J.R.R. Tolkien trained as a spy, Telegraph reports

[Michael]

This is for real, folks.

JRR Tolkien trained as British spy
The novelist JRR Tolkien secretly trained as a Government spy in the run up to the Second World War, new documents have disclosed.

Tolkien, one of his generation's most respected linguists, was ''earmarked'' to crack Nazi codes in the event that Germany declared war.

Intelligence chiefs singled him and a 'cadre' of other intellectuals to work at Bletchley Park, the codebreaking centre in Buckinghamshire.

Its staff - which included Alan Turing, the gay codebreaker - would later decipher the 'impenetrable' Enigma machines.

This saved Britain from German conquest by allowing the Navy to intercept and destroy Hitler's U-Boats.

Read the full article here.

[Alcuin]

I came to cross-post this same story here.

It looks as if Tolkien was recruited for his formidable philological skills. A master of Germanic languages in particular – he taught himself Gothic in 1910, before he entered Oxford (in particular, see Letter 272) – Tolkien’s insights into the construction and use of language could have proven extremely valuable, particularly against native German (Deutsche) speakers.

[Alvin Eriol]

I seem to recall that before the Downfall of 2003, some discussion related to this came up; I think it was the member who then went by the handle "Ranger of Ithilien" (is he still around?) who wanted to start a thread on it.

At that time, I think there was just rumor & speculation JRRT was recruited to work for the war ministry in some capacity, the exact nature of which was not known. I think we speculated about code breaking, code creation, and suchlike involving languages, but I figured a guy with such wideranging intellect he found pleasure in almost inadvertently inventing a new calendar would be hard to pigeonhole anyway.

[Michael]

I don't recall Ranger of Ithilien or anyone speculating that, but I'll take your word for it Alvin because when I saw the story earlier this evening a sort of vague feeling of Deja Vu did pass over me. I just never wrote anything about Tolkien's possible war-time spywork myself.

[Michael]

Okay, this was not so much news for some Tolkien scholars as I thought. Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull had already documented Tolkien's training. And they say he was notified his service would not be needed.

[Alcuin]

It doesn’t look as if Tolkien were asked to be a “spy” but rather a code-breaker.

Someone posting in the Tolkien Guide blog which you cited, Michael, under the moniker “Findegil” and signed as “Wayne & Christina” refers to Letters, note for letter 35, p. 436. I just read the note again, which contains most of the pertinent information in the Telegraph article.

But in October 1939, [Tolkien] was informed that his services would not be required for the present, and in the event he never worked as a cryptographer.

So this information was uncovered by Humphrey Carter or Christopher Tolkien.

Your familiarity with the information may be from Tolkien Guide, Letters, or both. It sounded vaguely familiar to me, too, but I couldn’t pin it down, either.