The Walrus and the Waistcoat

By the end of the Great War, the Editors of the OED were struggling somewhat. Their inspiring leader, Sir James Murray, had died in 1915, still doggedly working on the letter T. Most of the younger and abler members of staff had been sent away on active service, or to do other war work, and in June 1918 even Charles Onions, one of the remaining Chief Editors, was summoned to the Admiralty. As early as 1916, William Craigie had noted that the project was in need of someone with expertise in Old and Middle English. Fortunately, one of his former students was to return to Oxford in late 1918 in search of work. Recovering from the illness which had forced him home from the trenches, and with a wife and small child to support, he was understandably grateful for the offer of employment on the staff of the OED, and his linguistic credentials were well known to Craigie, who had tutored him in Old Norse. His name was Ronald Tolkien.

Over the following months, Tolkien established himself as a versatile and diligent member of staff, working on a wide range of words beginning with W (including waistcoat, walrus, wan, and wold), and by late 1920, when he left for a new job as Reader in English Language at Leeds University, he had made a notable contribution. He had also gained a great deal of experience in dealing with the English language, and he was later to say that he had ‘learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life’.

Some of his labours are documented and illustrated in a new book, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, all senior lexicographers at the OED. They trace what can be discovered in the archives from Tolkien's time at the OED, and show how his philological skill and linguistic creativity was brought to bear not only on this work, and on his much respected Middle English Vocabulary of 1922, but also on the growing body of writings embodying his imagined world, with its own myths and languages. The largest section of the book is a series of Word Studies, which look in detail at over a hundred of the English words used, and in some cases revived, remodelled, or invented, by Tolkien in the course of his life's work, such as dwarf and hobbit, mathom and wraith, attercop and dwimmerlaik. We are sure that it will interest not only Tolkien fans, but also language enthusiasts with an interest in the OED.

The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, is published by OUP on 27 April 2006, RRP 12.99, ISBN 0-19-861069-6 (978-0-19-861069-4).