'What I Have Found Time to Do': Tolkein and the Academic Cover Letter

 

Introduction

My sister, knowing my love of letter writing, gave me a copy of the collected letters of the man who might be the world's most well-known early medievalist: J.R.R. Tolkein (1892-1973). Tolkein has a distinctive and delightful epistolary voice, and the collection is worth reading whether you are interested in him as the writer of high fantasy or as a scholar of Old English literature and language.

One of the few of Tolkein's letters to survive from the period between 1918 and 1937 was his letter of application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon. When I am working on an application for an academic position, I usually end up re-reading it at some point. Please find it below for your reading pleasure.

To the Electors of the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford

27 June 1925

Gentlemen,

 I desire to offer myself as a candidate for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon.

A Chair which affords such opportunity of expressing and communicating an instructed enthusiasm for Anglo-Saxon studies and for the study of the other Old Germanic languages is naturally attractive to me, nor could I desire anything better than to be reassociated in this way with the Oxford English School. I was a member of that School both as an undergraduate and a tutor, and during my five years' absence in Leeds am happy to have remained in touch with it, more especially, in the last two years, as an Examiner in the Final Schools.

I entered Exeter College as a Stapledon Exhibitioner in 1911. After taking Classical Moderations in 1913 (in which I specialized in Greek philology), I graduated with first class honours in English in 1915, my special subject being Old Icelandic. Until the end of 1918 I held a commission in the Lancashire Fusiliers, and at that date entered the service of the Old English Dictionary. I was one of Dr. Bradley's assistants until the spring of 1920, where my own work and the increasing labours of a tutor made it impossible to continue.

In October 1920 I went to Leeds as a Reader in English Language, with a free commission to develop the linguistic side of a large and growing School of English Studies, in which no regular provision had as yet been made for the linguistic specialist. I began with five hesitant pioneers out of a School (exclusive of the first year) of about sixty members. The proportion to-day is 43 literary to 20 linguistic students. The linguists are in no way isolated or cute off from the general life and work of the department, and share in many of the literary courses and activities of the School; but since 1922 their purely linguistic work has been conducted in special classes, and examined in distinct papers of special standard and attitude. The instruction offered has been gradually extended, and now covers a large part of the field of English and Germanic philology. Courses are given on Old English heroic verse, the history of English*, various Old and Middle English texts*, Old and Middle English philology*, introductory Germanic philology*, Gothic, Old Icelandic (a second-year* and third-year course), and Medieval Welsh*. All of these courses I have from time to time given myself; those that I have given personally in the past year and marked *. During this last session a course of voluntary reading of texts not specially considered in the current syllabus has attracted more than fifteen students, not all of them from the linguistic side of the department.

Philology, indeed, appears to have lost for these students its connotations of terror, if not of mystery. An active discussion-class has been conducted, on lines more familiar in schools of literature than of language, which has borne fruit in friendly rivalry and open debate with the corresponding literary assembly. A Viking Club has even been formed, by past and present students of Old Icelandic, which promises to carry on the same kind of activity independently of the staff. Old Icelandic has been a point of special development, and usually reaches a higher standard than the other special subjects, being studied for two years and in much the same detail as Anglo-Saxon....

The large amount of teaching and direction which my post has hitherto involved, supplement by a share in the general administration of a growing department, and latterly by the duties of a member of Senate at a time of special difficulty in University policy, has seriously interfered with my projects for publishable work; but I append a note of what I have found time to do. If elected to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair I should endeavour to make productive use of the opportunities which it offers for research; to advance, to the best of my ability, the growing neighbourliness of linguistic and literary studies, which can never be enemies except by misunderstanding or without loss to both; and to continue in a wider and more fertile field the encouragement of philological enthusiasm among the young.

I remain,

Gentlemen,

Your obedient servant,

J.R.R. Tolkein

From The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkein, ed Humphrey Carpenter (London, 1981), pp. 12-13.

