Tolkien’s return to Oxford from the Great War: a new discovery

I have a new biographical article in the latest Tolkien Studies, written with Peter Gilliver of the Oxford English Dictionary, that fills in an important gap in what we know about Tolkien’s life between his First World War army service and his first civilian job.

There’s an old joke that Tolkien’s hardcore fans are so undiscriminating they would be happy to read his laundry lists. If such fans exist, they’ll be disappointed to hear that in all my years of research I’ve yet to encounter one of these fabled items.

Yet I’ve encountered quite a few other pieces of domestic or professional ephemera among the pages of Tolkien’s manuscripts. Granted, such moments can’t compete with first reading Gandalf’s battle with the Balrog – apparently the yardstick for Tolkienian excitement.¹ Yet I must confess that stumbling on a stray page from an appointments calendar, a shoe shop bill or a jotted to-do list has often given me a thrill. Truly. I’m always looking into the biographical shadows, and the items we generally chuck out can shine a light there – especially when it comes to dates.

Thanks to a discovery of this kind on one of my visits to the Bodleian Library, I have now been able to establish exactly when Tolkien began his first civilian job in the wake of his war service, at the Oxford English Dictionary. My good friend Peter Gilliver lent his in-depth expertise to help corroborate the finding. Our resulting article, ‘The Wanderer’s Return: New Findings on Tolkien in Oxford 1918–19’, has now been published in volume 21 of Tolkien Studies.

Here’s how it happened and what we learned…