James Morwood

On Sunday 4 February 2018, Wadham College hosted a memorial service for James Morwood in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, attended by 400 people. A number of friends, colleagues and former students, including Richard Curtis, paid tribute to him.

After publishing nearly 30 books, including The Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary, its successor, A Dictionary of Latin Words and Phrases, The Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek, and Our Greek and Latin Roots, Morwood had the opportunity towards the end of his life of working on two more scholarly editions of Greek and Latin texts with outstanding collaborators. The first of these, published in 2017, was a translation and commentary on Iphigenia at Aulis with Christopher Collard, "required reading for anyone interested in this Greek tragedy." This work completed a project to produce new editions of all the extant plays of Euripides started by Collard 40 years ago.

Morwood’s final collaboration was with Stephen Heyworth, his colleague at Wadham College, Oxford, with whom he had worked on A Commentary on Propertius, Book 3 six years previously. Their new book, A Commentary on Vergil Aeneid 3 (also 2017) was seen as a curious choice by some reviewers, because of the perceived “dullness” of Book 3 - there aren’t enough “Odyssean heroics”. Heyworth and Morwood reject this view as outdated, preferring to concentrate on Vergil’s poetics and influences, with James Taylor noting the usefulness of its "panoply of intertexts."

James Morwood died suddenly while swimming in the sea off northern Greece on 10 September 2017. At the inquest in Oxford, the Coroner accepted the diagnosis of the Oxford pathologist that Morwood had died of 'dry drowning'. "It is a form of drowning where the water hits his larynx and sends shockwaves to his heart.” His funeral, held at Oxford on 13 October, celebrated the warmth of his personality, his love of fun, and his role as an inspirational teacher, motifs which were reiterated in several obituaries. Ed Gorman in The Times quoted the comedy screenwriter Richard Curtis, who edited The Harrovian with Morwood while at Harrow, saying, 'It's no exaggeration to say that everything I do now started with James.'

The Medea was part of a major project undertaken with Oxford University Press to provide new translations of all 19 of Euripides’ extant plays, including the disputed Rhesus. This collection was published in five volumes as the Oxford World's Classics Euripides series (republished in a revised edition in 2016). Morwood translated and provided notes for three volumes in the series: Medea and other plays, Bacchae and other plays, and The Trojan Women and other plays. He also provided notes for the other two volumes, Orestes and Other Plays, and Heracles and Other Plays which were translated by Robin Waterfield. Introductions to all five volumes were provided by the classicist Edith Hall.

In 2007 Morwood revisited Euripides with a new scholarly edition of Suppliant Women. In her review, Aurelie Wach of Université Lille contrasts this work with the rival edition from Christopher Collard (1975) which Morwood himself describes as "magnificent" in his introduction:

Mount didn’t budge. The final chapter of his book Carpe Diem, published two years later in 2006, is entitled “Dumbing up, or death to the Cambridge Latin Course”.

Morwood was no ivory tower classicist, and he enjoyed a good fight. When the journalist Harry Mount wrote in The Spectator (2004) about the supposed demise of Classics in UK schools, Morwood wrote a powerful riposte, which The Spectator published in full under the title ‘’The pluperfect is doing nicely’’.

The Oxford translations are in prose rather than verse, and Otto Steinmayer observes that "Morwood was quite plainly not attempting to translate Euripides in a striking, fanciful, poetic way. . . these versions are not for the stage." Nevertheless, the availability of a fresh translation of Rhesus did lead to at least one new dramatisation of that play, presented at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, under the direction of George Adam Kovacs in 2001. In her review, Elizabeth Scharffenberger has this to say about the status of this controversial play:

In 1996 Morwood moved to Oxford University as Grocyn Lecturer in charge of the language teaching for the Classics Faculty, retiring from this role in 2003. Also in 1996 he was elected to a Fellowship at Wadham College, where he taught and served as Dean of Degrees, and Steward of Common Room. In 2000 he became Dean of Wadham College, holding the position until 2006. He was appointed editor of the Wadham Gazette in 2003, and became an Emeritus Fellow in 2006. He continued to teach Wadham undergraduates Greek tragedy, Homer and prose composition.

Following the early adoption of the original course at Wisconsin-Madison, and schools in St Louis, a specifically American Edition was published in 1996. A new College Edition adapted for an undergraduate readership and abbreviated so that it can be taught within two semesters (or a year) was published in 2012.

Morwood was appointed president of the London Association of Classical Teachers for 1995–1996, and subsequently president of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers (JACT) for 1999–2001.

His best-known work is The Oxford Latin Course (1987–92, with Maurice Balme, new ed, 2012), whose popularity in the USA led to the publication of a specifically American edition in 1996. Morwood is credited with helping to ensure the survival - even flourishing - of Classical education into the twenty-first century, both in the UK and the USA.

Morwood had a long association with the Joint Association of Classical Teachers and with its Greek Summer School, which was launched in London in 1968, continued at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, and is currently held annually at Bryanston School in Dorset. The JACT Summer School has played an important part in the preservation of ancient Greek as a significant subject in the UK. Morwood taught beginners, intermediate and advanced groups at the school regularly since 1970. He served as its Director of Studies, and on seven occasions as its Director, starting in 1986 when he took over from the founder, David Raeburn.

James Morwood taught Classics and English at Harrow School from 1966 to 1996, and was Head of Classics from 1979. His additional role as school Librarian provided him with some of the material for his first book, The Life and Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Sheridan attended Harrow School from 1762–68, and some of his papers were archived there.

Morwood was particularly incensed by Mount’s dismissal of the Cambridge Latin Course, saying: “His denunciation of the Cambridge Latin Course as ‘the evil Latin-for-idiots school textbooks’ is blind to the fact that it was this very course which rescued Latin from an apparently terminal decline in the 1960s.”

James Henry Weldon Morwood (25 November 1943 – 10 September 2017) was an English classicist and author. He taught at Harrow School, where he was Head of Classics, and at Oxford University, where he was a Fellow of Wadham College, and also Dean. He wrote almost thirty books, ranging from biography to translations and academic studies of Classical literature.

James Henry Weldon Morwood was born in 1943 in Belfast, the second son of James and Kathleen Morwood. His father was a doctor from Belfast, his mother a Californian and graduate of UCLA. They met in New York in 1939, married there and then boarded a ship to the UK after war was declared.

James Morwood was co-author with Maurice Balme (1925–2012) of The Oxford Latin Course, published in three Parts from 1987 to 1992. This course is targeted at Secondary Schools in the UK, and uses the "reading (inductive) method" in its approach to teaching the language. It was soon adopted in America, among others by Professor Jeffrey Wills, University of Wisconsin-Madison, who characterised the "readings" by their "reuse of basic vocabulary and their length – both of which fulfill tenets of the inductive approach."