Tolkien the Spy!

 Some interesting stuff in the piece

Tolkien's involvement with the war effort was revealed for the first time this week in a new exhibition at GCHQ, the new name for GCCS, the Government's spy base in Cheltenham, Glos.

'While he didn't sign up as was probably intended, he did complete three days' training and was 'keen' to do more.

''Why he failed to join remains a mystery. There is no paperwork suggesting a motive, so we can only assume that he wanted to concentrate on his writing career.''

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, or 'JRR' Tolkien as he became known, was among a string of intellectuals singled out for service by the Foreign Office.

The GCCS began preparing for a second World War in the late 1930s, and knew the importance of establishing a codebreaking centre to defeat the German forces.

The director of GCCS, known only as 'Alastair G Denniston', drew up a list of 50 possible candidates ''earmarked for service'' in the event of war.

Denniston was given the names by dons at Britain's two leading universities, Oxford and Cambridge, whom had worked with the Government in the First World War.

Tolkien, a professor of Anglo Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and professor of English Language and Literature from 1945 to 1959, was put forward.

In a letter to the Foreign Office dated 25 November 1938, Denniston says: ''I have been in touch with both universities and have established direct contact through dons who worked with us during the war, so that now we have a list of about 50 men earmarked for service under the Foreign Office in the event of war.

''I enclose a copy of this list so that you may know the type of men we intend to get.''

Tolkien and 12 others agreed to a ''tester'' day at GCCS HQ in London, where he was given training in Scandinavian languages and Spanish.

He visited the base for three consecutive days between March 27th and March 29th 1939 - six months before the war broke out.

A record of his training carries the word ''keen'' beside his name.

Those who passed the course, and agreed to sign-up, were offered an annual wage of £500 - the equivalent of around £50,000 today.

But Tolkien - who is assumed to have passed the course with flying colours - rejected the offer.

The historian joked: ''We simply don't know why he didn't join. Perhaps it was because we declared war on Germany and not Mordor.''

Isn't it odd that Tolkien, being so famously short of cash that he had to mark papers during vacation would turn down the equivalent of £50 grand a year?

Next thing we know, people are going to claim that Tolkien did spy, and that he left coded messages in his books. 

The irritating thing is, I'm sure I read ages ago that T. 'did not take up Government work, as many dons did' (paraphrase from memory, 'but joined the ARP. And I'm just as sure that code breaking was mentioned; in keeping with T.'s abilities. Years ago, this was. But can I remember where I read it!?

Hmm... higher and deeper and darker...

Hm, just wondering... that article captainbingo brought to our attention says that J.R.R. Tolkien did not sign the contract, while the note to letter 35 which geordie refers to indicates that Tolkien got informed that his service was not needed at that point of time - which would be different from not signing a contract.

Originally posted by Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien, Note 1 to letter 35 In January 1929 Tolkien was asked whether in the event of a national emergency (i.e. war) he would be prepared to work in the cryptographical department of the Foreign Office. He agreed, and apparently attended a four-day course of instruction at the Foreign Office beginning on 27 March. But in October 1939 he was informed that his services would not be required for the present, and in the event he never worked as a cryptographer

If we than take a further look on letters written whithin 1939 we will find letter 37 from 19 December 1939, where Tolkien informes Stanley Unwin that he had an accident just before the outbreak of the war (war broke out 1 September 1939) and that that took some time to heal and that his wife was quite ill too - they feared for a while it would be cancer.
We will also find letters to Christopher Tolkien later during the war, where J.R.R. Tolkien said that he would now in this war be a better soldier than he had been in the WWI. (I don't remember the number of that letter right now, but I think it was one of thoses send to Christopher when he was in South Africa)

Considering all that information I would think that it was a) a good reason to refuse this duty until at least his and his wifes health was restored but b) I woud even more find those information being a good reason for the Foreign Office to tell Tolkien that his duties are not needed at this point in time. Because on one hand side they might not have known for sure in October how long the recovery would take and would rather prefer somebody of better health so that they could be a bit more sure that this person would be available when the call has to be made and on the other hand side having to leave somebody ill at home to do the duty for you land might - if detected by the enemy - deliver a good opportunity for the enemy to try to blackmail somebody . Not that I would assume that Tolkien might have switched sides, but it might have robbed him of some energy needed to do this type of work.

