- The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary
Here is a book that should be of real interest to the many fans of The Lord of the Rings, the many fans of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the many fans of the Oxford English Dictionary. Gilliver, Marshall, and Weiner are editors of the OED, and they have brought together materials that their professional work has made them particularly alert to: the overlapping features of Tolkien the philologist, the storyteller, and lexicographer. This is not a study of Tolkien's invented languages—others have surveyed that terrain with almost unimaginable zeal. But it does provide a focused look at Tolkien's years of work at the dictionary, a solid introduction to Tolkien's growth and development as a philologist, and a leisurely stroll through [End Page 302] many words used by Tolkien that have special connections to his Lord of the Rings trilogy and to his other fiction.
Tolkien was born in South Africa in 1892; by 1911 he was a student at Oxford University, from which he graduated in 1915, just in time to serve in World War I. It's worth noting that by 1915 Tolkien had already been giving sustained attention to the invention of his own languages, but it was at Oxford that he developed the deep philological skills and passions that served him so well at the OED and in his novels. After leaving the armed services in 1918, Tolkien was hired as an assistant lexicographer on what was then known as the New English Dictionary, a project that eventually became the OED. It is at this point of Tolkien's life that the story of this book begins.
The part of the book devoted to Tolkien's OED years is brief—"Tolkien as Lexicographer" is under forty pages long. But the authors provide a very good portrait of Tolkien's lexicographical work by giving the reader a description of the tasks assigned to Tolkien during these years. His initial assignment was to do the background work and to construct early drafts of definitions for more than fifty words in the W section of the dictionary—the list included such words as waggle, wain, waist, waitress, wallop, walnut, walrus, wampum, wan, wander, wane, want, warlock, warm, wild, and wold. For this sort of scholarship Tolkien was extraordinarily well prepared. As a boy he had learned Latin and Greek; by the time he had finished his studies at Oxford, he had good working knowledge of many more languages, ancient and modern: Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, Gothic, French, Spanish, German, Welsh, and at least a little Finnish. The editors allow us to see Tolkien's knowledge and his hypotheses at work, knowledge (and opinions) that are evident in various dictionary slips written by Tolkien (eleven of those slips are reproduced in the text). Tolkien's work as a lexicographer was, strictly speaking, the work of a novice; his proposed entries were typically edited energetically. When Tolkien provided lengthy arguments for a particular etymology, the senior editors would regularly trim and cut back, moving toward a leaner, less discursive entry. In these pages of the book we can enjoy the work done by Tolkien and appreciate the next stage of work done by his editors. These brief tales of discovery, hypothesis, and revision will reveal some of the basic but quiet drama of lexicography as practiced by the OED early in the twentieth century.
The second section of the book is also brief—"Tolkien as Wordwright" is just over forty pages long, but it, too, is an excellent introduction to the subject. Here the authors discuss the capacious discipline called "philology," noting its near disappearance from the lexicon but not from people's [End Page 303] lives. Tolkien's long and passionate devotion to the history and development of word forms and meanings was a wonderful preparation for his professional work and his academic appointments, first at Leeds and later at Oxford. But it would be...