When I went to university in Denmark, the institution was organised
in a way that it is my impression differs significantly from the
organisation of English Universities that Tolkien would have
experienced, both as a student and as a fellow. Therefore I am asking
to have my impression of how things are -- or were -- organised in
England either confirmed or corrected. I am, of course, particularly
interested in the organisation Tolkien would have experienced both at
Oxford (both as a student and as a fellow) and at Leeds.
My impression is that the English universities were (and perhaps
still are?) organised primarily around the 'colleges' -- institutions
to which students and fellows are associated, where they live (though
not necessarily) and eat. Such colleges, as I've understood it, are
not particular to one subject -- that all subjects would co-exist
under the same roof, so to speak (though I suppose that colleges
would also -- and perhaps often so -- have particular strengths).
This would, I suppose, mean that the people at the universities would
have specialist communities in addition to the college communities,
where physicists, philologists, theologists etc. from several
colleges would work together on their special topics.
If this impression is correct, then one must assume that the
communities of fellows have a strong cross-discipline scholarly
community, where every fellow, regardless of his or her particular
subject, has rich op****tunities to learn of the hot topics in other
subjects, and that Tolkien in particular almost certainly will have
had some idea of the new ground being broken by physics in the first
half of the twentieth century -- new ground covering both quantum
physics and relativity.
It is this latter issue that makes me ask this question. I am reading
Verlyn Flieger's /A Question of Time/, and though she has, in her
first chapters, an excellent overview of the growth of philosophical
and literary treatments of Time in the first half of the century, I
think she fails to recognize (at least in these chapters) the ways
this was tied to the development of the new physics; how ideas arose
in an interplay of physics, literature and philosophy to the
enrichment of all the subjects. In the first half of the twentieth
century -- and in the time between the two great wars, the senior
common room of any college (if my impression of how such are
organized is correct) will have been buzzing with the new things
happening in physics, and Tolkien can hardly have avoided taking in
some of this (in the context of Flieger's book it appears to me very
likely that Tolkien would have heard about the idea of space-time and
of some of its properties).
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
Smile
a while
ere day
is done
and all
your gall
will soon
be gone.
- Piet Hein, /Advice at Nightfall/
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