The Lemon Fool

I have just finished The Monsters and the Critics by JRR Tolkien – seven general lectures given by JRRT stemming from his work in Western European philology and medieval literature. Apart from the content of the lectures themselves (especially that on English and Welsh), they reveal him in a totally new light: witty, urbane and cultured – as well as having a daunting and staggeringly wide knowledge of European languages. It contains one of the rare accounts of how JRRT ‘felt’ innately about languages, and why one’s mother tongue wasn’t necessary the one that one felt closest to (in his case Welsh, or more specifically Old Welsh and the West Midlands dialect of Middle English).