For some Tolkien collectors, desiderata include anything
with Tolkien’s name on it or in it in any capacity whatsoever. For example, Tolkien
served as a general editor for the Oxford English Monographs series, and as
such, his name appears on a number of volumes (seven, if memory serves). Tolkien
was actively involved in some of these. For the Old English Appollonius of Tyre
(ed. Peter Goolden, 1958), for instance, Tolkien provided a one-paragraph prefatory
note, and revisions he that suggested personally were acknowledged by the
editor in his introduction. That’s something of note, certainly — I have a
scan. But for others of this series, Tolkien probably had much less direct involvement.
Even so, collectors grab them up and display them proudly!
I don’t tend to go so far in my own collecting (because
of the expense and minor relevance), but some acknowledgments and mentions of
Tolkien I do find worthwhile, particularly when the comments are being made by
someone who knew him well — even more so when made by an Inkling.
Jack Arthur Walter Bennett (1911–1981) was a younger and
lesser-known member of the Inklings. Born in New Zealand to English parents, he
grew up in poverty and, after earning his undergraduate degree in Auckland, came
to Merton College, Oxford, on a scholarship, where he was a student of Tolkien’s.
He was part of what has been called the “New Zealand Mafia”, New Zealanders who
came to Oxford, often as Rhodes Scholars, before World War II. Another of these,
and another of Tolkien’s students, was Norman Davis, who edited the revised
edition of Tolkien and Gordon’s Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight. Kenneth Sisam, who gave Tolkien one of his
first big academic jobs, was also from New Zealand, but about a generation
older than Bennett.
Bennett — called Jack or “Jaw” (as Warnie Lewis referred
to him) — first attended a Thursday night Inklings meeting on August 15, 1946. Warnie
was annoyed. Bennett came back a week later, and Warnie recorded in his diary: “J[ack;
i.e., C.S. Lewis] and I much concerned this evening by the gate crashing of
B[ennett]; Tollers, the ass, brought him here last Thursday, and he has
apparently now elected himself an Inkling. Not very clear what one can do about
it” [1].
Bennett was known primarily as a scholar of Middle English,
Chaucer especially. With G.V. Smithers, he edited Early Middle English Verse and Prose (to which Norman Davis
contributed the glossary). A friend of mine — Bruce Leonard, I believe — gave
me a nice copy he’d picked up from the Oxfam Bookshop in St. Giles, when so
many of us were in Oxford for the Maker
of Middle-earth exhibition back in 2018. Bennett also helmed the well-known
journal, Medium Ævum from 1957 until
his death in 1981. This is the journal in which Tolkien published his own work
on “Sigelwara Land”
(two decades before Bennett’s time as editor). After World War II, he was
elected a Fellow and Tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, and worked directly with
C.S. Lewis, taking the language side of his curriculum. Warnie called him Lewis’s
“new lieutenant” [2]. Bennett later followed Lewis (after Lewis’s death) as Professor
of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, where he remained
until shortly before his own death. [3]
With some background out of the way — maybe more than
necessary, but probably helpful for some, since Bennett is not very well known even
to many Tolkien fans — let me turn to the book I have in front of me.
In 1970, Bennett traveled to Canada to deliver a series
of lectures at the University of Toronto. These he then collected and published
as Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge
in 1974, just a year after the death of Tolkien. In the fourth lecture of the
book, “The Jolly Miller”, Bennett praises some of the work Tolkien had done on
Chaucer forty years before:
But what did Chaucer mean by ‘fer in the north’ (4015)? [cf., Chaucer, The Reeve’s Tale, l. 4015: “Fer in the north; I kan nat telle where”]
This is a question that only a philologist can answer. And a brilliant
philologist and story-teller has answered it. Buried deep in The Transactions of The Philological Society
for 1934 lies one of the first papers that the author of The Lord of the Rings ever published. If admirers of that work, or
admirers of Chaucer, would study this paper they would learn something that no
critics of either can teach. The pity is that since 1934 linguistics has
elbowed philology out of the way and no one has bothered to test or extend
Tolkien’s findings on ‘Chaucer as a philologist’ in the light of new collations
of the manuscripts or later place-name studies. [4]
Tolkien’s death goes unmentioned, which might simply have
been English (or New Zealand) decorum, or it may be that the book was already
in galleys by the time Tolkien died in September 1973. But in any case, Bennett’s compliments, mindful of Tolkien’s passing or not, are a worthy remembrance of an Inkling only recently gone.
[1] Lewis, Warren Hamilton. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis.
Ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead, Harper & Row, 1982, p. 194.
[2] Ibid., p. 193.
[3] For more about Bennett, see David Bratman’s “The
Inklings: Their Lives and Works” in Glyer, Diana Pavlac. The Company They Keep:
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, Kent State University
Press, 2007, p. 232; and Scull, Christina and Wayne G. Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide,
Readers’s Guide, Part I (2017), “Bennett, Jack Arthur Walter”, pp. 119–120.
And if you want to know even more, McNeish, James, Dance of the Peacocks: New Zealanders in Exile in the Time of Hitler
and Mao Tse-tung, Random House, 2003.
[4] Bennett, J.A.W., Chaucer
at Oxford and at Cambridge, Oxford University Press/Toronto University
Press, 1974, p. 100.
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