On Tue, 21 Oct 1997, Robin Reid wrote:
>
> A side note: one of my favorite British writers Barbara Pym has an entry in
> her journal about seeing Tolkien lecture when she was student at
> Oxford--this was before LOTR was published and he became famous. She didn't
> think too much of him as I recall!
>
> Robin
> Robin_Reid@tamu-commerce.edu
>
Thank you for your long interesting letter about Tolkien etc. I thought
people might be interested in an extract which the best known current
children's fantasy writer in Britain, Diana Wynne Jones, has just
published in my journal FOUNDATION, in an autobiographical piece for our
special issue on "Young SF" (which also has articles on Ursula Le Guin, on
women in sf for small children, on Lois Lowry, Gudrun Pausewang etc).
She wrote:
"When I was a student at Oxford, both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were
lecturing there, Lewis magnificently and Tolkien badly and inaudibly, and
the climate of opinion was such that people explained Lewis's children's
books by saying "It's his Christianity, you know", as if the books were a
symptom of some kind of disease, while of Tolkien they said that he was
wasting his time on hobbits when he should have been writing learned
articles. Neither of them ever lectured on their secret hobbies. and yet
somehow not only I butnumerous others, such as Penelope Lively, Jill Paton
Walsh and Penelope Farmer, to name just a few -- and we none of us knew
one another there -- all went away and produced books for children.
Strange of us really."
And I could add that Tolkien DID lecture on his passion wwhen I was a
student at Oxford, but I was too late to get in the room... I gather he
was inaudible then, too.
Edward James
.............................................................................
Professor Edward James, Dept of History, Faculty of Letters and Social
Sciences, University of Reading, Whiteknights, READING RG6 6AA, UK
http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~lhsjamse/home.htm
Editor: FOUNDATION: THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION
Joint Editor: EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE
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