Cynewulf and His Poetry
Lecture by Kenneth Sisam
I collect Tolkien, but I also have a keen interest in the work of his friends and contemporaries as well. Some of his colleagues, especially from his early career that I have done much work on is E.V. Gordon and Kenneth Sisam. While looking around online I found some information from garm on a Sisam volume that I had not seen before, he pointed me in a few directions and eventually this lead me to a specific query from the time is was produced. I found an answer in this letter from Tolkien to E.V. Gordon, mostly about work on Pearl, TCG Letter #1374. Tolkien is replying to a letter from Gordon, in which Kenneth Sisam comes up.
Tolkien here says about Sisam's lecture on Cynewulf and his Poetry: "Of course, I personally have never thought Sisam too good in that line either – though he is very learned and within limits acute (though not very penetrative). But then I have never got over the Cynewulf lecture, which I thought deplorable."
As we know he was notorious for missing deadlines; sometimes months or even years would pass before he would produce something for publication to the shagrin on many of his contemporaries. Here is a snippet from a 1953 letter from Sisam: “Tolkien is a rogue. He has had Middle English Studies held up for 20 years… and his time is given to fairy stories”.
Anyway I managed in my hunting for more information, to find a copy of the lecture delivered by Sisam in 1932, four years before Tolkien's famous Beowulf lecture!
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