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EXAMS ARE DAUNTING enough at the best of times, so imagine if on top of having to do all that studying, you then had to face J.R.R. Tolkien as your English examiner.
Archivists at NUI Galway have uncovered summer exams from 1949 which list the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit author as an external examiner.
According to the NUIG Archives blog Tokien was the Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton College in Oxford at the time of the Galway exams.
Topics featured on the 1949 papers included Shakespeare, the novels of Walter Scott, “poetic justice and the hard facts of life” and the preternatural in Literature.
We wonder if a bad mark led to Tolkien writing “you shall not pass”* on the exam papers?
*Sorry. We had to.
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What do you do in your spare time professor? “well i’m writing a little book…but it’ll probably never take off..”
Fecker only gave me a C in my Elvish
I wonder how tough a marker he was?
Precious!
Tolkien also did a sabbatical stint in what was then UCG, where he was lucky to have met an authority in Old Icelandic, the late Prof. Leo Henry who spoke eight languages fluently and could recite Runic verse by heart!
Aside from the logo, and the obvious UCG/NUIG change, the typeface and layout of the text of the exam papers is still the same. Also J.R.R. Tolkien, coooooooool.
When visiting Galway as an external
examiner he used to come down to the Burren, sometimes with his friend CS Lewis and visited Frank Martyn who lived at Gregans Castle in Ballyvaughan.
Will you give me a good price for my wedding?:)
Tolkien was external examiner to the NUI in the days when that meant doing UCD, UCC, and UCG but only to confirm firsts and fails and throw an eye over the rest. It’s a nice image, the great Tolkien poring over the work of some budding Anglo-Saxon scholar from Oughterard but more probably it was a hurried or harried glance before he got out of dodge. And, if his collected letters are to be believed, he hated it! But then no-one really enjoys examining.
Also when working for the Oxford English Dictionary he wrote the entry for ‘walrus’ which remains unchanged to this day.
Also in 1948 he attempted to teach a parrot every word in the english language, but gave up when he got to the letter M.
*not true
Did he have a hobbit of failing students? Sorry I will get my cloak
…. Also used to go fishing with Andy Serkis …. Until
Ouch. Tough exam questions. So much more was expected from students back then, especially in relation to literature studies.
Oh JRR Tolkien is correcting your paper? Thou shall not pass!
That’s great.
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