1936 by Simon J. Cook

The thing about History is that it looks different from the outside. Take the year 1936, which saw Nazi Germany remilitarize the Rhineland in March and Spain plunge into civil war in July. Today we look from afar and perceive a world on the road to World War II. But when J.R.R. Tolkien gave a lecture on Beowulf in London that November, neither he nor anyone in the audience knew that, three years hence, Great Britain would once again be at war with Germany. They saw the same ominous clouds on the horizon, but from inside their world they could not read these signs with the clear eye of today, as one who now looks upon a future that is already past.

In the 1930s, English academics were peculiarly preoccupied with the nature of our human condition in Time. As a preliminary to a discussion of "canon" in 1936, I wish in this post to contrast two very different perspectives on the temporal horizon as seen that year from England’s ancient ivory towers: John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge and J.R.R. Tolkien from Oxford.

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in February, was an attempt to revolutionize the science of economics before the real world revolutionized itself, in one catastrophic way or another. Keynes faced the problem that the future is uncertain, which may be a Hobbit truism to you and me but for a Cambridge economist associated with the Treasury and the India Office in London, was the heart of the matter. The country was stuck in a Great Depression because nobody had any confidence in the future, and so nobody was investing in any new projects, so there was no work. The problem was as simple as that—it was the solution that was subtle, calling upon the one faculty that the hard-headed science of economics appeared to deny. But the turn that any solution must take is at least obvious, at least once you begin to see things from the elevated perspective of the Liberal Interwar British establishment. From this Cambridge perspective the business of government became, in addition to paying for soldiers and street lighting and adjusting herring taxes and lending rates, also a securing of the realm of imagination.¹

The author of the tale of Bilbo Baggins, still ten months from publication in November 1936, was the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the older of the two ancient universities and on a completely different wavelength to the Cambridge economist by just about any measure imaginable. Only a few years down the line, we may even discern veiled criticism of the view from Cambridge in the stories of the Oxford author, of the scouring of the Shire or even the view from the Dark Tower.

Nevertheless, and the fact that he looks in different directions to draw distinctive conclusions notwithstanding, when Tolkien addressed the British Academy in November 1936 with his lecture on Beowulf, he too looked out on the horizon from a watchtower in Time. Keynes grappled with the present as a catastrophic future opened up, and saw that, with the past no sure guide to the future, imagination is the key to our expectations. By contrast, the Oxford Professor of Anglo-Saxon in London that November looked into the past, discovered no less need for imagination, yet began his account of the view with the one fact that we do know about the future: we will die.

Casting his gaze resolutely into the ruin of the ancient past, Tolkien drew out an ancient theory of courage embodied in an old story of a hero who dies fighting a dragon. Tolkien nods to the storm clouds on the horizon of the present, forebodings of the future in 1936, only twice in his lecture, and then only obliquely. The first is his allegory of Beowulf as a tower, which is destroyed by the old poet’s modern friends, caught by the spell of the old stones of Northern tradition. The second is a comparison of this ancient tradition with that of the Greeks:

It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it … put the monsters in the centre, gave them victory but no honour, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage … So potent is it, that while the older southern imagination has faded for ever into literary ornament, the northern has power, as it were, to revive its spirit, even in our own times.²

This is all that Tolkien says in this lecture as to his own times. Those who wish to know more about this Northern spirit are invited, in his lecture as also today with Tolkien’s (now better-known) stories, to look into an imagined past, to read of this spirit when it stalked the earth incarnate, apprehended in mythical legend. As with Beowulf, so with Tolkien’s own stories (and so today with Middle-earth fanfiction), this is an invitation to engage with the old stones of an ancient Northern tradition that is, for better or worse, but by necessity, largely imagined. It must be largely imagined because so little of it has come down to us. Even in the mind of the Anglo-Saxon poet who gave us Beowulf, Tolkien believed, “the idea” of “the Unknown beyond the Great Sea,” where dwell mysterious allies, was “probably not fully formed.”³ The old poet inspecting the old stones, our singular link with the ancient imagination, was, on this most vital of points, guessing in the dark. 

The dual sense of History—the view from inside as well as outside—is imperative to hold onto today when we open the pages of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture on Beowulf and confront his vision of the spirit of the ancient Northern imagination.

That each one of us will die is certain. That our age too will also pass seems too terrible to contemplate, and yet Tolkien declares in no uncertain terms that the dragon will come. At the heart of the lecture is actually a step: the truism that in the long run we are all dead is shown to be reflected on a grand historical stage in the stones that make the background of the tale of the hero, Beowulf. Inspecting the old stones, Tolkien says of the old poet that “he sees that all glory (or as we might say ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’) ends in night.”⁴ This monster may get you, that monster may be my doom; when the dragon comes our city is doomed.

And come the dragon did, with six years of war that wrecked the world that we inhabit today. So today one might fall into the error of reading the whole essay of 1936 only from the outside, perceiving a prophetic vision of doom and accompanying expression of resignation in the face of the inevitable—almost, that is to say, discovering a moment in which Tolkien embraces the nihilism that he holds up as one integral element of the spirit of the ancient Northern imagination. But the counsel of despair cannot be what Tolkien was offering back on that Wednesday in November 1936—I will not argue this point, but simply posit that its denial is incredible. In the face of the once-again-reviving spirit of necromancy, Tolkien held up the other side of the ancient imagination: a "theory" of courage. One who holds to this theory knows that the dragon will come, but not when, counsels that we be ready when it does, and then reminds us rather pointedly that, in the meanwhile, it is our duty to fight all lesser monsters spawned of the ancient tradition, whenever they appear and whatever the cost.

Works Cited

1. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan & Co., 1936).
2. The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," 25-6.
3. Beowulf: Translation and Commentary, "Commentary."
4. The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,"23.