China in the age of Bede

[Chrysophylax Dives]

R. W. Chambers, Professor of English at University College London, an Anglo-Catholic, and a good friend of J.R.R. Tolkien, delivered a lecture on 'Bede' to the British Academy in May 1936. He draws a map of England in the world in the age of Bede, when both he and Tolkien believe 'Beowulf' was also composed. The meaning of the map is curious and I'll try and tease it out in this thread, commencing with Chambers' take on China. But I thought I'd start with this remark, a sign of the times recorded by an Anglo-Catholic London Professor.

Nowadays the medieval veneration of saints' relics is being revived, as the uncorrupted body of Lenin is worshipped by crowds of pilgrims in Moscow, just as that of Cuthbert was of old revered in Lindisfarne and Durham. Could not the trade in relics also be resuscitated? Our Government might then acquire the Leningrad manuscript [the second oldest copy of Bede's History] for the British Museum, in exchange for the bones of Karl Marx, now resting in Highgate Cemetery.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Three points to frame what follows.

1. In addition to understanding Chambers on Bede my intention is to hand over to @Rivvy Elf a passing comparison of China and the kingdom of Northumbria in the early 8th century of the Christian era. The reference to China is actually pretty small, and only one part of the picture of History that Chambers is drawing. But given Rivvy's evident bias against the Angelcynn (the Angle kin, or English), those of us who are of the Angelcynn are (in my opinion) obliged now to breathe deeply and acknowledge the likely truth in any barbs that come our way, while hoping Rivvy is gentle with us.

2. For this, and other reasons, my strong counsel is to consider R.W. Chambers not so much the Professor of English speaking at the British Academy in May 1936, which is the reality, but as an elderly Hobbit of good name if openly eccentric views holding forth on ancient genealogical matters to the regulars at the Green Dragon.

3. Do not make the mistake of assuming Tolkien thinks the same as Chambers. From the perspective of a Tolkien reader, Chambers must always appear paradoxical and this because we encounter him primarily as the chief living 'descendant' in the 1936 allegory of 'Beowulf' as a tower. This is to say that he is on the one hand one of the few academics who sees all the facts (unlike the rioting 'friends' of the story), but on the other hand seeing all the facts he still fails to see the answer - and so cannot but appear as the fall guy, the other guy who appears a bit dim the better to show off Tolkien's genius. This is unfortunate, and surely not what Tolkien intended because the whole story and lecture on Beowulf was basically a pitch aimed at Chambers - the key ally Tolkien needed to convince.

Perhaps the best introduction to Chambers is a letter that he penned to Tolkien in December 1934. The letter is quoted by Christopher Tolkien as he introduces The Fall of Arthur (2013), which unfinished alliterative verse his father had some time before passed to Chambers for inspection.

Chambers (Professor of English at University College, London), eighteen years his senior, was an old friend and strong supporter of my father, and in that letter he described how he had read Arthur on a train journey to Cambridge, and on the way back ‘took advantage of an empty compartment to declaim him as he deserves’. He praised the poem with high praise: ‘It is very great indeed … really heroic, quite apart from its value in showing how the Beowulf metre can be used in modern English.’ (FOA 10)

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Here is the 'burglary' passage, prior to the long British Museum passage to come. My emphasis on burglary by another name.

The seventh century, in which Bede was born, has been called 'the nadir of the human mind', or at least a great historian of to-day, George Sarton, has censured a great historian of a century ago, Henry Hallam, for so calling it. Sarton has pointed out that, though things were bad in Europe, the early seventh century was a golden age in Arabia, in Tibet, in China, and in Japan. Hallam hardly deserves the censure of his critic, for what he really said was that the seventh century was the nadir of the human mind in Europe. Two pages later, however, Hallam does so far abandon caution to say that 'the Venerable Bede may perhaps be reckoned superior to any man the world then possessed.' Hallam would have been on safer ground if here also he had said 'Europe.' To-day, as we pass through any great museum, the marvels of the T'ang dynasty warn the most careless of us not to suppose that 'Europe' and 'the world' are synonymous. But of these things Hallam could know nothing, they were hidden in reccesses of China and Japan then inaccessible to Westerners.

One wonders what obscure treasures might have been on view in the Mathum-hus or museum at Michel Delving by the middle of the Fourth Age?

[Rivvy Elf]

I would argue that the nadir of the human mind was in the 19th century when entities like the British Empire declared hegemonical superiority over the world and plunged it into a dark age of social, gender, and sexual inequity that we are still struggling to get out of.

[Rivvy Elf]

Benjamin Franklin, who died before Hallum, had knowledge of the Chinese civilization and apparently had great respect for them. Trade with the Qing Dynasty was well underway, and with trade, more and more texts spread its way throughout Europe.

What kind of nonsensical garbage excuse did this fool try to excuse Hallum, who was born in 1777, for the excuse of ignorance? More and more texts was accessible to Europeans and scholars like Hallum. But unlike the Chinese scholars of the May 4th movement, who changed their freakin language in order to better understand what was coming out of Europe, making those European texts more accessible, Hallum chose to assume instead of learning.

