Hunter Living Histories

The Unique Dr Rhona Beare (1935-2018) Classics Lecturer at the University of Newcastle (1966-2000)

By Dr Jude Conway

Rhona Beare was born on 20th July 1935, the oldest child of Sylvia Gibson and William Beare, professor of Latin at Bristol University, and the author of The Roman Stage which is still available for purchase today.

Early Years

As a child Rhona would have met Robert Graves, the poet and author of I Claudius who is reputed to have spent a great deal of time reading in the Beare home library during World War Two.

Rhona was educated at a girls’ high school in Bristol and in the early 1950s read Classics at Girton College, the first women’s college at Cambridge which had only been granted full academic status in 1948.

Tolkien

Rhona had read The Hobbit when she was at school and at Cambridge she read The Lord of the Rings three times straight, including the appendices. While doing research, in Latin and Greek, for a PhD at the University of Exeter, she also took an interest in medieval history and started sending detailed questions to J. R. R. Tolkien. It seems Tolkien enjoyed their correspondence but perhaps her new passion distracted her from her studies because she missed out on being awarded a PhD.

Rhona in the Early 1960s

In the early 1960s Rhona was Assistant Lecturer in Classics at Westford College, University of London, for 4 years and then in 1966, was appointed a Lecturer in Classics at the University of Newcastle. Her father, eulogised as ‘a modest, sober, humane, and forthright scholar’, had died 3 years previously, but he had studied at Trinity College in Dublin with the Newcastle university vice-chancellor J. J. Auchmuty, so that was probably the drawcard.

Meeting Godfrey Tanner

In those days you sailed to Australia and on embarking from the SS Iberia in Sydney, Rhona was met at the wharf by Classics lecturer Godfrey Tanner. The introverted Rhona and the extroverted Godfrey were to become two distinctive figures at the university for decades.

Reminiscences of Rhona

I started at Newcastle uni in 1968 and although I never studied Classics, I remember seeing Rhona Beare sweeping across the grounds with her hair in a bun and in her calf-length skirt (this was the 60s and skirts were well above the knee) so, to me, she looked very old fashioned.

The “Blue Stocking” Eccentric

On consulting a friend who studied under her I learnt that not only was Rhona the typical “blue stocking” female intellectual but she used to wear blue stockings to emphasise that descriptor. “She was definitely eccentric,” he said. Even Rhona’s sister Nancy described her a “one-off”.

Mastery of Languages

Rhona could read Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, French and German and used these skills in esoteric ways for example, using her knowledge of the Greek alphabet and Norman French to decrypt a code used by a messenger of Queen Elizabeth I. So it is not surprising to learn that she had a sign on her office door, room G45 in the late McMullins Building, Seigneur, ta mer si grande et mon bateau est si petite. The quote from the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer had also been displayed in President John F. Kennedy’s Oval Office but he needed the English translation “Lord your sea is so big and my boat is so small.”

A Stitch in Time

Rhona Beare’s many talents included various types of needlework especially tapestry and knitting. By studying a fragment of an ancient Roman sock, she worked out the type of stitches the Romans used. I wonder if she entranced her audience at the Newcastle and Hunter District Historical Society in 1982 with her talk on the history of roman knitting.

At University Open Days she gave demonstrations of Roman and Greek spinning and weaving. As Rhona never married, she was seemingly the archetypal spinster, so it was a delight to come across this photo of her dancing at a 1974 Ball.

Thesis on Ancient Oaths

In 1975 Rhona finally received her PhD from Exeter, with a thesis on Royal and Imperial Oaths, which could be worth reading.

 

Writings on Tolkien

As well as lecturing at the university, sometimes to only two students majoring in Classics, Rhona wrote articles on Tolkien for the small specialist journals. For example, she was attracted to Tolkien’s time travel stories, so one of her articles “Related examples of time travel and time distortion in literature”.

Songs for the Philogists

She translated Tolkien’s Songs for the Philologists from Modern, Middle and Old English, Icelandic, Latin, and Gothic, into Modern English, and hunted out the tunes. One of her translations was included in a 1982 publication The Road to Middle-Earth.

 

Tolkien’s Letters to Rhona

Rhona must have been chuffed when two of Tolkien’s letters to her were published in 1985 in a 20-page booklet for distribution to the 95 members of the New England Tolkien Society in the US. (And of course her letters were also included in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien).

Tolkien’s Silmarillion

While her 1999 booklet J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, was published by Nimrod Publications, founded by Norman and Jean Talbot in Newcastle.

Elegy by Rhona Beare

When asked to submit an entry into the Who’s Who of Australian Women Rhona listed research into epic poetry and English literature, as special interests. She also wrote poetry herself, as can be seen by this entry in a 1984 Nimrod publication.

