[Child of the 7th Age]

Esty, Davem, Lalwende,

I don't mind "off-topic". Some of my most enlightening conversations on the Downs have been entirely "off-topic"!

I agree with everyone completely on this. When I speak of the search for values, I am talking about identity and meaning. While that may not be religion in an institutional sense, it certainly involves the search for what is spiritual. There was an explicit repudiation of the emphasis on material values and a desire to go beyond that. Part of that could and did take the form of Tolkien whose writings carried a message of faith and hope without pinning the reader down to the specifics of belief.

Davem - I'm not sure if I see the sharp dichotomy between the "search for the personal" and the "search for the sources". I can only speak from anecdotal evidence: my own experience and that of friends. . My perception is that people don't go on to the latter unless they have first experienced the former. The Ph.D. route is such a terrible grind, and the economic benefits of following such a route are often negligible. It's not like going to med or law school. I don't know how it is in the UK, but in the US many doctorates in humanities fields fail to get "real" jobs, at least full-time academic teaching positions. That was certainly true when I came out in the seventies, but it is even the case today. Graduates often have to patch together a series of adjunct positions, work in museums or libraries, etc. Most humanities people know this when they sign on the dotted line to undertake a course of study. In order to embark on the quest for the sources, you have to have an underlying passion or love that fuels that desire and gets you over the hard places. I can't imagine going through a doctoral program without that underlying love in your gut.

Sometimes, you sense that love in the writing that scholars produce and sometimes you don't. When I read Verlyn Flieger, I have no doubt that she has a strong personal attraction to Lord of the Rings that is more than a simple fascination with sources. It is more than a text to dissect and analyze. With a scholar like Jane Chance, you don't see it that much in her writing. But if you speak to her in person, you get a totally different impression. (She lives here in Houston.) Whether you see it or not in the end product (and that may have to do with personality and how talented a given writer is), I believe it's there at the base of what they do.

As you've pointed out there are so many medievalists on my list of professors in the U.S. who do research on Tolkien. It's interesting to ask what came first....the chicken or the egg. Did Tolkien lead to medieval studies, or did medieval studies lead to Tolkien? My guess is that it is largely the former, although I have no means to prove that. If so, Tolkien may be responsible for a modest but real rise in the number of professors, classes and programs in the field of medieval studies. I think he would have liked that.

Lalwende - Thanks for reminding me about Brian Rosebury. He is certainly a professor who's done an interesting book on Tolkien. For some reason, I had him pegged in my mind as a "Yank." I didn't realize he taught at Lancashire. (That's where part of my dad's family was from. The rest hailed from Cornwall.)

Your comment on polytechnics is interesting. I think you are correct. We don't have such fine distinctions in categorizing colleges. There are certainly schools like Georgia Tech but they are still considered universities. It's also interesting to me that so many serious science people have an interest in Tolkien. At my son's school, two of his teachers were interested in Tolkien on much more than a casual basis. One was in physics and the other held a doctorate in chemistry.

I also like Davem's idea of the importance of community. I think that did play a role. To tell the truth, with the emergence of the internet, I think it reinforces that particular factor. The concept of community seen in Tolkien is reinforced by boards like this one. It's almost a case of life emulating art.