On Tolkien Besides His Books

What Was Tolkien Like As A Professor?
Ink and Fantasy | 8 Febr. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIjSKX5Hx2M

8:03 It may be noted that Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin* were in the same set, comparable to, but not necessarily friendly to, the Inklings, also all of them jazz musicians, as far as I can tell.

It may also be noted Kingsley Amis was a Communist up to 1956. He had quit the university of Oxford in 1947. So, he was a Communist while studying for Tolkien.

In other words, Kingsley Amis may have found the man unintelligible because he wanted other people to find him unintelligible. From what I can hear on the interviews I can find on youtube, he was in fact (most words) intelligible. The faculty for hearing someone with an accent other than you are used to is uneven. Some people can't make out what I say in French, or so they say, and with some working class I can't make out all of what they say. It's not an objective measure of my capacity for French, it is an indication, I should prefer writing to podcasting, and I should note that a small shade in accent makes a big difference to some. But ... from my ear ... Kingsley Amis was overdoing it.

Thurso Berwick

@ThursoBerwick

Tolkien does mumble in some of the clips I've heard.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@hglundahl

@ThursoBerwick not many words at a time to the point of making a sentence incomprehensible. It can be a word of two I don't pick up.

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* It may be noted that Philip Larkin was either very allergic to Tolkien's prose or to Anglo-Saxon:

Oz and Ends: Tolkien the Teacher
https://ozandends.blogspot.com/2011/12/tolkien-teacher.html

“I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.”

Did Philip Larkin hate "the filthy lingo" of Tolkien or of the Beowulf poet? Did he feel annoyed about Tolkien expecting him to love the Beowulf poem or did he feel annoyed about others expecting him to love Tolkien's lectures? As far as I can make an educated guess, Sweden owes the Beowulf poet the missionary vocation of St. Sigfrid of Skenninge.