On encountering yourself in the wild

I like to watch a speaker speak, but sometimes I have to look elsewhere. That’s how it went at a talk I’ve just attended about Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton. I arrived for the meeting of the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society to find the room packed, but a seat saved for me – in the front row almost directly in front of the lectern.

It hardly seemed fair to gawp into the face of the excellent speaker, Peter Geddes, from so brutally close. Especially after he began talking extensively of evidence he’d drawn from Tolkien and the Great War. It was not really that I felt self-conscious; I was concerned he might be put off his stride. Perhaps that’s a form of vanity in me. Anyway, he was not. He wasn’t even ruffled by the sight of me fixedly scrutinising the wood of the desk beside the lectern for the better part of 40 minutes. And I was able to tell him how he’d gathered threads familiar to me but done so in a new way; he’d opened doors I’d left closed.

Of course, I’m delighted when Tolkien scholars draw on my work. Writing is a long solitary slog, and my first book felt like Everest. But once it’s done, a successful book acquires a life of its own. Its author can get on with other things while looking on with parental pride, spiced occasionally with astonishment. At the 2023 conference on Tolkien and his friend G.B. Smith at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, I found fellow presenters repeatedly citing Tolkien and the Great War, chapter and verse. I found I had even forgotten some of what’s in it. Towards the end, I was prompted to joke: ‘I’m starting to think I really ought to read this book you all keep mentioning.’