electronic form.
At the end of October or the beginning of November 1918 Tolkien returned to *Oxford following military service, not yet demobilized from the Army but authorized to seek civilian employment. Prospects of an academic appointment were poor; but within a short time, his former tutor in Old Icelandic, William Craigie, promised him work on the staff of the Dictionary. Tolkien was placed, however, not under Craigie himself (who kept his staff small, the better to supervise) but as an assistant to Henry Bradley.
Salary records in the Oxford University Press archives suggest that Tolkien began work on the Dictionary at or near the start of 1919, having settled with his family at 50 St John Street in late 1918. The offices of the Dictionary were only a short walk away, in the Old Ashmolean building in Broad Street. Within them was the Dictionary Room, a ‘great dusty workshop, that brownest of brown studies’, as Tolkien called it in his appreciation of Bradley after the latter’s death (*Henry Bradley, 3 Dec., 1845–23 May, 1923). One of his earliest duties there was to take illustrative quotations in Old and Middle English submitted to the Dictionary by volunteer researchers, against which he would write the forms of words to be defined. Later he drafted dictionary entries themselves, detailing pronunciation, spelling, and etymology, writing definitions, and selecting and copy-editing quotations. His work was then examined and, as necessary, revised by Bradley.
Tolkien contributed to entries for words beginning with the letter W, such as waggle, waistcoat, wallop, walnut, walrus, wampum, warm, wasp, weald, wild, and wold. As Simon Winchester has said, W is ‘reckoned an interesting letter – there are essentially no Greek or Latin derivatives that begin with W, and its words are generally taken, as Bradley put it, “from the oldest strata of the language”’ (The Meaning of Everything (2003), p. 206). The original fascicles of the Dictionary pertinent to Tolkien’s work are W–Wash (published October 1921), Wash–Wavy (May 1923), Wavy–Wezzon (August 1926), Whisking–Wilfulness (November 1924), and Wise–Wyzen (April 1928). Peter M. Gilliver has determined, in his thorough ‘At the Wordface: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work on the Oxford English Dictionary’, in Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight (1995), that the first bundle of word-slips with which Tolkien was concerned was sent to press on 3 April 1919.
On the whole, Bradley was pleased with his assistant’s work. He singled out walnut, walrus, and wampum in his introduction to the fascicle W–Wash as containing ‘etymological facts or suggestions not given in other dictionaries’. And he wrote of Tolkien in support of the latter’s application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon (succeeding Craigie): ‘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’ (*An Application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford by J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor of the English Language in the University of Leeds, June 25, 1925). But Tolkien and his editor did not always agree. In a review of the Whisking–Wilfulness fascicle of the Dictionary for the *Year’s Work in English Studies for 1924, Tolkien noted that in the etymology of wild ‘the connexion with *walþus (wold, weald, forest) is rejected …’ (p. 48). He had asserted this connection in his draft of the entry for wild, and would not be dissuaded.
Tolkien joined the Dictionary staff just as the work was nearly complete (in its original form) through the letter T, with U and W in hand and the editors looking ahead to the end of the alphabet. Work on U and W, however, took longer than expected, there was tension between the editors at the Dictionary and officials at Oxford University Press (*Publishers) over excessive ‘scale’ (the increase in words in the Dictionary relative to those in Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language (1864), a convenient yardstick), especially, at this moment, words in Un-, and there were tensions also among the editors themselves which may have been apparent to their assistants.
While Tolkien’s work for the Dictionary lasted it was a fruitful experience for one who loved language. He once said that he ‘learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life’ (quoted in Biography, p. 101) – although in fact, according to official records, it was a term of fewer than eighteen months. It must also have been a great relief to him, after years in the Army and months in military hospitals, to be again among people with similar interests, and doing something that he enjoyed: digging among the roots of words. But he did not earn enough from this work to support his family, and therefore accepted English students for tutoring (it was common for Dictionary staff to function also within the University). Before long, evidently by the end of May 1920, he earned enough in tuition to give up his post at the Dictionary. By now, he was also writing the glossary, *A Middle English Vocabulary, for *Kenneth Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose. In 1923 he was considered for the editorship of the Dictionary’s Supplement, but apart from already having a job, was thought to not yet have ‘enough driving power’ (Robert Chapman, Oxford University Press, quoted in Peter Gilliver, The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016), p. 360).
In the course of his research for A Middle English Vocabulary Tolkien found uses of words antedating the earliest illustrative quotations given in the Dictionary. He also suggested, for future addition to the Dictionary, at least a quotation from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll, illustrating the word smirkle. These and other notes left by Tolkien, some in the working copies of the Dictionary used by staff, have aided, or will someday aid, the lexicographers who prepare supplements to the Dictionary. In 1969–71, in correspondence with *R.W. Burchfield, Tolkien was concerned with the definition of hobbit to be published in the second supplement to the OED.
On 20 January 1922, at the University of *Leeds, Tolkien gave a lecture on the Dictionary to a joint meeting of the Yorkshire Dialect Society and the English Association (*Societies and clubs). The Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society for January 1922 reported that ‘the lecture was extraordinarily interesting, and the attendance of members of the Yorkshire Dialect Society was unaccountably poor. Members are not to be congratulated on missing this opportunity of hearing an account of the aims of the “N.E.D.” by one who was until lately a distinguished member of its staff of philologists’ (p. 5).
Peter Gilliver notes in his history of the Dictionary that in January 1929 C.T. Onions gained an assistant, Monica Dawn, a graduate of the Leeds English school, where Tolkien ‘had apparently given her special training in the [dictionary] work. She was to be joined in July by another former pupil of Tolkien’s, Stefanyja Olszewska’ (p. 391). Another graduate of Leeds, *Stella Mills, also joined the staff in summer 1930 on Tolkien’s recommendation.
For comic effect in his story *Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), Tolkien quoted the Oxford English Dictionary definition of blunderbuss, attributing it to the ‘Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford’. The reference is presumed to be to the Dictionary editors Murray, Bradley, Craigie, and Onions.
J.S. Ryan noted in ‘Lexical Impacts’, Amon Hen 76 (November 1985) and 77 (January 1986), that numerous quotations from Tolkien’s writings are used as illustrative examples in the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (1972–82), ed. R.W. Burchfield. Deirdre Greene has argued that Tolkien’s predilection for historical lexicography influenced the plot structures and logic of *The Hobbit and *The Lord of the Rings: see her ‘Tolkien’s Dictionary Poetics: The Influence of the OED’s Defining Style on Tolkien’s Fiction’, in Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight (1995).
