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I have made only sporadic attempts to 'identify' the list of Notion Club Paper members (listed on pages 159-160) with real life Inklings, and others have already done so.
Indeed the striking thing about the Notion Club is how un-like the Inklings they are: no central Lewis character (no central character at all), lacking a Warnie character, and nobody with the peculiar impact of Charles Williams.
Nonetheless, sometimes I have tried to follow the associations in Tolkien's mind which may have led to the names and brief descriptions on the members page.
That is the fun of it: to 'get' an in-joke, and by such means to understand the workings of Tolkien's mind.
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Thus, in the bath this evening, I recognized Notion Club member Abel Pitt as a play on real life Adam Fox: and (from Google) I discover that Jason Fisher has already made this connection.
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The fictional biography of Pitt runs:
Dr Abel Pitt. Trinity. Born 1928. Formerly Chaplain of Trinity College; now Bishop of Buckingham. Scholar, occasional poet.
The obvious clue is that Pitt, like Fox, is an Anglican clergyman, both were scholars and occasional poets - but the real Fox was Dean of Divinity (at Lewis's college of Magdalen), a much more elevated position than Chaplain.
Abel is Adam's son in the Old Testament; but what link is there between Fox and Pitt?
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My guess is that coal/ col links Pitt and Fox - a coal-pit is where coal is extracted while a colfox (a fox whose ears and tail are tipped with coal-black) appears in Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale).
The joke would presumably be that Adam Fox was best known for publishing a book length poem called Old King Coel.
If so, this is an interesting example of Tolkien's philological high spirits that he embedded such fancies in his story, and illustrative of the characteristic scholarly foolery of the real life Inklings that he would expect them to get the joke.
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3 comments:
From David Bratman:
Tolkien was a philologist, and I would like to think better of him that he would make such a crude, strained, and convoluted joke in his own specialty.
King Coel, a Celtic name, is etymologically unrelated to "coal" and (outside of the famous rhyme) isn't even pronounced the same. I think we have adequate evidence that Tolkien's imagination wasn't fired by vague sound-alikes, but by deep philological relationships....
William Pitt and Charles Fox were the long-term antagonists and party leaders for 20 years during the later part of the reign of George III, and "Pitt v. Fox" is the summation of that era in British political history. Every schoolboy in Tolkien's day would have known this.
I'm not entirely sure that Tolkien would have made that joke either, but if he did it's a piece of straightforward donnish humor.
Anonymous Lurker (on the Miscellany blog) agrees with the Fox-Pitt political pun - looks like I'm out-voted, but then I am not a democrat, and prefer the Coal/ Col/ Coel pun!
If Tolkien would name the Barfield-calque ‘Ranulf Stainer’ as a joking reference ‘to Barfield's devotion to the philosophies of Rudolf Steiner’ I don't think we should complain too much on the joke being too crude :-) I think it is a better argument against to merely say that it is a rather convoluted joke.
Based on my own googling, I suspect that the reference to Jason Fisher is to the appearance in the recent book that he has edited, Tolkien and the Study of His Sources, the identification appears in the contribution by Diana Pavlac Glyer and Josh B. Long, ‘Biography as Source: Niggles and Notions’ in a section titled ‘The Notion Club Papers’ on p. 201 they note simply:
‘Abel Pitt, the former chaplain of Trinity and occasional poet, is Adam Fox;’ but they don't offer any justification of this identification. My quotation above regarding Barfield is also from that essay.
Incidentally this blog is also referenced in that paper:
‘John Havard comments, “I did not find much of father’s character that I recognised in Dolbear when I was reading the [Notion Club] Papers. I had the impression that Tolkien was more interested in providing light relief while he followed up the topics discussed than in any serious exploration of character.”[12]’
where note 12 is a simple reference to http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-similar-are-dolbear-humphrey-havard.html
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