After a discussion started by the President, in which the conversation drifted down such byways of language study as are formed by the eccentricities of James Joyce & Gertrude Stein, the meeting was declared informal, but continued until after midnight.
(Johnson Society Minute Book, PMB/R/6/1/7 1929–37)
Remarkably, the minutes record the name of only one invented language, but not one associated with Tolkien’s legendarium, and which was also omitted from the first publication of ‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. What is also intriguing is that the discussion that followed Tolkien’s paper made mention of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, both of whom are referenced in Tolkien’s accompanying notes (see pp. 91, 100).
In his edition of ‘A Secret Vice’ Christopher Tolkien speculates on a possible second delivery of this paper:
The manuscript was later hurriedly revised here and there, apparently for a second delivery of the paper long after – the words ‘more than 20 years’ were changed to ‘almost 40 years’. (Monsters, p. 3)
The manuscript does indeed contain a number of emendations, but many of them seem to be contemporary with the first delivery (see pp. 43, 44, 45). There are however three pieces of internal evidence that point to a possible second delivery, approximately 15–20 years from the first one: in addition to the emendation mentioned by Christopher Tolkien in the quotation above, Tolkien changed the words ‘this society’ to ‘this or any other society of philologists’ and the words ‘for a literary society’ to ‘for a learned society’ (see pp. 11, 12). Bearing in mind that the Johnson Society was – at least nominally – a literary society, it is possible that ‘A Secret Vice’ was delivered again to a Society with a philological agenda, c.1945–50. The date is intriguing, as during 1945–6 Tolkien was in the process of composing The Notion Club Papers (Sauron Defeated, pp. 145–327), a novel that was left unfinished, but which explores fascinating ideas on language and myth (see Fimi 2008, pp. 82–3). This novel also introduced a new invented language, Adûnaic. However, we have not been able to locate any concrete evidence for a second delivery of the paper. It may be that Tolkien prepared it – or began preparing it – but this second delivery did not happen. If it did occur, it may be that a record exists which will be located in the future. However, it is worth noting that Tolkien became relatively well-known after the publication of The Hobbit. It would, therefore, be curious that a second delivery has not been recorded in any of the Oxford periodicals.
The Tolkien who first delivered ‘A Secret Vice’ on 29 November 1931 was a man actively engaged in social, academic and creative interests, all of which very much informed each other. In terms of his academic career, Tolkien had been Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College for a little over five years. During this time, he had a full schedule of teaching, tutorials, attending faculty meetings, supervising students’ theses, and, to make some additional money, external examining. Since arriving from Leeds, he had been developing a growing body of his own academic work and research. While at the University of Leeds, Tolkien had co-edited a new edition of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight with his colleague E.V. Gordon (1925). Between 1924 and 1927 Tolkien had been a regular reviewer of philological books and publications (‘Philology: General Works’) in The Year’s Work in English Studies. In 1925, he published several articles in The Review of English Studies, including ‘Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography’ and ‘The Devil’s Coach-Horses’, both of which explored various philological cruxes of Old and Middle English. For example, in ‘The Devil’s Coach-Horses’ Tolkien argued that a specific early English word ‘eaueres’ is not, in fact, a survival of the Old-English word ‘eofor’ (boar) but a word that had developed in early Middle English, ‘aver’, which can be translated as ‘“property, estate” but also “a cart-horse”’ (Solopova 2014, p. 232). Also in 1925, Tolkien contributed a translation to Rhys Robert’s article ‘Gerald of Wales and the Survival of Welsh’ in which he offered a reconstructed version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s prophecy on the survival of the Welsh language using a late twelfth-century version of South Midlands English (see Anderson 2005, pp. 230–4). In 1928, Tolkien published a six-page ‘Foreword’ to Walter Edward Haigh’s A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, a dialect that preserved evidence of influence from the Norse invasions in the eighth and ninth centuries on English word-forms (see Croft 2007, pp. 184–8). In 1929, Tolkien published his landmark analysis, ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’, in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association. In this highly detailed article, he demonstrated that two groups of disparate devotional works from the West Midlands of the twelfth century shared close similarities in phonology, grammar and spelling. Tolkien coined the term ‘AB language’ (bringing together labels used to designate the two groups of manuscripts) to suggest that, when taken together, these documents reflected the preservation of a local English scribal tradition, descended from late literary Old English, and which still persisted in the late twelfth century (see ESMEA and AW). On 16 May 1931, Tolkien delivered a paper to the Philological Society in Oxford on Chaucer’s use of Northern dialects in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ of The Canterbury Tales. Tolkien described Chaucer’s representation of Northern English dialect in the speech of the scheming clerks of ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ as Chaucer’s ‘linguistic joke’ (Reeve’s Tale, p. 2). A characteristic that much of the above academic work shares is a focus on the uses and intricacies of language. In all his academic exploration, Tolkien employed the philological or comparative method to uncover, reconstruct and fill in the gaps in the meanings of lost words, names and their attendant stories.
Another aspect of academic endeavour with which Tolkien was actively engaged at this time was his work to reform the Oxford English School syllabus, in particular the reunification of the teaching of philology (‘lang’) with literature (‘lit’). In his application for the position of Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Tolkien wrote that one of his aims would be ‘to advance … the growing neighbourliness of linguistic and literary studies, which can never be enemies except by misunderstanding or without loss to both’ (Letters, p. 13), and when he took the Chair at Pembroke he duly sought to achieve his aim. In an essay published in The Oxford Magazine for 29 May 1930, Tolkien called for a reform of the syllabus that would put a stop to the artificial separation of the study of language from literature and called for the study of philology which combined both areas and which ‘is essential to the critical apparatus of student and scholar’ (Oxford Magazine, p. 778). Shortly thereafter, in 1931, Tolkien’s reformed syllabus was accepted and would remain in place for many years. His commitment to the harmonious co-existence of ‘lit’ and ‘lang’ evokes his dictum about the ‘coeval and congenital’ nature of mythology and language in his creative writing.
J.R.R. Tolkien had, by this time, found a great friend and ally in his pursuit of syllabus reform, in the Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College, Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis. Tolkien first met Lewis at an English Faculty meeting at Merton College on 11 May 1926. Lewis would record his first impressions of Tolkien in his diary: ‘a smooth, pale, fluent little chap … No harm in him: only needs a smack or so’ (cited in Biography, p. 143). Initially, Lewis, being in the ‘literature’ camp, was not a great supporter of Tolkien’s proposed ‘lit and ‘lang’ reforms. However, by 1927, Tolkien had got Lewis involved in his newly formed informal club to read Old Norse sagas in the original, ‘The Coalbiters’ (from the Old Norse kolbítar, meaning those who stay so close to the fire in the winter that they virtually bite the coal), and they became great friends and supporters of each other’s academic and, to greater and lesser extents, creative work. Lewis would also introduce Tolkien to his colleague Owen Barfield (1898–1997), whose theories on the original unity of language and myth, expressed in such works as his Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928), would be a considerable influence on Tolkien’s thoughts about language (see below, pp. lvii–lix). In the early 1930s Lewis, Barfield and Tolkien would be joined by other colleagues to form a new informal literary club, the Inklings, which has been celebrated as one of the most important literary groups of the twentieth