Oronzo Cilli has found a description of a lecture JRR Tolkien gave at the Roman Catholic boarding school of Stonyhurst, in Lancashire (where his son John had been a member of staff); on the evening of 31st March 1946 - the day before leaving after a week's working holiday.
The description was made in a register by someone who attended the lecture; who reports that Tolkien said he had been working on The Notion Club Papers since 1945 (fitting with the chronology established by Christopher Tolkien).
The lecture was apparently on Part One of the NCPs as published in The History of Middle Earth, Volume 9; and included reading from the work-in-progress, since the report notes:
The book was a clear skit on, the well know publications of Mr. H. G. Wells. Mr. Wells in his books has often portrayed life in the planets and the means of getting there by specially constructed rockets etc. Professor Tolkien in his book has stressed more the mental side than the material and has marked his characters to reach the planets by means of the mind.
The use of "skit" demonstrates the humorous nature of this early part of the work, at this point - and how it was received by the audience.
The report also notes that Tolkien: "was scarcely audible to most of the people in the House" - an oft-complained-of deficiency!
As often happens, the Question and Answer session seems to have drifted off-topic!
In the questions that followed, it was plain to see that some members of the house had missed the whole point of the paper, because the majorities of questions put were irrelevant dealing with the psychological aspect of dreams rather than the actual book itself.
A separate notice in the Stonyhurst college magazine adds:
This meeting was chiefly remarkable for question time, where the discussion turned mainly upon dreams and was the occasion of interesting confessions by members of the audience, although we would have been spared these self-revelations had more of the listeners grasped the real point at issue.
While the reporter was apparently rather irritated by the nature of the Q&A, it is understandable that the strange accounts of dreams and "remote viewings" in this part of the NCP, might attract more interest than the, rather technical and professional, discussions of the nature of science fiction travel!
1 comment:
Thanks for drawing our attention to this! His Italian article which Oronzo Cilli summarizes had already drawn my attention to the reports in The Venerabile - which is happily scanned and available online at the website of the Venerable English College, and searchable, so one can find out more about John Tolkien's various activities (among other interesting matters) - but this rediscovery of the register entry is a fascinating addition - explicitly mentioning the Notion Club Papers, giving the date, and supplying details not reported in The Venerabile!
Something that remains tantalizing is, who John Tolkien's Hungarian Jesuit instructor was - about whom Warren Lewis writes so interestingly in his 18 November 1947 diary entry - and if Tolkien expected any members of the Venerable English College Literary Society to pick up on his Hungarian references - and wordplay - in the part of the Papers he read them.
The new edition of Tolkien's Letters has some interesting complementary information about both John as gaffer and, implicitly, his interest in acting, too, in Letter 94a (7 January 1945).
David Llewellyn Dodds
Post a Comment