Back to school!

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

This is intended as a companion to the "Gems from the Letters" and "Most 'powerful' lines of Ea...." threads, this time for your favourite bits from Tolkien's academic and factual writing. In my opinion such was his joy in exercising his gift with words that even his most academic essays can approach a sublime beauty of their own, and I thought it would be rather nice to have a thread full of Tolkien doing what got his bust into the English Faculty Library.

To start us off, here's a real corker from Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture to the British Academy, 1936). Not only does it contain a rare example of Tolkien employing allegory (you can't get me for bringing that into it: he says so himself ) but he uses it to perfection, with not a little humorous effect:

I would express the whole industry in yet another allegory. A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: 'This tower is most interesting.' But they also said (after pushing it over): 'What a muddle it is in!' And even the man's own descendents, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: 'He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.' But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.