John M. Bowers

I should probably start with a warning: Odds are that I bought this book for a different reason than you would consider buying this book.

Oh, I like The Lord of the Rings. But I also like Chaucer, and am interested in new perspectives on Chaucer. And J. R. R. Tolkien was one of the greatest philologists of all time, and I wanted to know what he had to say about Chaucer. So I bought this for the Chaucer commentary, not the links to Tolkien's fiction.

And was badly disappointed. The book includes only a few fragments and excerpts of Tolkien's work. It is not "Tolkien and Bowers," or even "Bowers and Tolkien"; it is emphatically "Bowers on Tolkien."

The background: In the 1920s, Tolkien was supposed to write a limited commentary for an Oxford book Selections from Chaucer's Poetry and Prose, which was also supposed to include material by E. V. Gordon (with a big, unacknowledged, contribution by Kenneth Sisam to the plan of the volume). Tolkien and Gordon both worked on the project, but neither finished their parts; eventually the Clarendon Press gave up on it and asked them for what materials they had. These were thrown into a file which was eventually rediscovered; that was what inspired this book.

In one sense, it may have been just as well that the book was never published. One reason we remember Chaucer today is for all the innovations he brought to English literature, but the main reason we remember him was because he was a great writer. You'd never know it from the material included in the Selections. Except for the Nun's Priest's Tale (even that slightly bowdlerized), you might just as well have been reading Lydgate for all the interest the collection had. (Sorry, Tolkien fans: Middle English Poetry joke.) It certainly wouldn't encourage anyone to go out and read more Chaucer. So... good riddance to the book.

Still, the commentary would be one of our few chances to see how Tolkien viewed Chaucer. (Bowers thinks no one realized Tolkien's liking for Chaucer. But it's well known from his biography. Tolkien even adopted a Chaucerian tag, "Trouthe is the hyeste thyng that man may kepe," as a motto during the time he and his future wife Edith were forcibly separated.) So what was Bowers doing if he wasn't printing Tolkien's commentary?

Much of the book is devoted to the sad history of Tolkien (and Gordon) not getting anything done. This will be all too familiar to those who know about Tolkien; he just couldn't keep his mind on one thing for very long! There is also a singularly bad section on the process of editing a work for which we do not have the author's original manuscript. There are a number of ways of doing this, with the method that is preferable depending on, among other things, how many later copies we have, how they are related, and how well they preserve the original text. Bowers, who should know better, makes a hash of the distinction between "genealogical" and "best-text" editing. (The former is almost always the right way, where possible, but there are people who don't want to do the work.) And he doesn't really point out Tolkien's editorial strengths and weaknesses -- Tolkien was a great editor of, for instance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, because there is only one copy, with copying errors, and Tolkien had a linguistic sense that gave him much ability to spot possible errors and propose solutions. He was much less equipped to deal with the Canterbury Tales, where there are more than fifty copies of most parts of the work and the task is to determine which manuscript is right when they disagree. Tolkien had quite a quarrel with Sisam and Gordon about this, with some fault on both sides. (E.g. I would argue that Tolkien was right to want to use þ for th and ȝ for ȝ rather than writing it as gh or y or g or something; Chaucer almost certainly wrote þ and ȝ, and how we modernize those letters affects how we interpret the text! But Tolkien also wanted to put in a whole bunch of accent markings and the like, and that was his interpretation, not the original.)

