Tolkien by Devin Brown;

Author:Devin Brown;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781426796715
Publisher: United Methodist Publishing House
Published: 2014-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Gainful Employment

Though Tolkien would not receive his official discharge from military services until a number of months later, he visited Oxford in October 1918 to inquire about possible teaching openings. Unlike today, at that time graduate degrees were relatively rare, and positions at universities were given often to candidates having only an undergraduate degree. (Further muddling the issue was the fact that Oxford graduates typically were awarded a Master of Arts degree more or less automatically after a certain period of time had passed since receiving their Bachelor of Arts. In this manner, Tolkien was given his M.A. in October 1919.) But with the student population still depleted, academic postings were nearly impossible to come by. When Tolkien met with William Craigie, his former tutor in Old Icelandic invited him to join the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary, also known as the OED. In January 1919, once again living in Oxford but this time with a wife and son, Tolkien began work as an assistant lexicographer and was assigned to words beginning with W.

During the year and a half that he served on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary, Tolkien wrote definitions, compiled etymologies, and tracked down the earliest recorded uses of a list of words that included waggle, waistcoat, waiter, wallop, walnut, walrus, wampum, wanderer, warm, wasp, warlock, wild, winter, and wold. He later reported that he learned more in those months working as a lexicographer than during any other equal period of time in his life. It should be noted that long after Tolkien’s work at the dictionary was over, two words from his fiction were deemed to have achieved currency in English, and because of this, hobbit and orc were added to the OED.

After getting settled back in Oxford, Tolkien also began to accept students. Because he was married, he was particularly sought out to serve as the tutor for pupils from women’s colleges such as St. Hugh’s, St. Hilda’s, Somerville, and Lady Margaret Hall, since when they came to the Tolkiens’ home for lessons, they would not require a chaperone to come with them.

In 1920 Tolkien was offered a post at Leeds University, located about 160 miles north of Oxford, where he would teach for the next five years, beginning first at the rank of Reader, but being appointed to a new Professorship in English Language in 1924 at the rather young age of thirty-two. During his time at Leeds, Tolkien collaborated with E. V. Gordon on a new edition of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which would go on to become the most widely used text of the poem studied in Britain and the U.S. Together Tolkien and Gordon also helped to found the Leeds Viking Club, an informal organization dedicated to singing and reading Old Icelandic sagas—as well as to a good deal of beer drinking and merriment as members of the club recited original songs and poems, some serious but many comic, in Old English, Gothic, Old Norse, and other extinct Germanic languages.

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