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1927

?1927–early 1928 Tolkien draws the attention of C.T. Onions to the use in The Owl and the Nightingale of a phrase about which Onions is writing an article for the Review of English Studies (‘Middle English (i) Wite God, Wite Crist, (ii) God It Wite’, July 1928).

1927 Edith Tolkien gives her husband the desk on which he will later write The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. – Tolkien’s poem The Nameless Land (composed in May 1924) is published in Realities: An Anthology of Verse, ed. G.S. Tancred. – Tolkien rewrites his poem Over Old Hills and Far Away (originally composed ?January–February 1916). – Tolkien possibly writes the first version of his poem Knocking at the Door (*The Mewlips). – In his preface to An Introduction to Old Norse, published in 1927, E.V. Gordon acknowledges his debt to Tolkien in preparing the apparatus of the book, for reading proof of its Grammar, and for making valuable suggestions and corrections. – Tolkien plants two trees in front of 22 Northmoor Road; one is a red leaved prunus which flowers very early, and the other a variety which flowers later.

23 January 1927 Hilary Full Term begins. Tolkien’s scheduled lectures and classes for this term are: the Old English Exodus on Tuesdays at 10.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 25 January; Gothic (Class, continued) on Tuesdays at 5.30 p.m. in Pembroke College, beginning 25 January; The Verse of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader on Thursdays at 10.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 27 January; Old English Philology (Morphology and Vocabulary) on Thursdays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 27 January; Old Icelandic: Völsunga Saga on Thursdays at 5.30 p.m. in Pembroke College, beginning 27 January; King Horn (Textual and Dialectical Comparisons of the Manuscripts) on Fridays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 28 January; and Discussion Class (continued) on Fridays at 5.15 p.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 28 January.

Hilary Term 1927–Hilary Term 1929 Tolkien is an examiner in the English Final Honour School.

1 February 1927 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Library Committee meeting at 2.30 p.m. in the Library.

10 February 1927 Tolkien and George S. Gordon examine Mary Lascelles of Lady Margaret Hall viva voce on her B.Litt. thesis, Alexander and the Earthly Paradise in Medieval English Literature, at 2.00 p.m. in the Examination Schools.

11 February 1927 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Board meeting. The Applications Committee has approved the B.Litt. thesis subject of Ruth Anna Crook, ‘an edition of the prose life of Seinte Margharete, based on MS Bodley 34 and MS Roy 17 A XXVII, with a grammar and glossary which will consider parallels on other texts of the same group’. Tolkien is to continue as her supervisor. The Committee also assigns him to supervise A.C. Corlett of St Edmund Hall, who has applied for admission to a course of special study preparatory to research for a B.Litt. – Tolkien and George S. Gordon sign their report on the examination of Mary Lascelles.

18 February 1927 The Kolbítar meet at Exeter College and begin to read the Völsunga Saga. See note.

24 February 1927 A review-essay by Tolkien, Philology: General Works, is published in *The Year’s Work in English Studies, vol. 6 (for 1925). He discusses some twenty-four books, many of them lengthy Festschriften, and articles of varying length, in the course of forty-six pages.

2 March 1927 The Oxford University Gazette announces that Tolkien will be chairman of the examiners of the Final Honour School of English Language and Literature for 1927–8.

12 March 1927 Tolkien replies to a letter from Ronald Ashton, a former student at Leeds. He offers to write a testimonial. Oxford, he says, is not Paradise; ‘there are still lingering vestiges of civilisation’ there, but it is also ‘a centre of the motor industry: that fantastic lunacy’. He doubts that he would have torn himself away from Leeds if he had been single and ‘able to disregard small differences in salary. The English School here is a battle-ground and there is small peace and little sense in it’ (Michael Silverman, Catalogue Twenty-Seven, London, 2009, item 112).