There's a Chinese work called The Orphan of Zhao that made its way to people like Voltaire, who wrote a derivative work changing the setting and work (L'Orphelin de la Chine). Voltaire lived before Hallum.

So Hallum should have known something. Or he should have tried to learn literary Chinese or Japanese. Rather than assume the center of the world was west of Istanbul. Perhaps research the trade between Charlemagne, Harun Al-Rashid, and the Tang? Maybe read of the communication between the Eastern Roman Empire (oh, I'm sorry, the "Byzantines") and the various dynasties of China?

Or maybe, how about learning Arabic? Not only would one learn about the Golden Age of the Ummayads, the Abbasids, etc., one can get to learn what the caliphates knew about China. Particularly because the Tang and the Abbasids fought in a famous battle called the Battle of Talas.

No excuse. He deserves to be censured and roasted as a scholar!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

So, now the museum passage - in which I have to include the first section, just because.

There is something which overawes us, in the contemplation of this unchanging reputation [of Bede down the centuries], in a world where everything else seems to be open to challenge and and dispute, a challenge of which I, at least, am reminded every time I enter the British Museum Reading Room. All my life, when overcome by the atmosphere of that room, I have been accustomed to get up and walk along the Roman gallery, where the long line of Roman Emperors stood on their polished pedestals, till I finished opposite the bust of Julius Caesar. There, I said to myself, are the features of the foremost man of all this world, fashioned from the life by some master-craftsman of the first century BC. And I returned refreshed to my work. In accordance with the spirit of our age, the polished pedestals have all been swept away, a sadly diminished line of Emperors now stands, in the Roman gallery, on a shelf reminscent of a cocktail bar. Julius Caesar has been expelled. He now faces us, as we enter the Reading Room, with an inscription, Julius Caesar, Ideal portrait of the 18th century Rome, bought 1818.

And so, he who insisted that his wife must be above suspicion, now only serves to warn the unsuspicious Englishman against buying sham antiques abroad. There is change and decay in all the galleries of the Musuem. No longer can we see the Etruscan lady deliver, with uplifed finger, an everlasting curtain-lecture to her recumbent spouse. I believe that after the night watchman has done his rounds, from one monument of Antiquity to another, there passes:

A timid voice, that asks in whispers
'Who next will drop and disappear?'

Yet there are works of art in the Museum which have nothing to fear from any hostile critic, and two supreme ones have a special bearing on the Age of Bede. The Chinese pottery statue of a Buddhist apostle sits in the centre of the King Edward VII Gallery, rather more than life-size. In his grand simplicity, utterly remote from all earthly affairs, the apostle gazes into eternity. If our art-critics are right in their dates, he shows us what the Far East could do in the Age of Bede. He serves as a symbol to remind us once again that the darkest period of Western civilization coincides with the glories of the T'ang dynasty in China. Dynasties might have changed, and empires fallen, and the meditations of the Chinese sage, from whom that portrait was modelled (for a portrait it must assuredly be), would have been as little disturbed thereby as have been the features of his porcelain image. Like the sage of Bacon's New Atlantis, he has an aspect as though he pitied men. He belongs, we are told, to an age when inspiration was fresh, and Chinese Buddhist art young and virile.

The other great monument of the Age of Bede in the British Museum we can date exactly. It, again, is a monument of a young and virile art. It is the Lindisfarne Book, made on Holy Island by Bede's friend Eadfirth. …

The figure of the Buddhist apostle and the designs of the Lindisfarne Book are both, in their way, as near perfection as work of man can be. Compared with the Chinese apostle the Lindisfarne Book belongs to a primitive – almost barbaric – culture. But it is the most beautiful thing the West could do in that age, just as Bede is the greatest product of the West in knowledge.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I will (in good time) continue with this lecture, because Chambers is giving a fix on Bede's time and place, which contrasts Bede's own knowledge of living on the very edge of the world (the British Isles) in the sixth and last age of the world, with an attempt by Chambers in 1936 to read the history of 'the English people' since the age of Bede. All most curious and relevant (for me) in contemplating how Tolkien considered an Anglo-Saxon poet of the age of Bede attempting a great story of the days that were past.

But I hope it is not amiss, as someone who is not a Catholic, not even a Christian, to observe that Chambers perceives the world in terms of precious objects as well as peoples, and situates himself in a great game in which the Powers attempt to collect and accumalate the precious stones and relics of other peoples in other places and even of themselves in other times. None of the Anglican clergymen who did scholarship ever adopt quite such a perspective on the history of letters.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I doubt I'll continue the close copying and pasting, so a provisional take on the whole. Chambers uses China as an Other that was unknown to Bede. He proceeds to identify 'Civilization' with the fusion of Rome and Israel that is his Church, and then situates the known world of Bede in the era of the Arab conquests, when Christendom vanishes from its eastern homelands and even Spain is lost. This leaves only the converted Germanic tribes bearing the light of Civilization, but Chambers explains that those Germanic tribes who settled on the ruins of the Roman Empire on the Continent were corrupted by all the wealth.