He might have written a note to the Foreign Office that due to his own and his wifes illnes he would not be able to do the service they requested at this point in time too - for me that would make sense why both sources get a different origin of why Tolkien was no part of the decoding group, so both sources might be right even though they seem to be mutually exclusive.

Going back a bit - regarding Tolkien's salary. I don't know what it was in 1939, but according to the Scull-Hammond, Tolkien's salary at Leeds was £800 pa in 1925. When he moved to Oxford his stipend was £1,000. So Dorwiniondil's estimate sounds about right.

I don't know about T. having to stay at Bletchley - it sounds as if Tolkien would be expected to do the work in addition to his responsibilities to the University, and that would be difficult if he had to live on site. Apropos nothing much; some Oxford colleges were taken over by the Foreign Office and/or the War Office - 200 women stationed at Bletchley Park were billeted at Keble. They were transferred to and from Bletchley in what were known as the 'Beauty Buses'!

Tolkien's friend and fellow member of the 'Cave', Leonard Rice-Oxley, was a tutor at Keble and, what with being too old for military service and being a bachelor, stayed on at the college and got some teasing from his friends in the English faculty for being the only man among 200 women!   

This afternoon on the Mythopoeic Society list the question was asked, apropos the Telegraph article, if Tolkien in fact turned down the GCCS job, or if it was as Carpenter reported in his Letters note, that Tolkien was informed that his services were not yet required. We replied that Carpenter presumably based his note on materials in Tolkien's private papers (to which we ourselves did not have access), and this is supported by comments Tolkien made in letters to Allen & Unwin on 15 September and 19 December 1939. For some months after the training course in March that year -- we call it a "training course" in our Chronology (p. 226), Carpenter calls it a "course of instruction", the Telegraph article calls it a "tester", presumably it was all an aptitude test of some sort -- Tolkien assumed that he could be called into service by the Foreign Office at any time. He wrote as much to Philip Unwin on 15 September (we passed over the particular remark in our Chronology summary of the letter), to the effect that he had agreed to the job in the spring, was not yet summoned to it, but it was an open obligation -- Britain was now at war -- and once he was engaged with it, he didn't know how much time it would allow him to devote to outside work. Then on 19 December he wrote to Stanley Unwin (see Letters, p. 44) that he was "uncommandeered still myself, and shall now probably remain so, as there is (as yet) far too much to do here [in the Oxford English School], and I have lost both my chief assistant and his understudy". In the same letter, Tolkien comments on his accident "just before the outbreak of war", on his wife's illness, and that he was now the virtual head of his department, all of which would have been good reasons for the Foreign Office not to call him to work in cryptography at that time -- assuming he was suited to that work in the first place. His words, at least, give no indication that he turned down a position, but rather that it was a case of what Carpenter says in his note, that Tolkien was informed that "his services would not be required for the present".

The Telegraph article (as we went on in our reply on the Mythsoc List) is such a mess. Even had Tolkien gone to work in cryptography, he wouldn't have been a "spy" as the headline has it. Nor was he necessarily "'earmarked' to crack Nazi codes" -- some of the personnel at Bletchley Park were there as language, not cipher, specialists. Its staff were already, before 1939, reading messages enciphered on Enigmas -- the commercial variety if not the more difficult German army and navy Enigmas. The Royal Navy did not exactly use the secret German traffic "to intercept and destroy Hitler's U-Boats", as doing so would have given away the fact that Enigma was not impenetrable. And so forth, and so on. Did the GCHQ historian get things wrong? Did the reporter misunderstand or misquote? Both, maybe. The historian is quoted as making the unwarranted assumption that Tolkien "failed to join" because "he wanted to concentrate on his writing career", and the rather silly remark that "perhaps it was because we declared war on Germany and not Mordor"; and then the reporter carries on in the same vein, with statements such as "the director of GCCS, known only as 'Alastair G. Denniston'", as if Alastair Denniston were an unknown figure, when in fact he's well known in the history of British cryptanalysis.

Wayne and Christina

This latest post by Findegil is as always, spot-on! I've seen it referred to (or, more often, quoted in full) on several other sites. I think it's excellent. Thanks, Wayne & Christina.