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‘A Secret Vice’ and its Immediate Context

‘A Secret Vice’ was first published by Christopher Tolkien in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (Monsters, pp. 198–223), alongside six other essays by his father. Christopher notes that the paper:

exists in a single manuscript without date or indication of the occasion of its delivery; but … the Esperanto Congress in Oxford^fn2, referred to at the beginning of the essay as having taken place ‘a year or more ago’, was held in July 1930. Thus the date can be fixed as 1931. (Monsters, p. 3)

The ‘Secret Vice’ papers include other indications of an early 1930s date. For example, in the same folder there is a standard printed postcard from the Curators of the Examination Schools at Oxford, relating to the use of lecture rooms and dated Saturday 7th June (MS Tolkien 24, folio 53v), which indicates that the year is 1930 (Trinity Term). Also included is a list of marks for students at the University of Reading (MS Tolkien 24, folio 47r), some of whom graduated in 1932 and 1933 (University of Reading, 1973; Tolkien served as an external examiner for the University of Reading). A more secure terminus a quo can be found in the ‘Essay on Phonetic Symbolism’, in which Tolkien mentions Sir Richard Paget and his work on sound symbolism (see pp. 68, 83). Tolkien can only be referring to one of two of Paget’s books that explore this subject, and both were published in 1930: Human Speech: Some Observations, Experiments, and Conclusions as to the Nature, Origin, Purpose and Possible Improvement of Human Speech; or Babel, or The Past, Present, and Future of Human Speech.

Further research at a number of Oxford University archives has disclosed that Tolkien indeed delivered ‘A Secret Vice’ in 1931, as Christopher Tolkien had hypothesized. The minutes of the Johnson Society at Pembroke College reveal that Tolkien read ‘A Secret Vice’ to the Society on 29th November 1931, at 9pm. The Society was founded in 1871 in memory of Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), author and lexicographer. Although originally a literary society, by the early twentieth century it had become ‘practically the J.C.R.^fn3 meeting for an (alleged) literary purpose’ (Pembroke College Archives Catalogue). Indeed, the contemporary records (1927 and 1932) of the Johnson Society at the time Tolkien delivered ‘A Secret Vice’ show that topics were wide and varied, including early modern literature, as well as contemporary British, European and American writers.

Tolkien’s association with the Johnson Society goes beyond the delivery of ‘A Secret Vice’. Tolkien became a Fellow of Pembroke College as part of his role as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, to which he was appointed in 1925. The Society attempted on more than one occasion to invite Tolkien as a guest to one of their formal dinners in the late 1920s. In the minutes for 19 June 1927, it is recorded that Messrs R.G. Collingwood and John Masefield were unable to attend the Society dinner, and therefore ‘it was decided that the following two gentlemen be invited, Messrs. Ralph Straus and J.R. Tolkien [sic]’ (Johnson Society Minute Book, PMB/R/6/1/6 1927–9). In the event, neither attended the Dinner, which was held on 23 June. The following year, the minutes of 13 May 1928 show that both R.G. Collingwood and Tolkien were suggested as guests for the dinner of 20 June, but ‘the society voted in favour of Mr. Collingwood’ (Collingwood by that time had given two papers to the society on Jane Austen, both of which were greeted with enthusiastic reports in the minutes). However, Collingwood was unable to attend and Tolkien was duly invited instead. According to the minutes: ‘the society listened to various speeches, which, with the exception of that of Professor Tolkien, were remarkable for their singular lack of wit. Professor Tolkien then entertained the society with a series of amusing stories’ (Johnson Society Minute Book, PMB/R/6/1/6 1927–9).

The minutes for the meeting of 29th November 1931 record that:

In Public Business Professor Tolkien read one of the most ingenious papers that the Society has ever heard. The “Secret Vice”, which gave the paper its title, turned out to be the study & invention of obscure living languages, or codes. After a peculiar conversational opening, in which he touched on such elementary new languages as those produced by adaptation of already-existing languages, – he cited an example one in which the names of animals were used to denote certain words or phrases, & a whole new language built up on this principle, – Professor Tolkien went on to discuss those languages which were composed of words entirely their own, whether derived phonetically, or from some other (probably dead) language. The most interesting example of the phonetic type of language is that spoken in the island of Fonway, which apparently has no connection whatever with any other known language, nor is it spoken or understood elsewhere than in this one small island. Professor Tolkien finally regaled the Society with works of his own, written in an original phonetic language. He had, he said, on one occasion been surprised & rather dismayed to overhear two navvies conversing in a language which till then he had believed understood only by himself, its originator. The works which he now read, however, he believed to be entirely his own & to be unknown to anyone else.