Why I Love It So

Writing academic cover letters is an excruciating process: matching one's own research and teaching expertise to an often opaque description of the requirements of the post can be difficult enough, but moving productively through feelings of hope, fear, and inadequacy is even harder. Re-reading this letter reminds me that:

• A letter of application can be beautifully written: the repetition of the 'ex' sounds between the first and second paragraphs! The 'service of the Old English Dictionary'! The 'five hesitant pioneers'! (the limited use of adjectives and adverbs which thereby increase their effectiveness!) The structure of the final sentence!!
• It is possible to write clearly about one's achievements without boasting: the 'teaching paragraph' uses 'I' only four times, an astounding feat given that Tolkein was essentially describing the wholesale creation of a programme of linguistic study within the span of five years. By any standard, Tolkein's 1919-1920 teaching load was heavy: various Old and Middle English texts, the history of English, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, second-year Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. By implication, he also supervised a reading group for students across the department, volunteering his own time outside of his teaching load.
• A good teacher inspires enthusiasm in their students: The Viking Club. Case closed.
• Highlight the highlights: Rereading this letter, I am struck by how streamlined it is. Only the most important and relevant matters are included.
  
• What the applicant will get out of the post matters just as much as what the post will get out of the applicant: I adore the fact that Tolkein OPENS THE DAMN LETTER with why he wants the job: to express and communicate his enthusiasm for Old English and also to return to Oxford again. The transition into reminding the electors upfront that he is a native son of the place is so, so smooth. The final sentence, which sums up again why he wants the post and why he is a good fit for it, is both tailored to the specifics of the professorship and summarises what he has demonstrated in the previous paragraphs of the letter.

The four dots indicate where the editor abridged the letter, so I do not know whether Tolkein says anything about his own research (the curious reader might wish to see Thomas Honegger's article on Tolkein's academic writings, and the Tolkein Bibliography on Wikipedia), but for me the most striking difference between good practice in 1925 and 2020 is how little an applicant could get away with saying about their own work. Tolkein seems to have regarded his own desirability as a candidate as hinging on his proven ability to successfully expand the study and teaching of philology, as well as what we would now call his interdisciplinarity: his ability to bring together linguistic and literary studies. Research, in the age before REF, seems a distant third.

In Conclusion

The academic job market for medievalists is miserable and getting more so. We are very far from the days where the successful applicant for an Oxford professorship could 'append a note of what I have found time to do' as the sole mention a 'research programme'. Academia has changed so radically between Tolkein's day and our own that it may seem ridiculous to read a century-old cover letter when applying for a modern-day job. And yet, this letter gives me hope that now and in the future, we can all find time to do the work we want to do, whether or not an academic post comes of writing a cover letter about it.

 

 

                                                                                                 

New Recipes of Quarantine

I want to start writing about food and knitting again. A lot has changed over the six years since I started writing this blog--I moved to a new city in 2016, graduated with my PhD and got a permanent job in 2017, ran my first marathon in 2018, came to the end of a five-year relationship in 2019, and finished the first draft of the book that my thesis has become in 2020. I don't need to tell you what else happened in 2020, of much greater import than all of that: the coronavirus pandemic.

At the start of the national lockdown in the UK, I began writing down what I was eating every day. I don't even remember why I started to doing it--as someone who can get very anxious, I find activities like counting coins and organising books soothing, so its origins may lie in that impulse to impose order. In those first few weeks, my sister told me about the short story 'So Much Cooking' by Naomi Kritzer, which I read in delight, half-disbelieving that a story told in the form of a food blog could be published speculative fiction, and half-terrified how much it didn't feel like science fiction at all.

After fifteen weeks of recording what I ate for every meal, I stopped. It had started to feel like a chore rather than something that interested me, and chose to record only the new recipes I cooked. Here's the list!

Week 1 (23 March 2020)

1. chocolate granola from Bosh!
   
2. a red cabbage soup from Twelve Months of Monastery Soups
3. masala chai from Masala
   
4. sticky mushrooms from Bosh!
5. dry-tossed broccoli from Chicken and Rice
6. Brownies from Heartland
7. Rutabaga casserole, also from Heartland
8. Beet Hummus (I had made this the week before)

Week 2 (30 March 2020)

1. Spicy parsnip soup from Twelve Months of Monastery Soups
2. Homestyle-Tofu from Food of Sichuan
3. Bean salad with herbs from Mamushka

Week 3 (6 April 2020)

1. Buckwheat Mushroom Broth from Mamushka
2. Piyaz (Turkish Bean Salad) from Persiana
3. Korean Carrots from Mamushka
   
4. Spice-perfumed shoulder of lamb from Persiana
5. Gluten-free sponge cake from Food 52

Week 4 (13 April 2020)

