The Pleasure of a Name Inked on a Page -- Nora Kershaw

Recently I posted a brief review of Simon Cook's J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology, in which he argues that Tolkien's engagement with Hector Munro Chadwick's 1907 work, The Origin of the English Nation, was essential to the formation of the legendarium we all know as Middle-Earth, and which Tolkien in part regarded as a restoration or rediscovery of a lost mythology of England. I found Simon Cook's treatment of this subject so interesting and persuasive that I decided to read not only Munro's The Origin of the English Nation, but also his later work, The Heroic Age (1912).

While it was the work of only a few minutes to find e-books of both, I am still quite fond of tree-books, especially old ones. They have a heft and a texture that lends them a presence I cherish. If the paper and ink are of a high enough quality, you can even feel the letters on the page. So, despite all the advantages of e-books -- which are many and I own many -- tree-books are my first love, and you know you never get over that. For books like these, I wanted the real thing.

Again the search didn't take me long. I found first editions of them both on Biblio.com at fair prices, the one in the US, the other the UK. Within a couple of weeks I was unwrapping them, feeling their weight, even sniffing them to see if they had that old book smell (juuust right, not too musty). Then I opened The Origin of the English Nation to the title page, which was pretty normal:

It was when I turned to the inside of the front cover and looked at the inscription that things began to get interesting.

I glanced over the end page quickly, having owned many old books with names inscribed at the front. The first detail that caught my eye was the date, April 1912. That was when the Titanic sank.  A coincidence to be sure, but a mildly interesting one that makes you wonder about the person's life for a moment. Did she buy the book before or after she heard the news? Was she reading it when she heard? Did she know anyone on the ship? Did she exchange a few words with the bookseller about the disaster as he wrapped the book up for her to take home?  

And any mention of steamships in these years always brings to my mind another young woman of this era, my grandmother who left Ireland in 1910 for New York, returned home at some point during the First World War, intending to stay there  -- her ship was stopped and boarded by a German submarine -- but was persuaded to go back to New York by an Irishman she met on the ship, my evidently rather smooth grandfather. 

All these moments, lost in time.

Another part of the story this page tells came with Newnham College, a women's college not even forty years old in 1912, and only the second such college at Cambridge, promoting the radical idea that women should have the same educational opportunities as men. As Anne Jemima Clough said in 1875, a college of their own was what women needed:

How much more effectually, & with how much less mental strain, a woman can study, where all the arrangements of the house are made to suit the hours of study, – where she can have undisturbed possession of one room, – and where she can have access to any books that she may need. How very rarely, – if ever, – these advantages can be secured in any home we all know, and it is surely worth some sacrifice on the part of parents to obtain them for their daughters at the age when they are best fitted to profit by them to the utmost.

(quoted in Short History of Newnham)

Not that the process went smoothly. Though many illustrious women received an education through Newnham and colleges like it, they were for many years denied real degrees for their studies and full membership in their Universities. A failed attempt to win these privileges in 1897 led to riotous behavior that caused expensive damage in Cambridge's market square, but it wasn't the women protesting their rejection who did this. It was their male counterparts 'celebrating' it (Short History of Newnham).  Women in fact received the right to vote (1918, limited; 1928, universal) before Cambridge granted them (1948) the privileges that were their due as students who had satisfactorily completed a course of studies.

Enter Nora Kershaw. I saw her name in the midst of this tale, (presumably) a young student in 1912, right after what some have called The Perfect Summer, and right before the First World War came crashing down on Europe. But who was she? How does she fit into this context, this history? 

Perhaps the best thing about the internet (cat videos notwithstanding) is all the information it offers up with a few keystrokes. So I searched for Nora Kershaw, and the story got better. For what follows I want first of all to acknowledge my debt to Sandra Ballif Straubhaar's article on Nora Kershaw, An Extraordinary Sense of Powerful Restlessness, in Women Medievalists and the Academy (Wisconsin, 2005, ed. Jane Chance) 367-379. 

Born in 1891, Nora Kershaw read English and Old English at Newnham from 1910 to 1914. Of the next two bits of information, the first made me laugh out loud in recognition. A friend of Nora Kershaw's once recounted: 

I remember Nora’s tussle with her mother over her clothes.  Then one day she came to school in a state of great delight and excitement as she had been given a dress allowance and henceforward was to be responsible for her own clothes.  That afternoon she went downtown and came back jubilant with a Chaucer, a Spenser and I don’t know how many other books that she had bought with her dress allowance--no clothes of course. 

(quoted in Straubhaar, 367)

The second made me first realize precisely why she purchased the book I had in my hands, and then made me sit up in surprise. While at Newnham Nora Kershaw studied Old English with Hector Munro Chadwick (1870-1947), who was quite open-minded and advanced when it came to women at University.

