Editing J. R. R. Tolkien (section)

=== Linguistic career ===

{{further|Philology and Middle-earth}}

Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and [[philology]]. He specialized in English philology at university and in 1915 graduated with [[Old Norse]] as his special subject. He worked on the ''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]'' from 1918 and is credited with having worked on a number of words starting with the letter W, including ''[[walrus]]'', over which he struggled mightily.<ref>{{cite book |last=Winchester |first=Simon |title=The meaning of everything: the story of the Oxford English dictionary |date=2003 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=0-19-860702-4 |location=Oxford |oclc=52830480}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Gilliver |first=Peter |title=The ring of words: Tolkien and the Oxford English dictionary |date=2006 |publisher=Oxford University Press |others=Jeremy Marshall, E. S. C. Weiner |isbn=978-0-19-861069-4 |location=Oxford |oclc=65197968}}</ref> In 1920, he became Reader in English Language at the [[University of Leeds]], where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of [[linguistics]] from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English [[heroic verse]], [[history of English]], various [[Old English]] and [[Middle English]] texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory [[Germanic languages|Germanic]] philology, [[Gothic language|Gothic]], [[Old Icelandic]], and [[Middle Welsh language|Medieval Welsh]]. When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at [[Pembroke College, Oxford]], he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "[[Viking revival|Viking Club]]".<ref group="T">{{harvnb|Carpenter|Tolkien|1981|loc=''Letters'' #7, to the Electors of the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford, 27 June 1925}}</ref> He had a certain, if imperfect, knowledge of [[Finnish language|Finnish]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Grotta |first=Daniel |title=J.R.R. Tolkien: architect of Middle Earth |date=1976 |others=Frank Wilson |isbn=0-914294-29-6 |publisher=Running Press |location=Philadelphia |oclc=1991974}}</ref>

Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of [[Race (classification of human beings)|racial]] and linguistic significance", and in his 1955 lecture ''[[English and Welsh]]'', which is crucial to his understanding of race and language, he entertained notions of "inherent linguistic predilections", which he termed the "native language" as opposed to the "cradle-tongue" which a person first learns to speak.<ref>{{cite book |last=Scull |first=Christina |title=The J.R.R. Tolkien companion & guide |date=2006 |publisher=HarperCollins Publishers |others=Wayne G. Hammond |isbn=0-261-10381-4 |location=Hammersmith, London |page=249 |oclc=82367707}}</ref> He considered the [[West Midlands (region)|West Midlands]] dialect of Middle English to be his own "native language", and, as he wrote to [[W. H. Auden]] in 1955, "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)."<ref group="T">{{harvnb|Carpenter|Tolkien|1981|loc=''Letters'' #163 to [[W. H. Auden]], 7 June 1955.}}</ref>