The Preface of Vinaver's Edition of Malory: Three Cheerful Things

Reading the Preface of Eugene Vinaver's edition of The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (as the Fourth Doctor said in Logopolis, “Do you really feel up to an explanation?”), and was struck by three cheerful things:

Nothing has been more welcome to me, therefore, than the help and advice I received in the early stages of this work from a scholar-friend, the late Professor E. V. Gordon, whose supreme competence was equalled only by his generosity to fellow workers and his selfless devotion to learning. His untimely death put an end to a collaboration which I valued above all else and to which this edition owes more than words can acknowledge.

And, yes, that's also J. R. R. Tolkien's friend E. V. Gordon, collaborator on the edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the E. V. Gordon better known in ASNaC circles as the author of An Introduction to Old Norse.

Vinaver continues, a bit later:

Several friends, including Sir Edmund Chambers, Professor M. K. Pope, and Professor T. B. W. Reid, were kind enough to read my Introduction in manuscript and give me the benefit of their advice on points of fact and interpretation.

And that's Dorothy L. Sayers's old tutor Mildred K. Pope, on whom Sayers based the character of Miss Lydgate in Gaudy Night.

Vinaver concludes:

As much of this work as belongs to me I dedicate to the memory of Joseph Bédier whose encouragement and example have been my lifelong inspiration. I wish for no higher reward than the knowledge that he would have recognized it as the work of a disciple.

Seriously, it's pure and beautiful old-style academe. This is the air that breathes over those passages in Gaudy Night:

The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript. It was the hand-to-hand struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one’s own personal adventure bulk so large in the scheme of things.

She developed an acute homesickness for Oxford and for the Study of Lefanu – a book which would never have any advertising value, but of which some scholar might some day moderately observe, ‘Miss Vane has handled her subject with insight and accuracy.’ She rang up the Bursar, discovered that she could be accommodated at Shrewsbury, and fled back to Academe.

Yes, I might be feeling a little bit homesick myself…