silwritersguild | A Sense of History: First Brick in the Wall

"We don't need no education!" In this month's A Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook uses this line from Pink Floyd's classic song to interrogate the perspective of foundational Tolkien scholar Jane Chance concerning Tolkien's analogy of the tower in "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics."

Tolkien was himself part of academia and valued highly both historical and philological inquiry. Yet, Simon argues, the critics who followed him and tried to make sense of his work, often for non-academic audiences and publication sometimes miss the point of his work in an effort to shape their interpretations to the academic trends of their days. In unwinding the complexities of Tolkien's tower analogy, Chance somehow ends up with the critics as the monsters.

As in past columns in this series, Simon takes the title of the column, "A Sense of History," as a guide to consider not just the historical context in which Tolkien wrote but the historical context in which the first Tolkien scholars did their work. You can read Simon's analysis of Chance's ideas in here, in "First Brick in the Wall."