Someone on the internet attacked Luke Baugher, a friend of mine, the other day because he disputed a claim about Tolkien made in connection with the upcoming series on Amazon. Actually I should say someone attacked my friend's credentials; the threat of personal physical violence came later, perhaps from another troll, but that's for the police to decide. I want to talk about the first attack, in which the attacker denounced 'self-proclaimed scholars', in this case of Tolkien. What is a scholar and when does a person get to call themselves one?
So what does the OED have to say about this word? The word first appears in Old English about a thousand years ago, meaning from early on both someone in school to receive an education and someone who has studied a subject at an advanced level at a university. Starting out as a reference to someone schooled in Latin and Greek, 'scholar' expanded to include Scripture and other disciplines within the Humanities as they appeared.
Here's the definition most relevant to this discussion:
2a. A person who is highly educated and knowledgeable, usually as a result of studying at a university; (in early use) a person who has knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages and their literature. In later use chiefly: a person who pursues or is expert in a particular field of study, esp. in the humanities.
I will use myself as an example here to start with. I have a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Classics. I spent twelve years as a full time student, taking classes, passing exams, writing papers and dissertations, sitting up all night reading many nights and spending school holidays in the cool quiet of the farthest reaches of the basement of the library studying. (Being found in one of these odd corners during a holiday by one of my professors, a rather grumpy Jesuit who was himself a scholar of Aristotle, was how I earned his respect at last.). I later spent as many years teaching at the University level, presenting papers at conferences, and publishing an article or more a year in peer-reviewed scholarly journals in Classics. Though I left Academia long ago, I have never ceased reading the primary texts which brought me there in the first place, like the works of Homer and Sophocles and Plato and Aristotle. All along the line my work and my credentials were vetted and approved by others who had similar knowledge and experience. In recent years I have spent my time writing and reading about Tolkien and his works. I have presented papers at conferences and published articles in scholarly journals on the subject. I am currently finishing up a book on Pity in Tolkien, which a couple of University Presses have expressed interest in. This book is as much the product of fifty years of reading Tolkien and books about Tolkien as it is of my more recent close focus on his works in print and online.
I generally don't call myself a scholar any more than I insist that people address me as Doctor. That's my decision. I don't care about titles. I never have. Others do for various reasons. (The obnoxious habit some people have of omitting a title a woman has earned while including in the same breath a title a man has earned gives doctors who are women an excellent reason for insisting on the title.) Yet if I call myself a scholar, I am not proclaiming myself a scholar. The dictionary definition and the degrees I earned at the schools I attended proclaim me a scholar, as would the long years of diligent study if I lacked the degrees. The degrees themselves are not a prerequisite, but a formal recognition of achievement by one's peers. The study and the knowledge are a prerequisite.
So when I saw that my friend, Luke Baugher, who, aside from being the editor of Mallorn, The Tolkien Society's peer-reviewed journal, had earned a doctorate from the University of Glasgow and had written a dissertation on Tolkien -- a fine dissertation which I was privileged to read -- was derided as a 'self-proclaimed' Tolkien scholar, I had to laugh at the ignorance and foolishness of the accusation. My friend has the credentials, he has the knowledge, and he has the experience. He did not proclaim himself a scholar. The University of Glasgow and his mentor, Dr Dimitra Fimi, proclaimed him a scholar. And only 'the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots'* would question her scholarship.
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*This was revealed to me in a dream by Londo Mollari, though I already knew it.
