tolkien approved the selection, so far as we can tell, but seems to have had no voice in...