16 March 1927 Tolkien attends a Pembroke College meeting.

17 March 1927 At an English Faculty Board meeting, in Tolkien’s absence, the Committee on a Preliminary Examination in the Honour School of English Language and Literature (of which he is a member) recommends that the examination should cover the outlines of a period of English social and political history; the elements of Old English, and prescribed portions of Chaucer; prescribed Greek or Latin books; and unprepared translation from not less than two or more than three of Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, or Spanish.

19 March 1927 Hilary Full Term ends.

May 1927 A revised version of Tolkien’s poem Tinfang Warble (first composed in 1914) and his poem The Grey Bridge of Tavrobel (written in ?1927) are published in the May 1927 number of the Inter-University Magazine, a journal for Roman Catholic students published by the University Catholic Societies’ Federation.

1 May 1927 Trinity Full Term begins. Tolkien’s scheduled lectures for this term are: Judith and Beowulf (lines 1251–1650) on Thursdays at 10.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 5 May; Old English Philology (concluded) on Thursdays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 5 May; and The Heroic Poems of the Elder Edda on Fridays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 6 May.

12 May 1927 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Library Committee meeting at 2.15 p.m. in the Library.

June 1927 Two poems by Tolkien composed probably earlier in the 1920s, Fastitocalon and Iumbo, or ye Kinde of ye Oliphaunt, are published in the Stapeldon Magazine for June 1927, as by ‘Fisiologus’, under the general title Adventures in Unnatural History and Medieval Metres, Being the Freaks of Fisiologus.

15 June 1927 Tolkien attends a Pembroke College meeting.

16 June 1927 English Final Honour School Examinations begin. Tolkien is chairman of the examiners. There are 127 candidates.

23 June 1927 At a meeting of the English Faculty Board, in Tolkien’s absence, he is elected a member of the Committee for Nomination of Public Examiners in the Honour School of English Language and Literature and in the Pass School, Group B6, to Hilary Term 1931. He and H.C. Wyld are appointed examiners of the B.Litt. thesis of G.W. Small of Merton College (but according to the Oxford University Gazette, Small is later examined not by Tolkien and Wyld but by W.A. Craigie and C.T. Onions). Tolkien is also appointed an examiner of the B.Litt. thesis of Daniel Ferguson Aitken of Balliol College, A Study of the English Romance of Sir Tristrem in Relation to Its Sources.

25 June 1927 Trinity Full Term ends.

26 June 1927 So far, the Kolbítar have read the Younger (Prose) Edda and the Völsunga Saga. In Michaelmas Term they plan to read the Laxdæle Saga.

28 June 1927 The English Faculty Library Committee, in Tolkien’s absence, authorizes a collotype facsimile of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to be made from plates lent by Tolkien.

30 June 1927 Encaenia.

September 1927 The Tolkien family take a holiday in Lyme Regis. They stay in a lodging house. Either during this visit or in 1928, Tolkien, curious about its workings, breaks a cuckoo-clock in the lodging house to the annoyance of the landlady. While at Lyme Regis Tolkien takes up drawing and painting again, and adds several works to The Book of Ishness: some are topographical (Golden Cap from Langmoor Garden; an unidentified house; Boats, Lyme Regis; and Oh To Be in Oxford (North) Now That Summer’s There (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 25)); two are scenes from his mythology (Mithrim and Glórund Sets Forth to Seek Túrin (Artist and Illustrator, figs. 46–47)); and one, a coiled dragon, is related to Beowulf by its caption, ‘hrinȝboȝa heorte ȝefysed’ (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 48). – He also makes at least three illustrations for Roverandom, which he probably retells at this time: a drawing, The White Dragon Pursues Roverandom and the Moondog, and two watercolours, The Gardens of the Merking’s Palace and House Where ‘Rover’ Began His Adventures as a ‘Toy’ (Artist and Illustrator, figs. 73, 75–76). A related, untitled drawing (‘Rover Arrives on the Moon’, Artist and Illustrator, fig. 74) is dated ‘1927–8’. – Around this time Tolkien makes three drawings on a single page (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 77), one of 22 Northmoor Road, one of a seated (giant?) figure, and one of an ogre and child.

