Tolkien's Lost Chaucer by John M. Bowers

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tolkien's Lost Chaucer by John M. Bowers Tim William Machan John M. Bowers. Tolkien's Lost Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii, 310. $32.95. Along with Walter Scott and William Morris, J. R. R. Tolkien has been one of the most influential inspirations for medievalism in the past two centuries. Unlike his predecessors, however, Tolkien was also a professional medievalist, and his personal and professional interests frequently intermingled with one another. The influence of the Poetic Edda on Middle-earth has produced a small cottage industry of source study, even as Tolkien's fascination with fantasy and fairy stories appears throughout his famous paper on Beowulf, the monsters, and the critics. In fantasy as well as philology, further, Tolkien had the habit of starting projects that [End Page 386] he never finished, many of which, thanks to the efforts of his son Christopher and others, have been printed since his death in 1973. Tolkien's Lost Chaucer brings all these threads together. In the 1920s, while still at the University of Leeds, Tolkien joined George Gordon (not the Gordon with whom he edited Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) as a co-editor of the Clarendon Chaucer, meant to replace Skeat's 1895 Student's Chaucer. It would have a selection of texts (weighted to early works rather than the Canterbury Tales), notes, and a glossary. Tolkien's primary responsibilities were the notes and glossary, the sorts of localized tasks that seemed to appeal to him and that he performed so successfully with Gawain that that edition remains widely used today. One thing led to another: Tolkien moved to Oxford, his teaching interests concentrated on Old English, his drafts significantly overran the space allowed by the press, and he found himself increasingly involved with his own fiction and what would become The Hobbit. All of these seemed to work against the Clarendon project. By 1930, despite the encouragement of his old tutor and current press editor Kenneth Sisam, Tolkien had largely dropped the Chaucer edition, although he seems to have tinkered with it on and off during the 1930s and 1940s, the period of his greatest creativity for The Lord of the Rings. Finally, in 1951, he sent most of the materials he had compiled to the press and relinquished responsibility for them. And there they sat for sixty years, if not exactly in plain view, not exactly hiding, either: Tolkien and others had referred in print to the canceled edition. It took John Bowers, however, to sleuth out the drafts, in an unmarked grey box in the basement of Oxford University Press, and the present volume contains the results of his sleuthing. Beginning with an account of how he turned a hunch about the papers' existence into a certainty, Bowers goes on to discuss the edition's history and desultory progress before offering extended quotations and summaries of the notes. While the edition was not meant to contain The Reeve's Tale, Bowers presents Tolkien's editorial work as a springboard to his 1934 "Chaucer as a Philologist," which he discusses at length. Tolkien's Lost Chaucer concludes with an extended consideration of passages in Tolkien's legendarium, particularly The Lord of the Rings, that might be read as echoes of passages from Chaucer. Like Christopher Tolkien, Bowers also suggests, Thomas Chaucer may have been his father's literary executor, each of them making possible the comparative explosion of works after their fathers' deaths. [End Page 387] As Chaucer criticism, Tolkien's comments contain few if any novel insights. And this is not a disparagement, not only since he wrote notes and not a critical argument but because he wrote them for a student edition. Copyright issues, further, perhaps prevented the quotation of long passages, though Tolkien's frequently execrable penmanship equally could limit what might be gleaned from his work on Chaucer. What does emerge is a critic very like the one present in Tolkien's (small) published corpus: one interested in language details and given to sometimes very broad generalizations and flights of fancy of the kind found in his extraordinary sigelwara papers. The Beowulf essay did, arguably, reorient...