But with so many other loose ends in this edition, there must have been something else weighing on his mind. He had provided no entry for the word in his Chaucer Notes and may have felt that the omission represented unfinished business. It is worth digressing to ponder why, from among all the words in Old and Middle English, Tolkien chose this word losenger as the subject for what would become one of the last scholarly studies published during his lifetime. d’Ardenne to deliver a paper at a conference in Liège, he decided to investigate the word losenger which had engaged his attention when glossing the Legend of Good Women almost three decades earlier for his Clarendon Chaucer. His 1947 purchase of the Ellesmere facsimile testified to his ongoing concern with Chaucer, and in 1951 when invited by his former student R.T.O. With the 14th-century poet seldom far from his thoughts as the culmination of all that came before, even his famous Beowulf lecture opened with a witty allusion to the General Prologue (574–5): “it may seem presumption that I should try with swich a lewed mannes wit to pace the wisdom of an heep of lerned men” ( Essays, 5–6). Lewis, however, Tolkien insisted that English literature ended rather than began with Chaucer ( Biography, 77). His teacher George Brewerton, himself a medievalist, sparked Tolkien’s earliest interest by reciting the Canterbury Tales to their class at King Edward’s School. Like almost all medievalists in the 20th century, Tolkien as a youngster had come to the field by way of Chaucer and took some delight in noting that his son John, at the age of 2, had already added “Chaucer” to his vocabulary. Not to mention the labours of Language in rescuing much of his vocabulary and idiom from ignorance or misunderstanding. His merits as a major poet are too obvious to be obscured though it was in fact Language, or Philology, that demonstrated, as only Language could, two things of first-rate literary importance: that he was not a fumbling beginner, but a master of metrical technique and that he was an inheritor, a middle point, and not a ‘father’.
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Some listeners inside Merton Hall in 1959 might nonetheless have been surprised that Tolkien, best known for his work on Old English poetry, devoted a section of his “Valedictory Address” to recruiting Chaucer to the cause of Language against Literature in a debate still very much alive in the retiring professor’s mind: This Chaucerian legacy, so clearly embodied in Tolkien’s hobbits, is easy enough to miss because it has been so thoroughly normalized in English literature that it no longer seems “medieval” at all, especially in Oxford where Chaucer had been a steady literary presence for more than five centuries. Strangely missing from Eco’s literary types was the jolly, earthy, boisterous Middle Ages of the Decameron in his Italian tradition and the Canterbury Tales in ours. Tolkien’s success as a fiction writer derives from assimilating several of these fantasies of the past including the decadent Middle Ages described by Faramir at Minas Tirith. Umberto Eco has examined our ongoing fascination with the Middle Ages and listed ten different versions including the “shaggy medievalism” of works like Beowulf.