Most of the rest of the book is devoted to places where Bowers thinks Chaucer inspired Tolkien. This isn't really relevant to the Selections from Chaucer commentary, but most of the conclusions just weren't believable. It looks like someone gave Bowers a list of folklore motifs in Chaucer, and another in Tolkien, and he just lined them up and equated them whether it makes sense or not. Tolkien, when told that his One Ring was like Wagner's Ring, sarcastically dismissed the idea by saying that the only thing they had in common was that they were round. I felt the same way when Bowers compares Criseyde with Éowyn: the only thing they have in common was that they were both women whose parents were dead. And Bowers compares Aragorn's succession to the English succession after Richard II was overthrown. Even if you ignore the fact that Chaucer had little time to write about that (he died the year after Richard's overthrow), the situations are completely non-parallel. Richard II turned despot and was overthrown by Henry IV; Denethor -- who was not a king -- committed suicide, and Faramir became Steward and voluntarily relinquished power to Aragorn with the consent of the people. The only thing in common was that power changed hands. That chapter irritated me enough that I first stopped taking notes on it, then just gave up reading it. (Happily for you, or I might inflict more examples on you!)

There are also some non-Tolkien related errors. For instance, Bowers refers more than once to the first and second editions of F. N. Robinson's The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer as The Riverside Chaucer. It is true that the Riverside Chaucer regards itself as a sort of new edition of Robinson. But I have Robinson, and it is not called the Riverside Chaucer! And the Scipio of the Somnium Scipionis was Scipio Æmelianus, not Scipio Africanus. These are, in a sense, minor, but they're irritating, and they make me wonder what else Bowers missed that I cannot check.

Or take p. 165, which says the Canterbury Tales is not a novel. Of course it's not a novel; novels (as a genre, as opposed to a book length) hadn't been invented yet. The Lord of the Rings isn't a novel either; it was, deliberately, a medieval romance -- a genre represented in Chaucer by the "Knight's Tale," the "Wife of Bath's Tale," and the "Franklin's Tale" among others. The fact that Tolkien managed to sell a medieval romance... just shows one reason why Chaucer is still worth reading today: because Chaucer wrote them too.

Bowers claims (p. 141) that Chaucer toward the end of his life was "Not financially distressed." Now it's true that we don't have a record of his accounts, but he had no inherited land and little if any purchased land; his annuities were relatively small and one had ended when his wife died; and he spent much of his middle age living in a London gatehouse. Most biographers think that Chaucer eventually had significant financial problems.

Then, too, Bowers, p. 234, claims that Chaucer was once held "hostage" by the French. No, he wasn't; he was captured in war and held prisoner, which is an entirely different thing, and always was. Hostages were given to assure that someone fulfilled a promise; prisoners were simply people who were held for ransom.

Furthermore, "Chaucer and Tolkien were both extremely lucky in the sons who served as literary executors." Certainly Christopher Tolkien published vast amounts of his father's unfinished works. But there is not one speck of evidence that Thomas Chaucer had anything to do with his father's writings. He was a busy man -- he was Speaker of the House of Commons after his father died -- but we have no mentions of him in a literary context whatsoever.

I bought this book because I wanted to see Tolkien's commentary on Chaucer. The result has convinced me that there wasn't much point in publishing that lost work. But I'm not sure that publishing this was a much better idea.… (altro)

I saw a review of this book in a newspaper, decided then and there I had to have it, and I was not disappointed. A completely fascinating book, if you happen to like learning about the process of how scholarly books are put together -- which I do. A reader gets not only insights into Chaucer (with which I wrestled at prep school), but the War of the Ring novels as well. In spite of a few apologies, the book is actually written in a very clear, entertaining fashion, which says much for Bowers' style.… (altro)

The TEAMS series of Middle English texts is a very useful, helpful collection of texts, and this volume is no exception. Because Chaucer never finished the Canterbury Tales, there were many attempts to complete, or at least pad out, the book. This TEAMS edition collects some of the results.

If it has any defects at all, it is that word "some." It would be nice to see Gamelyn here, for instance. Yes, it's available in another TEAMS volume, but this is the logical place for it. It would be much easier if all the early Chaucer additions were here, not just the ones "left over."

But that's a minor gripe. This is a well-written, well-edited book, including a very good romance (the Tale of Beryn) not available elsewhere. Students who want to look beyond the basics of Chaucer will be very happy to have this book.… (altro)