Tell me if this has happened to you before: you’re trying to concentrate at work, going over TPS reports or balancing budgets or whatever, and you get distracted and end up writing a beloved work of fiction that proves foundational to every fantasy story to come out for the next 70 years. If I had a nickel, right?
That’s not exactly what happened with J.R.R. Tolkien, beloved author of The Lord of the Rings, but it’s basically the thesis of this piece on LitHub, an excerpt from John Bowers’ book Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer, all about the influence that poet Geoffrey Chaucer exerted on Tolkien’s writing. Basically, Bowers takes a close look at Tolkien’s academic work as a professor at Oxford, pointing out that most of his major publications came out before World War II. Afterward…well, he may have busied himself creating a legendary fantasy epic.
"For so many years, in short, [Tolkien] had been loafing in his scholarly career as a losel (an idle wastrel) who squandered time on children’s stories when he should have been whipping his Beowulf book into shape. He confided to his publisher in 1937 that Oxford would merely add The Hobbit to his “long list of never-never procrastinations” (Letters, 18). Fiction-writing simply did not count in terms of academic production, especially after Tolkien had idled away his two-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship. “The authorities of the university,” he would lament when The Lord of the Rings was in press, “might well consider it an aberration of an elderly professor of philology to write and publish fairy stories and romances” (Letters, 219). He explained to his American publisher this widespread view of his failings: “Most of my philological colleagues are shocked (cert. behind my back, sometimes to my face) at the fall of a philological into ‘Trivial literature’; and anyway the cry is: ‘now we know how you have been wasting your time for 20 years’” (Letters, 238). His enormous effort during the late 1940s in the cramped row-house without even a desk—”I typed out The Hobbit—and the whole of The Lord of the Rings twice (and several sections many times) on my bed in an attic of Manor Road” (Letters, 344)—was little known because it simply did not count."
It’s weird to think of The Lord of the Rings as being a distraction from a day job, but it’s important to remember that Tolkien never thought he would find a large audience for his fiction; he wrote The Hobbit to amuse his children, and it was almost by happenstance that it wound up in the hands of a publisher. He was an academic first…but maybe one who was always a fiction writer at heart.
Still, his “distractions” did weigh on him. “ research student V.A. Kolve recalled him reflecting upon these shortcomings,” Bowers writes. “’He confessed to me once that some were disappointed by how little he had done in the academic way, but that he had chosen instead to explore his own vision of things.’…He would confess during a newspaper interview in 1968, ‘I have always been incapable of doing the job at hand.'”
I also like the idea of Tolkien’s academic qualifies sniggering about how he’s wasting time on kids stories while The Lord of the Rings becomes a monster hit. But then again, people have all sorts of different priorities.
Anyway, I think I speak for most people here when I say I’m glad Tolkien slacked off at work.
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h/t Vox