1. Tahini Cookies from Jerusalem
   
2. Lamb and sour cherry meatballs from Persiana
   

Week 5 (20 April 2020)

1. Tadka Dal from Masala

Week 6 (27 April 2020)

1. Lentil-chickpea salad, from Smitten Kitchen
   
2. Chicken roasted over vegetables from Cooking in the Moment

Week 7 (4 May 2020)

1. Open Kibbeh from Jerusalem
2. Vegetable Kurma from Masala

Week 8 (11 May 2020)

1. Custard-filled cornbread from Orangette
   
2. Mapo Tofu from Food of Sichuan
3. Tadka Dal or Vegetable Kurma (my notes are a bit confused)

Week 9 (18 May 2020)

1. Homemade wheat thins from Smitten Kitchen
2. Zucchini tofu koftas from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant
   
3. Cuban Black Bean Soup from Twelve Months of Monastery Soups
4. Spiced Root Vegetable Cakes with Date and Tamarind Sauce from Persiana

Week 10 (25 May 2020)

1. Beet and Chickpea Salad from Good and Cheap
2. Crumiri Cookies from Classic Home Deserts

Week 11 (1 June 2020)

1. Chickpea and carrot burgers, adapted from Smitten Kitchen
   
2. Stir-fried celery with minced pork from Food of Sichuan

Week 12 (8 June 2020)

1. Baked German Potato Salad from Cooking from Quilt Country
   
2. Oatmeal Cake from Cooking from Quilt Country

Week 13 (15 June 2020)

1. Rhubarb Cake from Chocolate With Grace
2. Red Bean and Rice Soup from Twelve Months of Monastery Soups

Week 14 (22 June 2020)

1. Rajma Galouti Kebab from Masala
   

Week 15 (29 June 2020)

1. Schwenkfelder Cake from Secrets of Saffron
2. Simplest Spaghetti al Limone from Smitten Kitchen
3. Yogurt Drop Scones (Oladky) from Mamushka

Week 16 (6 July 2020)

This was the week where UK lockdown restrictions eased significantly and I stopped recording what I ate every day. I continued to note down the new recipes I tried!

1. Greek Breads with Spring Onions from Mamushka
2. Fennel and Carrot Pot Pie from Food 52 Vegan

Week 17 (13 July 2020)

1. Lamb Sharma from Jerusalem 
2. Cabbage Apple Slaw with Sweet Tamarind Dressing from Chicken and Rice
   

Week 18 (20 July 2020)

1. Smoky Black Bean Chili, adapted to feature the vegetables I had on hand, from Food 52 Vegan

Week 19 (27 July 2020)

1. Mr Xie's Dandan Noodles from Food of Sichuan
   
2. Stir-Fried Pickled Mustard Greens with Tofu from Messy Vegan Cook

Why and How

Forty-eight recipies over nineteen weeks, an average of 2.47 new recipes a week, feels like a lot. Particularly during lockdown, when I was cooking just for myself. If I had to pin down the reasons I bothered, they would be:

• I like to eat.
  
• It was something to do.
• It was something nice to do in the middle of a global health crisis.
• In early March 2020, I purchased a meat share from the local university's farm, something my former partner and I had talked about doing but never actually did. I had a half a lamb in my freezer, and the dinner parties I'd hoped to have weren't going to happen. Might as well do something with all that food.
  

Lastly, and most importantly, prior to the start of the UK lockdown, when my workplace had switched to a schedule of alternating work from home with work in the office, I hit up my local library to stock up on reading material.

My local library has a good cookbook section and prior to the shift towards lockdown I had checked out the following food related books:

• Secrets of Saffron by Pat Willard
• Mamushka by Olia Hercules
• Food of Sichuan by Fuschia Dunlop 

And as you can see in the picture, I also picked up Chicken and Rice by Shu Han Lee and Bosh! by Henry Firth and Ian Theasby. Having new cookbooks around helped motivate me to try new things.

Secondly, about a year and a half ago I signed up for a fortnightly delivery of fruit and vegetables from Eden Farms, which has been an absolute godsend during the pandemic--it means that I am able to limit my grocery store trips to about one a month. The vegetable boxes in particular are seasonal and change weekly, so one of the reasons to try new recipes is to figure out how to use up what arrives on my doorstep.

