Peter
J. Fields
In the early fall of 1999, Dr.
Tripp lost his first wife, Susan, to cancer. During those sad days, he
approached me about taking over the editing of In Geardagum, the
journal he founded (along with the Society for New Language Study) in the
1970s in Denver, Colorado. Over the past 30 years, some of the most
important scholars in Old and Middle English contributed articles to the
journal, including Helen Damico, Alexandra H. Olsen, Paul Beekman Taylor,
Kevin Kiernan, William C. Johnson, Jr., N. F. Blake, Tadao Kubouchi,
Thomas Shippey, Ruth Waterhouse, Zacharias P. Thundy, Jay Ruud, E. L.
Risden, Ian Robinson, Joerg O. Fichte, Loren Gruber, Dean Loganbill,
Gregory K. Jember, Masahiko Kanno, Donald Fry, Shunichi Noguchi, Akiyuki
Jimura, Naoko Shirai, Fidel Fajardo-Acosta, and Richard Trask, among
others. Even as I cite these names, I know I’m leaving out many
illustrious scholars and they have my apology.
Unfortunately, Dr. Tripp could
not persuade any of these renowned figures to take on the thankless job of
editor, even though some of them had done so for one or two issues in the
seventies or eighties. Inevitably, the nineties found Dr. Tripp doing the
editorial chores, and with his wife’s illness, he no longer had time. As
it turns out, I happened to be in the living room of one of the more
illustrious past editors and scholars of IG, who, after he
reluctantly turned Dr. Tripp down, handed the phone receiver to me. At wit’s
end, Dr. Tripp asked if I would be editor. As a recent student of his at
the University of Denver, I was not in the habit of saying "no"
to him.
Personally, I was delighted and
honored to be of use to Dr. Tripp, a mentor who had been so long-suffering
with me during my doctoral studies. Dr. Tripp was well-known for his
generosity to so many people. Countless students owed their careers to
him, including many international students. Dr. Tripp, for instance, spoke
fluent Japanese and worked with Japanese students and scholars both in
Japan and in Colorado. But his linguistic skills never told half the
story. Dr. Tripp was the most approachable professor his graduate students
ever encountered. He was exceptionally kind and generous with his time and
encouragement—as well as with dynamic ideas for a thesis or article. He
was a catalyst for so many graduate students who had bogged down with
other Ph.D. directors who turned out to be too busy to keep up with the
(admittedly) long and winding road of a given student’s dissertation.
However, his days as a professor
had darkened over. Shortly after I agreed to take on the editorship, he
set about finishing his life in Denver. Not long after Susan’s death, I
discovered that Dr. Tripp had retired from teaching and had sold the brick
bungalow he had shared with Susan for some thirty years. In expeditious
fashion, Dr. Tripp had closed the book on one phase of his life. I
wondered if he would find joy in anything again, or if I would have
further occasion to see him. To my surprise, I was able to meet and talk
with him in October, 2001, in Vancouver, at the annual convention of the
Rocky Mountain MLA.
Dr. Tripp was a different person.
He bounded toward me, happy, and enthusiastic about language and
literature. At his side was Miyoko Tanahashi, a Japanese woman who had
retired from a business career and was living in New York City. The two of
them had just married and were traveling together. She had known both Dr.
Tripp and his first wife for many years (the Society published a volume of
Ms. Tanahashi’s poetry in 1985, Back to Bones and Air). Miyoko
was strikingly vivacious and active, and it was evident that she had
restored Dr. Tripp to emotional and mental vitality. It was not the old
Dr. Tripp—but a new man. He had bought, and remodeled, a cabin in Shadow
Lake, near Concord, Vermont. Once upon a time during the late 1960s, he
had briefly taught in that state. But he wasn’t able to make a go of it.
Nevertheless, he would reminisce about Vermont. It was the road
less-traveled. Now he went back and took that path and became active in
local issues. He also fulfilled a longstanding promise to himself: that he
would someday write a folksy little book comparing fellow inklings C. S.
Lewis and Owen Barfield. He went through several drafts of it in record
time.
In terms of medieval scholarship,
Dr. Tripp set about writing a series of essays in which he returned to a
subject he had first explored some two decades earlier, about the time
that Kevin Kiernan brought out his ground-breaking manuscript study of Beowulf.
In those days, Dr. Tripp had just returned from England himself, having
also examined the manuscript with the aid of television magnification and
other modern techniques. He was pleasantly surprised that Kiernan had
noticed some of the same things he had, and that he and Kiernan had come
away with the same conviction: that the Beowulf poem was probably
contemporary with its manuscript. In other words, Beowulf was
probably an 11th century post-Viking poem. On the heels of
Kiernan, Dr. Tripp brought out his own study, More About the Fight with
the Dragon, but the consensus at the time wasn’t as yet ready to
follow up on the new manuscript studies.
