You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend

our disbelief.

I'm Eric Molinsky.

More than anything, he wanted his work to be taken seriously on his own terms.

But John Ronald Ruell Token was such an outlier in the world of academia.

There was a lot of nasty, snide, Oxford gossip going on for a long time.

So it was like, oh, he was a genius, but he ran off the rails and started writing these

crazed epics.

This is Michael Drout.

He teaches the work of Token at Wheaton College.

Token had one of the plum jobs at Oxford.

So he's a the Rawlinson Bosworth professor of Anglo-Saxon.

It meant that he had to give a number of lectures, but he had a much lower workload than

a lot of other Oxford professors on the understanding that he's going to produce amazing and great

scholarship like he had done at the beginning of his career.

And he produced very little and what he produced was weird.

Why?

Well, for example, he sends off to essays and studies this article on the Battle of

Maul and except it's not an article, it's a play in blank verse.

Now it's turned out to be one of the most influential things ever written about the Battle

of Maul.

But I can't imagine what the editor was thinking when he opened it.

...