So in sum, I had the privilege of the time, motivation, and opportunity to try new things, and the resources to make that happen. It has helped me cope with the current situation, and if you are in a position to cook new things, I hope it is helping you too.

Calm Before the Storm

Greetings earthlings.

Once again, it's Thanksgiving. Once again, it's time for friends and feasting.

This year's menu is:

spiced nuts

Turkey (dry-brined this year, so we'll see how that goes)
Roasted Vegetables (beets, Brussels sprouts*, carrots, onions, garlic)
Stuffing the way my family makes it, so I have Bell's Seasoning
Cranberry Sauce
Mashed Potatoes
Gravy
Cabbage with Lemon, Garlic, and Dried Cranberries

Dinner Rolls


Apple Pie
Chocolate-Pecan-Bourbon Pie (whipped cream will be on hand for these)

I'm writing this the night before, when the turkey sits in the fridge, the bread awaits baking, most of the vegetables are chopped, the nuts are roasted, the pie crusts prepared. I am still convincing myself that I will have time to mark a few essays while things cook, and knowing full well I will find reasons to avoid it. (Reasons means dishes.)

Thanksgiving is one of the things I miss most about New England. I enjoy sharing it here.


*roasting Brussels sprouts is the One True Way to eat them

The Busy Season

This week marks the first time I've slept in my own bed and spent most of my time in my own city since around the 18th of April. Which explains why things went radio silent 'round these parts. In that time I have:

• walked part of the Offa's Dyke Path (now redated earlier) and gotten a spectacular sunburn
• enjoyed the hospitality and interesting papers of Spoleto
• talked and listened in Kalamazoo
• learned about early medieval archaeology
• heard some wonderful things about the development of Caroline minuscule
• attended a symposium on an important 1914 production of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim's play Paphnutius (And heard the play acted, possibly for the first time since 1914)
• begun to assemble panels for Kalamazoo and Leeds 2015

It's been good stuff, all of it, and has made me think--which, after all, is one of the joys of this line of work. More later.

Sometimes You Just Gotta Hit the Road

So I've been teaching for the first time this semester...which explains why I posted once this semester and then never again.

I've learned a lot from the experience, including food-related things such as making most of my meals for the week over the weekend. Soup Forever!

But today, I plan to write about something else.

Something perfect for the stresses and frustrations of PhD life.

(my skill at photography is legendary)

I make a lot of my own bread, for the same reasons that other people play lots of video games, or go to the gym, or go stare at cat pictures for a very long time: it's fun. It helps. Breadmaking has the wonderful advantage that it allows you to punch something, and the more you punch, the tastier it gets.

It has the disadvantage that it takes a lot of time, and you need to be in a position to pay attention to how long things are taking. But other than that, it takes simple, cheap ingredients, and did I mention you get to punch things?

Oatmeal Bread

(adapted from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant)

1 c of water

1 c milk

2 c oatmeal

1 tbsp yeast

1/2 c lukewarm water

1/2 c brown sugar

1 c white flour

2 1/2 c wholemeal flour

1 1/2 tsp salt

Heat the milk and water in a saucepan on the stove until boiling. Before your stove is covered in a mess, take it off and add the oatmeal. Allow this to cool until the bottom of the bowl is warm to the touch but not hot and you can comfortably touch the oatmeal mixture.

While your oatmeal is cooling down, boil water in the kettle. Pour out half a cup into a shallow bowl and allow it to come to a temperature that's still warm but cool enough you can stick a finger in. Add and dissolve the yeast.

When the oatmeal is sufficiently cooled, add the yeast mixture and the brown sugar. Stir it all together, and add the cup of white flour. This is what the recipe calls a sponge. Cover it with a tea towel, put it in a warm place (the top of the refrigerator is where mine goes.) Go watch an episode of a TV show on Netflix do something else for 45 minutes.

Now comes the punching! Add the salt and add about 2 cups of wholemeal flour. You may need a little more--you want a stiff, dry dough, with almost all of the flour mixed in.

Dump your dough onto a floured surface (this is where that last 1/2 cup of flour comes in) and start kneading. The dough is pretty stick, so oil your hands first. Using the heels of your hands, stretch the dough away from you, then fold it, flip it, and repeat. You want to do this for at least 5-7 minutes, until the dough has a bit of give (what recipes call elastic). 