Even in the earlier days of his career, when the position of women in the University was not officially recognized, [H. M. Chadwick] treated them with the same consideration as his men students, always convinced of the important part they could and did play in learning.  Whether men or women, his students met with the kindliness and old-world courtesy which ever marked his bearing to his fellow humans and, more than that, they were treated as fellow scholars 

 (quoted in Straubhaar, 368)

Ten years later in 1922, after returning to Cambridge and publishing her first book -- Stories and Ballads of the Far Past -- Nora Kershaw married him, becoming Nora Chadwick.

Wait. What? Nora Chadwick? One of the most prominent and prolific medievalists of the 20th century? The one who wrote -- among many, many other more important works¹ -- The Celts and The Druids, which I had read as a young man? Yes, that Nora Chadwick.*

And here I was, holding this book that had been hers, in which she had written her name. To me this is cool.  Can't do this with an ebook.

Thank you again, Simon Cook.

________________________

Regrettably, I have not been able to find a photograph of Nora Kershaw Chadwick to include in this post. An image comes up pretty quickly in a google search, but further investigation indicates that it is not Nora Chadwick, but another scholar by the name of Mary Boyce. If anyone could supply me with an image or a link to one, I would be grateful.  --- update 13 November 2015 -- thanks to the kindness of a reader, I now have a photo of Nora Kershaw Chadwick here.

¹ For a complete bibliography of her more than 50 published works, see Straubhaar's article.

An Allusion to Rupert Brooke in Tolkien?

In addressing the assumptions of some readers that The Lord of the Rings was about World War II, Tolkien reminds us that he had been in World War I (FR xxiv, emphasis added):

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead. 

In John Garth's Mythgard class on Tolkien and the Great War today we were reading Rupert Brooke's 1914 sonnet Peace and a phrase leaped out at me (emphasis added):

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love! 

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

Even if the striking similarity of phrase is accidental -- which I don't believe for a moment, given Brooke's fame early and late as the poster boy of World War I poets -- Tolkien and Brooke take the idea of youth being caught in such different directions that I think I will have to give these passages further thought.  But not tonight.  Tonight I just want to revel in the pleasure of having heard the echo. 

Young C. S. Lewis, Arrived at Oxford

C. S. Lewis first came to Oxford in the spring of 1917. So many students were absent, abroad on the battlefields of France, that the town and its colleges seemed empty. Lewis himself had entered the University Officers' Training Corps and would spend much of the year preparing to serve in France.

One weekend that summer he wrote to his friend, Arthur Greeves, back home in Ireland:

Last night, at about nine o'clock I wandered out into the deserted quad. & after 'strolling' for some time went up a staircase where nobody ever goes in these days into the oldest part of the College.  The windows here are all tiny & ivy covered & stained so that it was very dark already.  I walked up & down long passages with locked rooms on each side, revelling in 'desolation'.  The 'oaks' of these rooms were mostly (as I say) locked, but by good luck I found one open & went in.  On the inner door the faded name 'Mr Carter' greeted me: inside was a tiny room, smaller than my own at home, very dark & thick with dust.  It seemed almost sacrilege to turn on the light in such a forsaken place, but I simply had to inspect it.  The furniture was all just as the owner must have left it & his photos were there on the wall.  I also inspected his books (mostly ordinary Everymen) including 'Lavengro', 'Tristram Shandy', [Edmund] Burke's Speeches & 'Tom Jones'. I suppose this sounds trivial to you; but perhaps you can picture the strange poetry of the thing in such a time & place.  I wonder who Carter is, and if he has been killed yet, & why he left his pile of music so untidily on the dressing table? 

(Letter of 8 July 1917)

University College, Oxford 

The respect, the poignant reverence, with which Lewis examines this scene, seeing poetry and near sacrilege, and wondering in a single breath whether the war had killed Carter 'yet' -- as if it were inevitable -- and about the mess of papers he had left behind him -- as if he were in a rush to leave -- all of this can only make me wonder how much of himself Lewis saw in this room. How much of his own onrushing future in the trenches loomed in this isolated room, dark and thick with dust, with a faded name on the door, and the pieces of a life left behind?

Perhaps as I continue reading his letters, I will learn the answer for sure, just as I think I sense it now. Part of the problem is that it's so easy to read this fluid prose, and think of the C. S. Lewis we all usually think of, the teacher, the scholar, the apologist, the Inkling, the novelist of more mature years, of this fellow here below:

and not this other fellow in the next photograph, this very young man soon to go off to war when all he really wants to do is read and learn, this very young man whom we don't see when our minds conjure up the image of C. S. Lewis.  This young man has never met Tolkien, is somewhere between atheist and agnostic, and in his letters talks about girls and music as well as the books he loved and devoured.  The man who wrote the letter above was not merely describing a scene and evoking a mood.  He was writing something that lay in his own future. And after several hundred pages of his letters it becomes easier to sense the fear that lies behind his words as his own time in the trenches draws nearer.  What books did he leave behind on his desk, what papers? Was his door locked behind him when he went?  Or did he perhaps leave it open for the next very young man to find?  Did he ever learn what happened to Carter?

Lewis in 1919.

Carter lived, by the way.