Tolkien the Spy

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by Tuor in Gondolin

While only speculative, this does bring to mind some vague allusions to
"war work" in Letters. Could he have had some advisory input on
Ultra and other projects? If this is just coming to light now what
else might still be hidden? Probably nothing, but still...

You never know - after all the letters and official Biography were that much closer to the time of the War (and cold war) to have to be discreet. And the Bletchley Park people had to be beyond discreet. One was more or less sent a white feather by his old headmaster in a letter telling him he was disgrace for not being in uniform and had to take it on the chin since he could not explain the vital significance of his "safe desk job".

[davem]

For those who don't keep up with the Lord of the Rings Plaza Forum, (I occaisionally pop up there as Captain Bingo to pass on info - I also started a thread on this same topic over there just after starting this thread) I thought I'd pass on a response on that forum from Wayne Hammond & Christina Scull, noted Tolkien experts with a number of major works behind them (the Tolkien Companion & Guide, LotR Reader's Companion, etc), on this subject

This afternoon on the Mythopoeic Society list the question was asked, apropos the Telegraph article, if Tolkien in fact turned down the GCCS job, or if it was as Carpenter reported in his Letters note, that Tolkien was informed that his services were not yet required. We replied that Carpenter presumably based his note on materials in Tolkien's private papers (to which we ourselves did not have access), and this is supported by comments Tolkien made in letters to Allen & Unwin on 15 September and 19 December 1939. For some months after the training course in March that year -- we call it a "training course" in our Chronology (p. 226), Carpenter calls it a "course of instruction", the Telegraph article calls it a "tester", presumably it was all an aptitude test of some sort -- Tolkien assumed that he could be called into service by the Foreign Office at any time. He wrote as much to Philip Unwin on 15 September (we passed over the particular remark in our Chronology summary of the letter), to the effect that he had agreed to the job in the spring, was not yet summoned to it, but it was an open obligation -- Britain was now at war -- and once he was engaged with it, he didn't know how much time it would allow him to devote to outside work. Then on 19 December he wrote to Stanley Unwin (see Letters, p. 44) that he was "uncommandeered still myself, and shall now probably remain so, as there is (as yet) far too much to do here [in the Oxford English School], and I have lost both my chief assistant and his understudy". In the same letter, Tolkien comments on his accident "just before the outbreak of war", on his wife's illness, and that he was now the virtual head of his department, all of which would have been good reasons for the Foreign Office not to call him to work in cryptography at that time -- assuming he was suited to that work in the first place. His words, at least, give no indication that he turned down a position, but rather that it was a case of what Carpenter says in his note, that Tolkien was informed that "his services would not be required for the present".

The Telegraph article (as we went on in our reply on the Mythsoc List) is such a mess. Even had Tolkien gone to work in cryptography, he wouldn't have been a "spy" as the headline has it. Nor was he necessarily "'earmarked' to crack Nazi codes" -- some of the personnel at Bletchley Park were there as language, not cipher, specialists. Its staff were already, before 1939, reading messages enciphered on Enigmas -- the commercial variety if not the more difficult German army and navy Enigmas. The Royal Navy did not exactly use the secret German traffic "to intercept and destroy Hitler's U-Boats", as doing so would have given away the fact that Enigma was not impenetrable. And so forth, and so on. Did the GCHQ historian get things wrong? Did the reporter misunderstand or misquote? Both, maybe. The historian is quoted as making the unwarranted assumption that Tolkien "failed to join" because "he wanted to concentrate on his writing career", and the rather silly remark that "perhaps it was because we declared war on Germany and not Mordor"; and then the reporter carries on in the same vein, with statements such as "the director of GCCS, known only as 'Alastair G. Denniston'", as if Alastair Denniston were an unknown figure, when in fact he's well known in the history of British cryptanalysis.

Wayne and Christina

[Mithalwen]

Thanks Dave..I stopped going there when they were so obnoxious about the article Lalaith translated.

[Faramir Jones]

Tolkien may have been very distantly alluding to all this in LotR, in the episode 'A Conspiracy Unmasked'. In it, Merry told Frodo that because he suspected that the latter was going to leave the Shire, he formed a conspiracy with Pippin, Sam and Fatty. He then said:


'But if you want to be introduced to our chief investigator, I can produce him.'

'Where is he?' said Frodo, looking around, as if he expected a masked and sinister figure to come out of a cupboard.

'Step forward, Sam!' said Merry; and Sam stood up with a face scarlet up to the ears.

(LotR, Book 1, Chapter V)


What do people think?

[Mithalwen]

Well the main problem there, is that they then say that Sam stopped providing information once he was caught but given the point when Gandalf caught him, I don't know what he could have told them before...