Wash your bowl or find a new one. Give it a light coating of oil and dump in the dough, turning to coat the top. Cover it with a tea towel again and go do something else for about an hour, until the dough has doubled in size. (It's almost impossible to tell when it's doubled, so I generally go for visibly bigger. This is the part where you can let it rise for the length of TV show episode, or forget a bit, and let it alone for two. Nothing terrible is going to happen.)

Punch the dough down and shape it into a loaf by folding the edges under until you have a tubular thing that will fit in an oiled loaf pan. Cover and let rise for about 45 minutes, pr until the loaf visibly gotten bigger.

Preheat the over to 180C/350F and bake for about forty minutes, until the loaf is browned and sounds hollow when you knock on it.

Turn it out on a wire rack and let it cool.

Makes five-six breakfasts (10-14 slices of bread, depending on how generously you cut). Oatmeal bread is incredible with peanut butter.

'

Healthy Cake

Yesterday I brought a cake to a friend's birthday party. It turned out pretty well so I thought I'd share.,

This is mostly based on the Red Wine Chocolate Cake found at Smitten Kitchen, with a few variations, because I am a graduate student, not a New York City-dwelling adult. I cannot always be trusted not to run out of butter and brown sugar. Not to mention that the waste of an egg white, no matter how much it will 'improve' the cake, still gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Here it is the rainy season better know elsewhere as winter. Because I forgot to take a picture of the cake, let's all look at these pretty flowers.

(Magdalen College Gardens, Oxford)

Sooner or later, it will be spring!

Healthy Cake (it's red wine and chocolate, so it's good for you)
adapted from Deb Perlman of Smitten Kitchen

Notes: Using all butter would be a good idea and I'm pretty sure using only light brown sugar would be just fine.

3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp vegetable oil
1/4c dark brown sugar
1/2c light brown sugar
1/4c white sugar
1 egg
3/4c red wine
1c flour
1/2 c cocoa powder
1/8tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/4tsp baking powder
1/4tsp salt
1/4tsp cinnamon

Preheat oven to 180C or 325F.

Using a spatula and a large bowl, mix the butter, oil, and sugars until smooth. Add in the egg and red wine. The batter will have little buttery flecks--don't worry about this. Mix in flour and cocoa still blithely ignoring any small lumps. If your soda and baking powder are a bit old and lumpy, use a tea strainer to sift them into the batter (this prevents those horrible chemical lumps). Then add the salt and cinnamon. Mix.

Grease a nine-inch cake tin and pour in your batter. Bake for 25 minutes and then check to see whether a toothpick comes out of the cake clean. If it doesn't continue to bake the cake for five minutes longer until your toothpick comes out clean.

Cool the cake in the pan for ten minutes, then place it on a rack to finish cooling.

Serves at least eight

Again, Some More

How many graduate students do you know who have gardens?

(beat)

Hi!

(photo taken 1 June 2013)

I am lucky, lucky in so many ways but one of the ways in which I am luckiest is that my five-person house has a great backyard, or as the British would say, a garden.

I can't remember when I came up with the idea that I was going to grow things in my garden but I explained it through feeling a bit lost and uncomfortable in my new city of Leeds. Putting down roots, I thought would help.

About a mile from my house is a shopping centre, which has a Poundland. If you're ever in the UK and tempted by a green thumb go to Poundland. Seriously. All of the plants and seeds and soil in that photograph (with the exception of the really long pot on the left) were purchased there. I got my gardening tools and my seed trays there and started off.

My plants took up the entire windowsill but my housemates were very gracious about it. (Also I told them they could eat what I grew, which helped.) They even watered it all when I was away.

The plants grew bigger.

Eventually, by early summer, everything had been planted outside. We had two kinds of tomatoes, parsley, marjoram, thyme, pansies, basil, and morning glories. I bought two rose bushes for a pound but they didn't make it. Here is one side of the garden:

And here is the other:

In my childhood home, we have a little herb garden by the back door. There's something wonderful about being able to walk a few steps and pick something for dinner.

By late November the tomatoes looked even scragglier than the September photograph above. Into the compost they went. I rescued the green tomatoes and put them a brown paper bag to ripen and we used them up until...

TODAY!

Yep, I went home for Christmas and forgot about the brown paper envelope of tomatoes on top of the refrigerator. When I came back, I discovered to my delight that they were still good.

New Year's Resolution: Tomatoes for 2014! And living rosebushes.