 

Lover of Books

Rhona devoured books of all kinds and was a member of the Jane Austen Society but above all, as her sister Nancy attested, she loved detective stories. She especially liked to visit the places mentioned by her favourite authors, once visiting the Tower of London just to see the precise turret from which some villain is said to have shot his victim.

Rhona and Godfrey Tanner

Godfrey Tanner retired from the university in 1993 while Rhona did not retire until 2000. On that occasion, as Hunter Living Histories recently posted, the Classics Professor Harold Tarrant observed that Rhona had an agile mind, capable of retaining anything other than the names of her students, and, so far from being moulded by the necessities of life into a recognisable pattern; she remained, like her long-term colleague Godfrey, sui generis. For those not familiar with the Latin term it means unique.

Life After Retirement

After her retirement, Rhona returned to Bristol and continued to pursue her passions. Her talk “Influence of Climate on Myth: Tolkien’s Theory and Practice” at the Tolkien 2005 Conference in Birmingham was published in the Conference Proceedings.

[Photo Credit: Anna Ivanova. Rhona Beare, “Influence of climate on Myth”]

Last Days

In the last months of her life Rhona’s still agile mind was evident in her asking for copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy in the original Italian, and the New Testament in Greek, because she said “the text was clearer”.

 

Rhona Beare died on 20 February, 2018.

Former University of Newcastle professor Marguerite Johnson, who had visited Rhona at her basement flat in Bristol, gave a eulogy at a Meeting of the Executive Committee of The Australasian Society for Classical Studies. In a later interview Marguerite commented that she had been mostly taught by men, but was also taught by Dr Rhona Beare – an extraordinary woman, most definitely an individual, and one of the most brilliant minds I’ve encountered” Marguerite said.

 

How is Rhona Beare remembered?

Only three months after her death a Tolkien fan was boasting online that he had acquired a “nice set of books from Dr. Beare’s Tolkien library”, and that her numerous annotations in the pages would give him new ideas about Middle-Earth.
Her sister Nancy made a gift to Girton College to establish a scholarship in Rhona’s name to enable a talented student to continue their studies in Classics, and Elizabeth Stockdale, an Honorary Associate of the University of Sydney, has written an entry in Brill’s biographical dictionary of women classicists, entitled “Rhona Beare: Girton, Australia, and Tolkien” which is due for publication this year.

In seems the unique Rhona Beare will not be forgotten.

Listen to Dr Conway speak about Dr Rhona Beare at March 2025 HLH Showcase

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Beare_(Latinist) (accessed 28/2/25).

http://www.tolkiensociety.org/2005/guests.html (12/5/13, no longer accessible but probably information about the guest speakers at the Tolkien 2005 Conference in England).

“Here to lecture at university,” 9 March 1966, Newcastle Sun, p.38.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girton_College,_Cambridge (28/2/25).

“Rhona Beare 1934–2018,” https://issuu.com/girtoncollege/docs/girton_college_development__newsletter_2020_/s/10501690 (11/2/25).

“Dr Rhona Beare’s books,” https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=19091 (11/2/25).

Opus, University of Newcastle (UoN) newspaper, Vol. 17, No. 1 – April 1970, and The Godfrey Tanner Edition, 2002.

The University News, University of Newcastle: Open Day Issues, 1977 and 1979; 13 March 1975.

Text messages from Kerry Hughes, Classics student at UoN, late 1960s, early 1970s (11-12/2/25).

Conversation with David McLean, Cooks Hill Books, whose information about Rhona came from Professor Marguerite Johnson, 19/2/25.

http://www.sarahrimkus.com/o-god-thy-sea (11/2/25).

“Guest Speakers,” Newcastle and Hunter District Historical Society Journal, Vol. 10, March 1982.

Mythlore: A Journal of JRR Tolkien, Vol21/iss3/6 Summer 1996.

“In Memoriam,” Tolkien Studies, West Virginia University Press, Volume 15, 2018, pp. 3-4.

Andrea Lofthouse and Vivienne Smith (compilers), Who’s Who of Australian Women, Methuen Australia, 1982.

An Interview with Professor Marguerite Johnson, 26/8/2021 by Connie Skibinski, The University of Newcastle, https://www.awaws.org/history-of-women/an-interview-with-professor-marguerite-johnson (11/2/25).

“The Australasian Society for Classical Studies”, http://www.ascs.org.au › general_meeting_minutes Doc (11/2/25).

https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/rhona-beare-girton-australia-and-tolkien-2 (20/2/25).

 

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