Peter Godman

‘Knights should be naturally endowed with slim calves and neat feet whose length exceeds their width as if moulded by a craftsman, but I observe that your calves are on the contrary pudgy, bulging, round and stunted, and your feet are as broad as long, and gigantic to boot,’ jibes a countess to a commoner, referring not to his shoe-size (‘gigantic to boot’) but to the dimensions of his feet, in this stylish but not always lucid translation. The commoner replies:

Among the terms of abuse which J.R.R. Tolkien was accustomed to apply to an Oxford college of which he was (and I am) a member, there is one that makes an odd impression. It is the adjective ‘medieval’, pointedly used in its pejorative sense by this philologist and professor of Anglo-Saxon.