In an issue of "The New York Review of Books" (Number 9, May 29, 2008), Al
Alvarez writes about the poet Geoffrey Hill. Concerning his studies in
Oxford, he says: "Modernism, however, was not part of the curriculum when
Hill went there, in 1950, to read English. The English Department was the
fiefdom of J. R. R. Tolkien - at that time better known as a philologist
than as a fantasist - and he controlled it as cunningly as Eisenhower
thought the military-industrial complex controlled the United States: the
syllabus started at *Beowulf* and ended around 1834, with the death of
Coleridge; the study of Old English, Middle English, and modern philology
was compulsory; contem****ary writing was merely something you read, if at
all, in your spare time."
Tolkien's lack of interest in modern literature is well known, but was his
rule really that absolute and fanatical?
As a side thought: when Alvarez calls Tolkien a "fantasist", is that a
deliberate putdown of Tolkien, or is it just I who perceive the term as
dismissive?
Öjevind
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