Searching for Charles Brady's Ring Bearers

January 13, 2025
Charles Brady

Buffalo, NY - It is nigh on three decades since Charles A. Brady (CAB) - Canisius English professor nonpareil – departed this world. Yet his reputation lives on and, at times, not only expands but does so in the most unexpected and welcome ways.

Early last year, for instance - and out of the blue - a young UK-trained lawyer based in Sweden paid tribute to CAB’s long-ago reviews of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, the British author of the now-globally-celebrated The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Matthew Thompson-Handell’s stellar piece, “Charles A. Brady – A Connoisseur of Tolkien,” appeared in the June issue of “Beyond Bree,” the newsletter of the Tolkien Special Interest Group of American MENSA.

A link to the article (which would have pleased CAB no end) appears below, with the permission of Thompson-Handell and Beyond Bree’s editor, Nancy Martsch:

CHARLES A. BRADY – A CONNOISSEUR OF TOLKIEN 

As the eldest of CAB’s six children, this was, of course, a joy to see - particularly as the essay also celebrates CAB’s long correspondence with C. S. Lewis which the famed British writer initiated and in which Lewis often wrote of his friend and fellow author, J. R. R. Tolkien.

“The Hobbit,” Lewis told CAB, “is merely the adaptation to children of part of a huge private mythology of the most serious kind: the whole cosmic struggle as (Tolkien) sees it mediated through an imaginary world. The Hobbit’s successor, which will soon be finished, will reveal this more clearly.”

That successor, known today as The Lord of the Rings, was not completed “soon” – and in fact took another decade, Lewis pointing out to CAB that Tolkien’s “published works (both imaginary & scholarly) ought to fill a shelf by now: but he’s one of those people who is never satisfied with a MS. The mere suggestion of publication provokes the reply ‘Yes. I’ll just look through it and give it a few finishing touches,' which means that he really begins the whole thing over again.”    

Indeed, it was Lewis’ continuing enthusiasm for Tolkien’s long-in-coming “Ring” extravaganza that occasioned CAB’s being among the first American reviewers of what would in time become one of the best-known book series in the world.

This was, God love us, 70 years ago - but it is relevant today to readers of Canisius Magazine as CAB’s review, in the then-Buffalo Evening News, presaged the landmark courses on Tolkien and his work that CAB created and taught at Canisius well into the 1970s.
It is those courses (remembered by Canisius’ also-cherished professor emeritus of English, Robert J. Butler PhD) that are the focus here: Thompson-Handell wants to write about them too!

So listen up, English majors and other alumni who studied under CAB from the late 50s into the 70s! Thompson-Handell wants to hear from you!

“I would be thrilled, for two reasons, to get in touch with anyone who may have taken such courses in Tolkien at Canisius College,” Thompson-Handell emailed, after being apprised of Dr. Butler’s memory of CAB’s Tolkien courses.

“One, it would be fascinating to learn more about how Tolkien was being taught (especially as (Tolkien) has often been looked down upon by the academic literary community). Two, it would be equally fascinating to gain some insight into your father’s teaching.”

Thompson-Handell, who can be reached at @email, is looking not only for specific academic memories of CAB’s Tolkien teaching – but for any recollections any members of the Canisius community may have of these courses.

I must note here that my siblings and I are rather used to individuals “discovering” CAB even this long after the fact - but Thompson-Handell, staunch aficionado of Tolkien that he is, stands out among them:

“In late 2022, I found an online community focused on collecting Tolkien books (and occasionally other ephemera), and carved a little niche for myself collecting reviews of his work,” he writes. “ I found reviews - especially those from the initial publication, when (Tolkien) was more or less unknown - very interesting especially since his work (all the more so after the Peter Jackson films) has become an industry all of its own.

“I began to read even things that I could not get my hands on (easily), and quite quickly discovered your father’s reviews of the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings. Once I discovered that he had reviewed almost all of the work published by Tolkien, during the time he wrote for The Buffalo (Evening) News, I felt that here was someone whose critical insights would likely be of great interest in the Tolkien community, hence my decision to write the article for Beyond Bree.”
It was a poem CAB wrote (to run atop his tribute to Tolkien at the time of the great writer’s death) that brought Thompson-Handell into my siblings’ and my orbit. He wanted permission to use the poem and found me, the eldest, first online and then by snail mail, in 2024.

His outreach sent me spiraling back in time to the years when, as a schoolgirl, I would come home to the happy news that another letter had arrived from C. S. Lewis! Sometimes I would encounter the postman first - and come running into the house, a latter-day Pony Express, waving still another Lewis missive. (One time it wasn’t Lewis – it was W. H. Auden. And there were many more as literary intellectuals of the mid-20th Century sought one another out - CAB drawing some of the best!)

I was a child when Lewis first wrote to CAB about his friend Tolkien’s forthcoming Ring fantasia and all I remember of that time is what a child would, Lewis telling CAB that Tolkien’s wife insisted on his writing in another part of their property (a porch, I think, or a shed) as she disliked either the smell of his pipe or a particularly pungent cheese he favored, perhaps both.

Otherwise, my memory of the Lewis letters is chiefly of the regal stamps each bore. Today, donated by CAB in 1972, they are kept in the storied Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford where Lewis both studied and taught. CAB’s youngest, our brother Kevin C. Brady, Canisius ’77, MBA, ‘92, was able to view them (by special arrangement) last fall when he and his wife, Helen Planinsek Brady, Canisius ’78, visited Oxford and the Bodleian.

There the letters are held sacred and bound in volumes: Kevin could not handle them although he could take photos of them with his phone and the Bodleian’s Special Collections staff scanned copies of the handwritten Lewis/CAB correspondence for him.

What a contrast to the days when I, a decade and a half Kevin’s senior, was allowed to hold the Lewis letters and admire their “foreign” stamps when they first arrived at our home - with little to no concept of their future worth. They were but prized to CAB then. They would be celebrated by scholars worldwide in years to come.

Those were heady times - but these are too. There aren’t many Matthew Thompson-Handells in this world. 

If you have any Canisius/Tolkien courses memories at all, do send them to him - @email. You will be glad you did – he is delightful!

 Story by: Karen Brady Borland
(who – being neither a nun, aspiring nurse nor night school student in the late 50s/early 60s – was barred from attending a then-all-male-undergraduate Canisius College)  

Photo by: Gregg R. Borland