JRR Tolkien trained as British spy

[Alcuin]

There is actually a footnote on this in Letters of JRR Tolkien for Letter 35. The letter is on pp 41-43; the footnote is on p 436. It contains most of the pertinent information in the Telegraph article.

In January 1939 Tolkien was asked whether in the event of a national emergency (i.e. war) he would 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.

Letters was published in 1981. The selections were made by Tolkien’s official biographer, Humphrey Carter, with assistance of Christopher Tolkien, so one of them actually “uncovered” this information long before its release as an old war secret.

It is also worth noting that the screaming headline, “Tolkien trained as a spy”, does not match the facts as laid out by Carter and CJR Tolkien. Tolkien seems to have begun training as a code-breaker. Had he continued in this, he would presumably have been sent to Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing led an assortment of geniuses, using work pioneered by the Poles and including a prototype Enigma machine constructed by Polish intelligence and smuggled to England at the beginning of hostilities in 1939, and broke the Enigma code. The people working on this included chess masters and people who could solve the Sunday Times crossword with relative ease, as well as mathematicians like Turing, linguists, interpreters, and so forth.

Tolkien was surely recruited for his linguistic and philological skills, which were his profession and for which he was rightly esteemed: he was at the time Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at University of Oxford, and in 1945 became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature.

The article says that Tolkien “declined a £500-a-year offer to become a full-time recruit.” This does not agree with what Carter wrote, that “he was informed that his services would not be required for the present”.

Perhaps code-breaking is like stock trading: no matter how smart you are, how well-trained you are, and what your skill-set may be going into it, you are either born a trader or not. Some people can trade, and some people can’t. Perhaps some folks can break codes, and some can’t. GrayMouser may be on the right trail.

By the way, Tolkien is remarkably open about this in the aforementioned letter, written 2 February 1939 to Mr. C.A. Furth at his publishers, Allen & Unwin. He told Furth he had “some work in preparation for a ‘National Emergency’ (which will take a week out.) I have to go to Scotland either in March or April.” His training, according to the Telegraph article, was in London; presumably, his trip to Scotland was on other business.