So only in Northumbria did the light still burn, whereas in all the wider world beyond the candles were going out. That is a powerful take on the age of Bede. Chambers observes that Bede and his Northumbrian contemporaries had inherited the Ptolemaic map of the world and knew that they lived on the very outer edges of the world. And Bede gave the classic account of the Six Ages of the World, marking his own day as the Sixth and final age, an age of ruin and decrepitude.

Where it all goes wrong, for Chambers, at least reading him today, is that he situates Bede as a turning-point in the history of the world, such that henceforth the light would spread out from this small corner of the British Isles until it radiates the whole world. So like Tolkien, Chambers made much of the English missionaries who worked the Continent in the next generations. But unlike Tolkien, Chambers reads History as if the mission of the English is to colonize ('civilize') the whole world.

Basically, two dimensions of an English identity are liable to get one into trouble when talking Tolkien with folks from the wider world. Firstly, English people have an assumption that because they know the countryside that Tolkien loved, and love it themselves, therefore they understand the stories better than other people. That must be really annoying. The second is that the English have a tendency to smuggle their superior cultural sense into their judgments without themselves noticing, thereby speaking as colonial settlers who view themselves as culturally innocent newborn lambs.

But if you consider the age of Bede as Chambers frames it you do get another side of Englishness. From the very beginning of English history, this is a people who have well understood that they live on the very edge of everything, that History is something that happens to other people. The British Empire, they say, was made in an absence of mind.

Hobbits drinking Chinese and Indian tea.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

A last quote from Chambers, which I feel pinpoints the gulf between him and Tolkien, which is basically about a 17 year gap in age.

There are some of us who, in spite of the depression which has set in since the end of the War, have enough of Mid-Victorian confidence and optimism still to share Newman's view [in the singularity of Christian Civilization]. To us, then, the seventh century must be the era when two-thirds of the Mediterranean coast lands were lost to Civilization, and when the coast of the North Sea was won.

Tolkien would surely have agreed as to the characterization of the age of Bede, but not the subsequent suggestion of Chambers that the age of Bede was therefore a turning-point in History, with English colonialism the way here on in. It seems to me that Tolkien rather shared Bede's view of both space and time - living on the very western edges of the world in what looked like being its final age.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Rivvy Elf, I lost track of where I was reporting on my rummaging on archive.org and asking questions on email as to UK/Western study of Chinese, so I'll ask here if you know of R.H. Matthews, whose 1931 Chinese-English dictionary seems long to have been standard, was a missionary work in contrast to the comparable Sanskrit-English dictionary of the era of A.A. Macdonell, who is like Tolkien an Oxford Professor (fellow of the great Balliol College). Here is the last paragraph of the Wiki entry on Matthews' dictionary:

Paul W. Kroll, Professor of Chinese at the University of Colorado, says [31] the most troubling inadequacy of Mathews's dictionary is that "it indiscriminately mixes together vocabulary of all periods", from the ancient Book of Documents to early 20th-century merchant and missionary vocabulary, with the "unhappy result that students infer all terms and meanings to be equally applicable throughout three thousand years of Chinese history". Another problem is the seemingly random arrangement of various meanings for any particular word, leading the user to a "pick-and-choose approach".

One can be sure that Tolkien would have recognized the evident paucity of the professional (= academic)
study of the Chinese language compared to that of either any of the Indo-European or Semitic languages. Actually, worth bringing up the Bible even here: the immediate context of Tolkien's linguistic studies are indeed the Indo-European languages, which got going a century earlier as a Welshman woke up to Sanskrit and its relationship to Latin and Dutch and even Welsh. But over the next century the Indo-European fascination was bound up also with ongoing philological study of the Bible and related literature, in a variety of tongues but requiring Semitic philological skills and for most of the 19th century much more of an obvious political hot potato, as a historical reading of these ancient texts threatened revealed religion.

All of which is to say. By the 20th century philologists at Oxford were really good at reading anything in a language either Indo-European or Semitic, but they seem to have been all at sea with Chinese - and I guess that in a way Chambers even hints at this and that Tolkien was surely aware of the state of ignorance to his far East.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Stepping back from the comparison of the two dictionaries one glimpses the accidents of local English academic culture that ended up with J.R.R. Tolkien indeed as Professor Shippey put it, author of the twentieth century. The living language is left to the missionaries on the ground, who do impressive work, but devoid of the precise and profound expertise by which Oxford philologists might move between the classical languages of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Classical = well, not exactly dead, because the whole point was that a tradition breathed life into them ever anew, but not a living language found spoken in the world today. So on China they are still stuck on Marco Polo, while the fantasy of invented Elvish language in an imaginary history steps almost naturally into shape before the eyes of one who has walked into the Battle of the Somme, and back again. Without the slaughter of a generation what might have been different? But what the British were left with was a genius for fantasy, and a desire to turn their faces away from the wider world beyond.