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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