More specifically, Dr. Tripp
noticed that no one was ready as yet to question the central
"fable," as it were, of the story in Beowulf. Dr. Tripp’s
Vermont scholarship was in support of what he called a
"homiletic" approach to Beowulf. Chief among his
convictions was that the dragon was really a man, or king, who entered the
treasure hoard and became a dragon. Dr. Tripp was prolific on the subject,
quickly turning out an impressive hoard of new essays. I published some of
them in IG and last year I asked him if he would want to summarize
his basic argument for the Dragon King of Beowulf. I told him that
it would help people if, aside from close reading and paleographic
discussions of the manuscript, he would simply tell the story of who the
Dragon King was. Until that time, he had always considered a
narrative-approach to be unnecessary and even non-scholarly.
In 2003, the Kalamazoo Medieval
Institute at Western Michigan University asked Dr. Tripp to sponsor a
special session at the annual congress under the auspices of the Society
for New Language Study. There were not many people left who were still
associated with the Society, but he asked me to present on Beowulf.
While in Kalamazoo, he and I talked and hiked. It was difficult keeping up
with Dr. Tripp. He was a vigorous walker and could easily leave teen-agers
in his dust. However, a few months later, he was diagnosed with an
advanced lesion on his brain. The doctors gave him six to eight months. He
would prove them wrong. Such was his vitality that he would last a year
and a half. Miyoko would later tell me that his relative longevity
following the diagnosis was considered nothing less than
"incredible." During this time, he raced to finish the piece on
the Dragon King, which by now he had embraced as a way of connecting the
unpublished essays. He was beginning to project a whole book.
As for his little book on Lewis
and Barfield, there had been talk of going to one of the standard academic
presses. But Miyoko was worried about the time factor. She wanted to bring
it out immediately, so Dr. Tripp could see the final result and personally
make any last minute adjustments. This book—In Search of Salt: A
Perennial Comparison of C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield—is available
at the editorial address of IG as a publication of the Society for
New Language Study.
In regards to the Dragon King
narrative, Dr. Tripp provided several personal chapters on the etiology of
the idea, what would constitute chapters one through four. The narrative
would now become chapter five, and the unpublished essays would be molded
into subsequent chapters. However, as he attempted to rework parts of the
accumulating manuscript, he began repeating that he would have to leave
the serious editing to me. He felt bad about leaving this chore undone,
but I was delighted, once again, to be of some modest use to him. I have
made some progress in this vein. Chapter Five—the narrative summary of
the Dragon-King—has begun to assume its final shape and appears in this
issue.
I visited Dr. Tripp for the last
time in May of 2004. He could get around with a walker and still delighted
in talking. We chatted about Beowulf and the "Klaeber
consensus" for several hours. Among his files, I found a manuscript
on wordplay in Beowulf that he had left off some years ago (at
approximately the thousandth line of the poem). I should mention that
Miyoko was taking scrupulous, tender-loving care of Dr. Tripp. Even as we
talked, she brought sandwiches, beverages, and desserts. All around us the
sun cascaded in through the big windows. It was obvious that Dr. Tripp
took deep down pleasure in Miyoko’s plants and flowers. Indeed, I would
use the word "joy" to describe his basic mood, something
constantly informed by his relationship with Miyoko. I noticed that the
two of them would have brief asides. Sometimes one of them began in
English and the other finished the sentence in Japanese—or vice versa. I
should mention that both Miyoko and Dr. Tripp were adamant that I pick out
books from his library and take them with me. As I did, I made a special
point of collecting up the wordplay manuscript. I am working with a
co-editor to bring this book out in the near future. The working title is Tripp’s
Thousand Lines of Wordplay in Beowulf. The complete Dragon King
manuscript (again, with the same co-editor’s help) may take a little
longer.
That May at Shadow Lake, I was
struck by how lucid Dr. Tripp was. He never lost that renewed spirit or
cogency of mind. However, during the early morning hours of February 1,
2005, Dr. Tripp had what Miyoko later described as labored breathing and
cold sweats. "Well, this could be it," he said. At the hospital,
the two of them reaffirmed to the medical personnel that he not be
resuscitated. Miyoko would later describe that confirmation as a
"very solemn moment." The doctors made Dr. Tripp as comfortable
as possible. He communicated as best he could. "Be brave," he
told her. He said that he loved her. He said he was grateful that she had
become his wife. He continued to register life signs until almost
mid-afternoon. Then she noticed that his pulse seemed to have stopped. She
sent for the nurses. At ten minutes until three, she was told "he is
gone." In Miyoko’s words, he had slipped away in "quiet
simplicity."