16 October 1927 Michaelmas Full Term begins. Tolkien’s scheduled lectures and classes for this term are: Beowulf and The Fight at Finnesburg on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 18 October; The Prose of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader on Thursdays at 10.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 20 October; and Germanic Philology (Class) on Fridays at 12.00 noon at Pembroke College, beginning 21 October.

19 October 1927 Tolkien attends a Pembroke College meeting.

21 October 1927 Tolkien writes to Willard G. Harding about the etymology of sag.

27 October 1927 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Library Committee meeting at 2.00 p.m. in the Library. The Committee decides to strengthen and complete the philological section of the Library, and officially adopts for this purpose a list of works in Old and Middle English and Icelandic prepared by Tolkien.

4 November 1927 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Board meeting. He is elected to the Applications Committee officially for one year, but in practice for the rest of his working life at Oxford. See note. He is also elected to the Library Committee, and appointed supervisor of advanced student E. Olszewska of Lady Margaret Hall, whose D.Phil. thesis is A History of the Scandinavian Influence on the English Language. He proposes that the General Board of the Faculties be asked to initiate legislation for a Diploma in Comparative Philology (as suggested during summer 1927 by the Boards of Faculties of Literae Humaniores, of English Language and Literature, of Medieval and Modern Languages, and Oriental Languages). The English Faculty Board is to be represented on the Committee for Comparative Philology by two members, including the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon. The Board endorses Tolkien’s proposal. Also during this meeting Tolkien presents the report of the examiners in the 1927 English Honour School, written by himself on behalf of the committee (Tolkien, Ernest de Selincourt, A.O. Belfour, and F.P. Wilson).

5 November 1927 Tolkien certifies that Julia Maud Keays-Young has completed course work towards her B.Litt.

9 November 1927 Tolkien attends a Pembroke College meeting.

16 November 1927 Tolkien and Eugène Vinaver examine Daniel Ferguson Aitken of Balliol College viva voce on his B.Litt. thesis, A Study of the English Romance of Sir Tristrem in Relation to Its Sources, at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools.

21 November 1927 Tolkien and Vinaver sign their report on the examination of D.F. Aitken.

23 November 1927 Tolkien attends a Pembroke College meeting.

27 November 1927 The Arthurian Society is formed (*Societies and clubs), with Eugène Vinaver as its first Honorary President. Tolkien will become a member.

2 December 1927 Tolkien certifies that A.C. Corlett of St Edmund Hall is qualified to be a full B.Litt. student, with the thesis The Phonology of the Vowels in the Poems of B. Mus. MS Nero Ax (Sir Gawain, Pearl, Patience, Purity) with Special Reference to the Treatment of Middle English.

9 December 1927 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Board meeting. The Applications Committee has appointed Tolkien and E.V. Gordon examiners of the B.Litt. thesis of Julia Maud Keays-Young, England and the English in the Icelandic Sagas. It has also appointed Tolkien supervisor of B.Litt. student A.C. Corlett, and of advanced student H.M. Buckhurst of St Hugh’s College. Miss Buckhurst’s thesis to be The Historical Grammar of Old Icelandic. – Tolkien also attends a Pembroke College meeting.

10 December 1927 Michaelmas Full Term ends.

21 December 1927 Tolkien, as ‘Father Christmas’, writes a letter dated 21 December to the entire Tolkien family as well as Aslaug (one of the Icelandic au pair girls) and Jennie Grove, who usually spends Christmas with the Tolkiens. Father Christmas has heard from Michael and Christopher but not John, whom he assumes will soon be too big to hang up a stocking. He tells how the Man in the Moon came to visit him on 7 December, fell asleep, and was pushed under the sofa by the North Polar Bear. With the Man absent from the moon, dragons came out and obscured its light (surely a reference to the lunar eclipse that occurred on 8 December). With this is an illustration of the North Pole with no moon or Northern Lights, lit only by a comet and stars.

Christmas 1927 Tolkien probably writes out the first manuscript of Roverandom during the holidays.