THE INSPIRATIONAL Malvern College schoolmaster who persuaded JRR Tolkien not to burn the manuscript of ‘Lord of the Rings’ and wrote a biography of C.S. Lewis has been honoured with the establishment of a prestigious award.
George Sayer was head of English at the college from 1949 until his retirement in 1974 and profoundly influenced generations of his pupils.
The broadcaster Jeremy Paxman whom Sayer taught in the mid-60s said he was the best teacher he ever had.
And the college has just launched the George Sayer Fellowship in his honour.
From 1933, CS Lewis, an old Malvernian, was Sayer’s tutor and close friend at Magdalen College, Oxford.
After Sayer became an English teacher at Malvern, Lewis and his friend Tolkien often visited him at his home to talk, drink and walk the Malvern Hills, on which he based the White Hills of Gondor in ‘Lord of the Rings’.
In a fascinating episode confirmed by Sayer’s 92-year-old widow Margaret, Tolkien was disillusioned by the difficulty in getting his sprawling fantasy novel published and talked of burning it.
“In one of his visits to our home in Malvern while sitting around the fire, Tolkien was down about struggling to find a publisher,” she said.
“He even threatened to destroy the whole thing but George reassured him and asked him to read some passages from it aloud.
“He told him that it certainly deserved a publisher and that he might even be able to find one.”
Encouraged, Tolkien kept the manuscript and ‘The Lord of the Rings’ was eventually published in three volumes during 1954 and 195555, going on to sell more than 150 million copies.
“Apart from his influence on Tolkien and Lewis, Sayer must have been a great teacher,” said Prof Alister McGrath.
“He would return students’ essays with witty, encouraging comments scrawled on them in red pen and sometimes smeared with marmalade and his cat’s paw-prints.
“In my role as first George Sayer Fellow, I hope I can emphasise Lewis’s link with Malvern plus my own great delight in reading his work and share that love with the pupils.”
