Tolkien had long dreamt of returning to Oxford. Throughout his war service he had suffered an ache of nostalgia for his college, his friends, and the way of life that he had led for four years. He was also uncomfortably conscious of wasted time, for he was now twenty-seven and Edith was thirty. But at last they could enjoy what they had long hoped for: ‘Our home together’.
Realising that he had entered a new phase of his life, Tolkien began (on New Year’s Day 1919) to keep a diary in which he recorded principal events and his thoughts on them. After starting it in ordinary handwriting he began instead to use a remarkable alphabet that he had just invented, which looked like a mixture of Hebrew, Greek, and Pitman’s shorthand. He soon decided to involve it with his mythology, and he named it ‘The Alphabet of Rúmil’ after an elvish sage in his stories. His diary entries were all in English but they were now written in this alphabet. The only difficulty was that he could not decide on a final form of it; he kept on altering the letters and changing their use, so that a sign that was used for ‘r’ one week might be used for ‘l’ the next. Nor did he always remember to keep a record of these changes, and after a time he found it difficult to read earlier entries in the diary. Resolutions to stop altering the alphabet and leave it alone were of no avail: a restless perfectionism in this as in so much else made him constantly refine and adjust.
With patience, the diary can be deciphered; and it provides a detailed picture of Tolkien’s new pattern of life. After breakfast he would set out from 50 St John’s Street to the New English Dictionary work-room, which was in the Old Ashmolean building in nearby Broad Street. There, in what he called ‘that great dusty workshop, that brownest of brown studies’, a small group of experts laboured away at producing the most comprehensive dictionary of the English language ever to be compiled. Their work had begun in 1878, and by 1900 the sections covering the letters A to H had been published; but eighteen years later, after delays caused by the war, U to Z was still incomplete. The original editor, Sir James Murray, had died in 1915, and the work was now supervised by Henry Bradley, a remarkable man who had spent twenty years as a clerk to a Sheffield cutler before devoting himself to full-time scholarship and becoming a distinguished philologist.1
Tolkien enjoyed working at the Dictionary, and liked his colleagues, especially the accomplished C. T. Onions. For his first weeks he was given the job of researching the etymology of warm, wasp, water, wick (lamp), and winter. Some indication of the skill that this required may be gathered from a glance at the entry that was finally printed for wasp. It is not a particularly difficult word, but the paragraph dealing with it cites comparable forms in Old Saxon, Middle Dutch, Modern Dutch, Old High German, Middle Low German, Middle High German, Modern German, Old Teutonic, primitive pre-Teutonic, Lithuanian, Old Slavonic, Russian, and Latin. Not surprisingly, Tolkien found that this kind of work taught him a good deal about languages, and he once said of the period 1919–20 when he was working on the Dictionary: ‘I learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life.’ He did his job remarkably well, even by the standards of the Dictionary, and Dr Bradley reported of him: ‘His work gives evidence of an unusually thorough mastery of Anglo-Saxon and of the facts and principles of the comparative grammar of the Germanic languages. Indeed, I have no hesitation in saying that I have never known a man of his age who was in these respects his equal.’
From the Dictionary it was only a short walk home for lunch, and, not long after, for tea. Dr Bradley was an undemanding taskmaster as far as hours were concerned, and in any case the work was scarcely supposed to occupy Tolkien’s entire day. Like many others who were employed at the Dictionary he was expected to fill out his time and his income by teaching in the University. He made it known that he was willing to accept pupils, and one by one the colleges began to respond – chiefly the women’s colleges, for Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh’s badly needed someone to teach Anglo-Saxon to their young ladies, and Tolkien had the advantage of being married, which meant that a chaperon did not have to be sent to his home when he was teaching them.
Soon he and Edith decided that they could afford the rent of a small house, and they found a suitable one just round the corner from their rooms, at 1 Alfred Street (now called Pusey Street). They moved into it in the late summer of 1919, and engaged a cook-housemaid. It was a great joy to have a house of their own. Edith’s piano was brought back from store, and she could play regularly again for the first time in years. She was pregnant once more, but at least she could give birth in her own house and bring up the baby in a proper home. By the spring of 1920 Ronald was earning enough from tuition to give up work at the Dictionary.
Meanwhile he continued to write ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, and one evening he read ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ aloud to the Essay Club at Exeter College. It was well received by an undergraduate audience that included two young men named Nevill Coghill and Hugo Dyson.
Suddenly the family’s plans changed. Tolkien applied for the post of Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds, scarcely expecting to be considered, but in the summer of 1920 he was asked to go for an interview. He was met at the station in Leeds by George Gordon, Professor of English at the university. Gordon had been a prominent member of the English School at Oxford before the war, but Tolkien did not know him, and conversation was a little stilted as they took the tram through the town and up to the university. They started to talk about Sir Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature at Oxford. Tolkien recalled the occasion: ‘I did not in fact think much of Raleigh – he was not, of course, a good lecturer; but some kind spirit prompted me to say that he was “Olympian”. It went well; though I only really meant that he reposed gracefully on a lofty pinnacle above my criticism. I knew privately before I left Leeds that I had got the job.’
1 As a child, Bradley had first learnt to read upside-down by looking at the Bible on his father’s knees during family prayers.