Yet it was as well for Tolkien that among the second-year men at his college were a couple of Catholics, who sought him out and made sure that he settled in. After that, he made friends quickly, though he had to be careful about money, for he only had a tiny income, and it was not easy to live economically in a society designed for the tastes of the rich. His ‘scout’ brought breakfast to his rooms every morning, and this could be restricted to a frugal meal of toast and coffee; but there was a tradition of entertaining one’s friends to breakfast, and this demanded that something more substantial should be provided at one’s own expense. Lunch was a mere ‘commons’ of bread, cheese, and beer, again brought to his rooms by the scout; while dinner, taken formally in Hall, was not an expensive meal; but it was pleasant at dinner to accept an offer of beer or wine from one’s friends, and of course this gesture had to be returned. When the ‘battel’ or college account was presented for payment each Saturday morning it could be unpleasantly high. Then there were clothes to be bought, and a few pieces of furniture to be found for his rooms, for the college provided only the bare necessities. The cost soon mounted, and although Oxford tradesmen were accustomed to allowing almost unlimited credit they had to be paid in the end. After a year Tolkien wrote that he had ‘a good few bills unaccounted for’, and added: ‘Money matters are not very cheerful.’
He had soon thrown himself wholeheartedly into university activities. He played rugger, though he did not become a leading figure in the college team. He did not row, for that sport above all at Oxford was the preserve of public-school men, but he joined the college Essay Club and the Dialectical Society. He also took part in the Stapeldon, the college debating society; and for good measure he started his own club. It was called the Apolausticks (‘those devoted to self-indulgence’) and it was chiefly composed of freshmen like himself. There were papers, discussions, and debates, and there were also large and extravagant dinners. It was one degree more sophisticated than the teas in the school library, but it was an expression of the same instinct that had helped to create the T.C.B.S. Indeed Tolkien was at his happiest in groups of cronies where there was good talk, plenty of tobacco (he was now firmly dedicated to a pipe, with occasional excursions into expensive cigarettes), and male company.
At Oxford the company had to be male. Admittedly there were a number of women students attending lectures, but they lived in ladies’ colleges, grim enclaves on the outskirts of the city; and they had to be severely chaperoned whenever they approached a young man. In any case the men really preferred each other’s company. The majority of them were fresh from the male preserves of the public school and they gladly accepted the masculine tone of Oxford.
They also used among themselves a curious slang, which converted breakfast to brekker, lecture to lekker, the Union to the Ugger, and a sing-song and a practical joke to a sigger-sogger and a pragger-jogger. Tolkien adopted this manner of speech, and he also joined enthusiastically in the Town versus Gown ‘rags’ that were popular at the time. Here is his account of a not untypical evening’s entertainment:
‘At ten to nine we heard a distant roar of voices and knew that there was something on foot so we dashed out of College and were in the thick of the fun for two hours. We “ragged” the town and the police and the proctors all together for about an hour. Geoffrey and I “captured” a bus and drove it up to Cornmarket making various unearthly noises followed by a mad crowd of mingled varsity and “townese”. It was chockfull of undergrads before it reached the Carfax. There I addressed a few stirring words to a huge mob before descending and removing to the “maggers memugger” or the Martyr’s Memorial where I addressed the crowd again. There were no disciplinary consequences of all this!’
This kind of behaviour, noisy, brash, and boorish, was more common among the upper-class undergraduates than among the ‘poor scholars’ like Tolkien, the majority of whom avoided such pranks and devoted themselves to their studies; but Tolkien was too sociable to be left out of anything lively that was happening. Partly as a result, he was not doing much work.
He was reading Classics, and he had to go to regular lectures and tutorials, but Exeter College had no resident classical tutor in his first two terms, and by the time the post was filled (by E. A. Barber, a good scholar but a dry teacher) Tolkien had got into slack ways. By now he was bored with Latin and Greek authors and was far more excited by Germanic literature. He had no interest in lectures on Cicero and Demosthenes and was glad to escape to his rooms where he could go on working at his invented languages. Yet there was one area of the syllabus that interested him. For his special subject he had chosen Comparative Philology, and this meant that he attended classes and lectures given by the extraordinary Joseph Wright.
Joe Wright was a Yorkshireman, a truly self-made man who had worked his way up from the humblest origins to become Professor of Comparative Philology. He had been employed in a woollen-mill from the age of six, and at first this gave him no chance to learn to read and write. But by the time he was fifteen he was jealous of his workmates who could understand the newspapers, so he taught himself his letters. This did not take very long and only increased his desire to learn, so he went to night-school and studied French and German. He also taught himself Latin and mathematics, sitting over his books until two in the morning and rising again at five to set out for work. By the time he was eighteen he felt that it was his duty to pass on his knowledge to others, so he began a night-school in the bedroom of his widowed mother’s cottage, charging his workmates twopence a week for tuition. When he was twenty-one he decided to use his savings to finance a term’s study at a German university, so he took a boat to Antwerp and walked stage by stage to Heidelberg, where he became interested in philology. So this former mill-hand studied Sanskrit, Gothic, Old Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Russian, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old and Middle High German, and Old English, eventually taking a doctorate. Returning to England he established himself in Oxford, where he was soon appointed Deputy Professor of Comparative Philology. He could afford the lease of a small house in Norham Road, where he engaged a housekeeper. He lived with the native economy of a true Yorkshireman: he used to drink beer which he bought in a small barrel, but he thought that it went too quickly, so he arranged with Sarah the housekeeper that she should buy it and he should pay for each glass as he consumed it. He continued to work without ceasing, beginning to write a series of language primers, among which was the Gothic book that proved such a revelation to Tolkien. Most important of all, he began his English Dialect Dictionary that was eventually published in six huge volumes. He himself had never lost his Yorkshire accent, and he remained fluent in the dialect of his native village. Nightly he sat up into the small hours working. His house was semi-detached, and in the other half of the building lived Dr Neubauer, Reader in Rabbinical Literature. Neubauer’s eyes were bad and he could not work by artificial light. When Joe Wright went to bed at dawn he would knock on the wall to wake his neighbour, calling out ‘Good morning!’, and Neubauer would reply ‘Good night!’
Wright married a former pupil. Two children were born to them, but both died in childhood. Nevertheless the Wrights carried on a stoic and lively existence in a huge house built to Joe’s design in the Banbury Road. In 1912 Ronald Tolkien came to Wright as a pupil, and ever afterwards remembered ‘the vastness of Joe Wright’s dining-room table, when I sat alone at one end learning the elements of Greek philology from glinting glasses in the further gloom’. Nor was he ever likely to forget the huge Yorkshire teas given by the Wrights on Sunday afternoons, when Joe would cut gargantuan slices from a heavyweight plum cake, and Jack the Aberdeen terrier would perform his party trick of licking his lips noisily when his master pronounced the Gothic word for fig-tree, smakka-bagms.
As a teacher, Wright communicated to Tolkien his huge enthusiasm for philology, the subject that had raised him from penniless obscurity. Wright was always a demanding teacher, which was just what Tolkien needed. He had begun to feel a little superior to his fellow-classicists,