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 century (see Carpenter 1978; Glyer 2007).

Although Tolkien had a busy academic schedule this did not preclude him from progressing creatively. In addition to exploring projects in both prose and poetry, he was developing new versions of his expanding mythology that intertwined neatly with his language invention. From the summer of 1925 to c.1931 Tolkien revisited his earliest version of the tale of Beren and Lúthien (‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ in The Book of Lost Tales) and turned it into a long poem in octosyllabic couplets: ‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’ or ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (Lays, pp. 150–329). Before the end of 1929, Tolkien gave Lewis ‘The Lay of Leithian’ to read. In a letter to Tolkien, Lewis wrote that he stayed up all night reading it and praised the work for its reality and mythical value (Lays, p. 151). Lewis also provided Tolkien with a list of suggested changes, somewhat parodying academic commentary on real medieval manuscripts (see Lays, pp. 315–29).

As for the rest of Tolkien’s mythology, it was expanding from a ‘Sketch of the mythology’ in 1926 (which itself was a re-conceived version of the earlier ‘Book of Lost Tales’) to the ‘Quenta Noldorinwa’ (Shaping, pp. 76–218), which would establish the main narrative of the mythology before he started work on The Lord of the Rings. Associated with the ‘Quenta’ is Tolkien’s first ‘Silmarillion’ map, which geographically represented the secondary world Tolkien had created by this time and included place-names in Qenya and Noldorin (Shaping, pp. 219–34). In the early 1930s Tolkien also started to express his mythology using a historical-chronicle form, similar to works such as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Tolkien worked on ‘The Earliest Annals of Valinor’ and ‘The Earliest Annals of Beleriand’, partially translating both from English into Anglo-Saxon (Shaping, pp. 262–341).

In addition to the emerging ‘Silmarillion’ mythology, Tolkien also worked on several other creative projects in prose and poetry. In 1927, he published two poems under the general title: ‘Adventures in Unnatural History and Medieval Metres, being The Freaks of Fisiologus’ in The Stapeldon Magazine, a publication of Exeter College, which Tolkien attended as an undergraduate. In these poems, Tolkien parodies the medieval bestiary by juxtaposing different semi-mythical creatures in playful verse. In 1930, Tolkien also completed work on his Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, a poem modelled on a medieval Breton lay.

In the early 1930s, both just before and very soon after the delivery of ‘A Secret Vice’, Tolkien was also occupied by two other key literary compositions. First, drawing on his own lectures on the Old Norse Eddas and Sagas^fn4, Tolkien composed two original poems: ‘Völsungakviða en nýja’ (The New Lay of the Völsungs) and ‘Guðrúnarkviða en nýja’ (The New Lay of Gudrún)^fn5. His aim was to attempt a reconstruction of the story of the Volsungs, to include new material covering that which was missing in the Norse Sagas (see Sigurd, pp. 5–12). Second, Tolkien composed an alliterative Arthurian poem. As Christopher Tolkien’s 2013 edition of The Fall of Arthur illustrates, Tolkien attempted to link the departure of Arthur and Lancelot to the West with his own ‘Silmarillion’ mythology (see Fall of Arthur, pp. 123–68).

Tolkien also wrote poems for his children during that period. By 1931, a doll owned by his children had inspired him to start writing poems and, interestingly, construct a small piece of prose, about the whimsical character Tom Bombadil (see Bombadil). Another of his children’s toys inspired Roverandom, a tale he eventually wrote down in 1927. It was also during this period that Tolkien also started sending his children letters from ‘Father Christmas’ each December. In 1928, Tolkien composed a cycle of poems incorporating fantasy and satire called the ‘Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay’ (see Anderson 2003, pp. 309–11). During this period, Tolkien also wrote Farmer Giles of Ham, a comic tale about a dragon and his bumbling adversary set in the medieval villages around Oxford. Yet another dragon tale emerges sometime around, or shortly after, the summer of 1930 (see Rateliff 2007, p. xiii); a tale that Tolkien told his children, and with which they were so enraptured, that in the early 1930s he was compelled to put on to paper. The Hobbit was published in 1937. It gave the reading public the smallest glimpse of the, by now quite vast, mythology that Tolkien had been developing up to this time.

‘A Secret Vice’ is, therefore, a key text, from a key period, that not only brings together Tolkien’s academic and creative work on language, but is probably the first occasion at which Tolkien spoke publicly, if a little cryptically, about his entirely private mythology and secondary world. It could be argued that at 9 pm on 29 November 1931, Tolkien revealed to the world the ‘coeval and congenital’ arts of world-building and language invention – the crux of his creative endeavours and literary success.