The monsters and the lecturers

[supergee]

Diana Wynne Jones on being taught by J.R.R. Tolkien. The way I heard it, he never was a good lecturer. He appears as a minor comic figure in the lives of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, the inept professor in a required course, talking inaudibly and writing illegibly.

Thanx to andrewducker

ETA: kalimac (go-to authority in these matters) says that Tolkien had already finished The Lord of the Rings before Diana Wynne Jones got to Oxford.

Comments

[supergee]

I didn't know that. thank you.

[oursin]

I wrote up the sequence during a recent re-read here.