19 June 1926 Trinity Full Term ends at Oxford.
23 June 1926 Encaenia (an annual procession to the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford to hear an oration in Latin, to commemorate founders and benefactors, and to witness the conferring of honorary degrees). During his years at Oxford, Tolkien will usually attend Encaenia, and with his wife (while her health permitted) also the garden party following the ceremonies.
25 June 1926 Tolkien replies to an enquiry from Willard G. Harding, about the word gemowe, which Tolkien has not encountered before.
End of June 1926 Tolkien attends a dinner at Leeds for departing senior members of the faculty.
3 July 1926 Term ends at Leeds.
16 August 1926 Tolkien writes in his diary that he has done ‘a little typing of part of Tinúviel’ (quoted in The Lays of Beleriand, p. 150). This is the first mention of the typescript (by this date already in progress) of the Lay of Leithian, here called in full The Gest of Beren Son of Barahir and Lúthien the Fay Called Tinúviel the Nightingale or The Lay of Leithian, Release from Bondage. The typescript incorporates emendations made on the earlier manuscript and includes further changes. It is not clear if he has done any more work on the poem since he reached line 757, the end of Canto III in September 1925. The manuscript of Canto IV is completed in March 1928.
?Summer 1926 While the Tolkien family are having a picnic on the banks of the Cherwell, Michael trips over willow roots and falls into the river. Tolkien, wearing his best tennis flannels, jumps in to rescue his son. – Summer 1926 is the earliest date, if probably the least likely, among several considered for the moment when Tolkien, in the midst of marking School Certificate examination papers, wrote the opening words of The Hobbit (‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’). See further, article on *The Hobbit in Reader’s Guide.
October 1926 Tolkien is admitted to a non-stipendiary professorial fellowship at Pembroke College.
17 October 1926 Michaelmas Full Term begins. Tolkien’s scheduled lectures and classes for this term are: the Old English Exodus on Tuesdays at 10.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 19 October; Gothic on Tuesdays at 5.30 p.m., place to be arranged, beginning 19 October; The Verse of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader on Thursdays at 10.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 21 October; Old English Philology on Thursdays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 21 October; Old Icelandic Texts (Class) on Thursdays at 5.30 p.m., place to be arranged, beginning 21 October; King Horn on Fridays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 22 October; and Icelandic Discussion Class on Fridays at 5.30 p.m., place to be arranged, beginning 22 October.
Michaelmas Term 1926 Tolkien is nominated to serve as an examiner in the Honour School of English Language and Literature from Hilary Term 1927 to Hilary Term 1929.
21 October 1926 Tolkien replies to an enquiry from Willard G. Harding about the etymology of sag.
5 November 1926 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Board meeting. Meetings are usually held in the Board Room of the Clarendon Building, and in this period (when scheduled) at 3.30 p.m. on Fridays. Tolkien is appointed an elector to the Jesus Professorship of Celtic until Michaelmas Term 1928. (He will be reappointed continuously until Michaelmas Term 1963, but only in 1947 will he take part in an election.) – English Faculty Board meetings are always preceded by a meeting of the Applications Committee, which deals with matters concerning research students and presents their decisions for approval by the full Board. See note for 4 November 1927. The Applications Committee has appointed Tolkien supervisor of Ruth A. Crook of Somerville College, a probationer B.Litt. student who wishes to work on a Middle English subject.
10 November 1926 Tolkien attends a Pembroke College meeting.
16 November 1926 Tolkien, now a member of the English Faculty Library Committee, attends a special meeting held in the Library, with George S. Gordon, David Nichol Smith, Edith Wardale, and the Librarian. They discuss the mixed response of the colleges to a proposal that there be an annual £1 subscription for use of the Library from undergraduates reading for the School of English.
17 November 1926 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Exeter College Essay Club at 8.30 p.m. in the Rector’s lodgings. He reads a paper on the Elder Edda, postponed from 12 May. According to a report in the Stapeldon Magazine for December 1926, ‘the reader, after sketching the character and historical background of the Edda, described certain of the poems. He also gave a number of translations and readings from the Icelandic which demonstrated the peculiar poetic and musical qualities of the language’ (‘Essay Club’, p. 96).
9 December 1926 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Board meeting. He is appointed, with George S. Gordon, David Nichol Smith, *F.P. Wilson, and Edith Wardale, to a committee to draft a lecture schedule for the academic year 1927–8, to be reported to the Board at the first meeting in Trinity Term 1927. (Tolkien will be re-appointed to this committee until at least 1931.) He is also appointed, with George S. Gordon, H.F.B. Brett-Smith, David Nichol Smith, and Edith Wardale, to a committee to consider the question of a Preliminary Examination in the English School. The Applications Committee has appointed Tolkien and Gordon examiners of the B.Litt. thesis of *Mary Lascelles of Lady Margaret Hall, Alexander and the Earthly Paradise in Medieval English Literature.
11 December 1926 Michaelmas Full Term ends.
20 December 1926 Tolkien, as ‘Father Christmas’, writes a letter to his sons. He tells how the North Polar Bear turned on the taps for the aurora borealis, producing a splendid display (solar magnetic storms in 1926 are notably strong, producing spectacular auroral displays in many places in the northern hemisphere). Tolkien also sends a picture showing the scene with the lights filling the sky, and an envelope with a stamp and inscription written by the Snow Man, Father Christmas’s gardener.
?1927–early 1928 Tolkien draws the attention of C.T. Onions to the use in The Owl and the Nightingale of a phrase about which Onions is writing an article for the Review of English Studies (‘Middle English (i) Wite God, Wite Crist, (ii) God It Wite’, July 1928).
1927 Edith Tolkien gives her husband the desk on which he will later write The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. – Tolkien’s poem The Nameless Land (composed in May 1924) is published in Realities: An Anthology of Verse, ed. G.S. Tancred. – Tolkien rewrites his poem Over Old Hills and Far Away (originally composed ?January–February 1916). – Tolkien possibly writes the first version of his poem Knocking at the Door (*The Mewlips). – In his preface to An Introduction to Old Norse, published in 1927, E.V. Gordon acknowledges his debt to Tolkien in preparing the apparatus of the book, for reading proof of its Grammar, and for making valuable suggestions and corrections. – Tolkien plants two trees in front of 22 Northmoor Road; one is a red leaved prunus which flowers very early, and the other a variety which flowers later.
23 January 1927 Hilary Full Term begins. Tolkien’s scheduled lectures and classes for this term are: the Old English Exodus on Tuesdays at 10.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 25 January; Gothic (Class, continued) on Tuesdays at 5.30 p.m. in Pembroke College, beginning 25 January; The Verse of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader on Thursdays at 10.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 27 January; Old English Philology (Morphology and Vocabulary) on Thursdays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 27 January; Old Icelandic: Völsunga Saga on Thursdays at 5.30 p.m. in Pembroke College, beginning 27 January; King Horn (Textual and Dialectical Comparisons of the Manuscripts) on Fridays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 28 January; and Discussion Class (continued) on Fridays at 5.15 p.m. in the Examination Schools,