![\"tollers-young\"](\"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/tollers-young.jpg\" "\\"tollers-young\\"")
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If one judged by recent posts, it might be hard to tell that The Cimmerian<\/em> is a “website and shieldwall” for Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien<\/em>. The Man From Cross Plains has dominated our\u00a0recent blog activity, but\u00a0never think we’ve forgotten Tollers. The Cimmerian<\/em> will be giving the\u00a0Loremaster of Middle-earth his due in the coming weeks and months. I stumbled upon a couple of news items relating to John Ronald Reuel yesterday. While both concerned\u00a0revelations that are weeks\u00a0old (at least), I hadn’t known\u00a0about either of\u00a0them and\u00a0I assume that\u00a0both articles\u00a0would be news to many others.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The first item is from the online version of The Daily Telegraph<\/a><\/em>, one of the most highly-regarded and popular papers in the UK. The Telegraph<\/em> article<\/a> reveals that\u00a0between March 25 and March 29,\u00a01939, Tolkien attended, and was trained at, the Government Code and Cypher School in London (the project was later moved to Bletchley Park, in JRRT’s beloved Buckinghamshire). He was one of a cadre of fifty academics assembled by the\u00a0British Foreign Office\u00a0in anticipation of a formal war with Nazi Germany.\u00a0Their job would be to crack German codes, something for\u00a0which JRRT’s deep and innate affinity for linguistics would make him well suited.<\/p>\n Apparently, Tolkien’s tester at GCCS judged him to be “keen” for the project.\u00a0Tolkien, however,\u00a0subsequently declined the Foreign Office offer for reasons unknown. In the Telegraph<\/em> article, an official from the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ<\/a>, the successor to GCCS), conveniently hiding behind his anonymity, speculated that Tollers “wanted to concentrate on his writing career.” Said technocrat goes on to make the utterly wild, unsubstantiated\u00a0guess that perhaps “it was because we (the British government) declared war on Germany and not Mordor.”<\/p>\n My mind boggles. Had this government lackey (who had no problem using JRRT’s name to promote his museum) even tried<\/em> to contact the Tolkien estate or\u00a0a prominent Tolkien scholar like Tom Shippey<\/a>? He certainly gave If monetary, political\u00a0and\u00a0literary concerns were behind Tolkien’s declension of the GCCS’s offer, what evidence is there?\u00a0Tolkien had zero assurance of a “big payoff” from the novel he was only beginning to write. As for “Germany vs. Mordor,” I urge “Mr. Anonymous” to read the relevant missive in Carpenter’s The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien<\/em> where JRRT, a man with a wife and children to provide for, turned down a lucrative offer from a publishing house in Nazi Germany and told the Gestapo to go to hell.<\/p>\n It continues to be astounding to me how many authors (and other artists)\u00a0we respect here at The Cimmerian<\/em> were once involved, in some way, with war-time intelligence work. Not just Tollers, but also Harold Lamb<\/a> and Algernon Blackwood. There may be others I’m forgetting. Edgar Rice Burroughs was the oldest American war correspondent in the Pacific theater during the Second World War (he was present\u00a0at Pearl Harbor and later\u00a0witnessed some of the first kamikaze attacks). Hollywood director, John Ford, worked for the U.S. Navy in several capacities. Not to mention that Christopher Lee fought as a member of the SAS<\/a> against the Nazis.<\/p>\n Other\u00a0Tolkien-related news emanates from the heart of Texas, ironically (or fittingly) enough. According to\u00a0The\u00a0San Marcos Daily Record<\/em>, Steven Beebe, a professor at Texas State University-San Marcos, has discovered a few pages\u00a0from a manuscript by C.S. Lewis. Apparently, that manuscript was to be the beginning of a collaborative book co-authored by Lewis and Tolkien called Language and Human Nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n Beebe, who discovered the manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, will publish his analysis of the manuscript in the\u00a0academic journal,\u00a0Seven<\/a><\/em>, in 2010. It is possible that Language and Human Nature<\/em>, which was originally scheduled to be published in 1950, was abandoned after the long\u00a0friendship between Tolkien and Lewis began to wane. One can only imagine what that book might have been like. Lewis was originally highly disdainful of philologists<\/a> before he met JRRT. He later famously recanted that position (to some extent). What that meeting of two brilliant minds might have produced is almost painfully tantalizing.<\/p>\n On a more mundane front,\u00a0I was just informed today that\u00a0The History Channel<\/a>, as part of its series, “Clash\u00a0of the Gods,” has been televising through the month\u00a0of October a segment devoted to the “pantheon” (Tolkien never looked upon his Valar<\/em> and Maiar<\/em> as true divinities)\u00a0that Tollers described in The Silmarillion<\/em>. According to fairly reputable sources<\/a>, the show doesn’t do a half-bad job, all things considered.<\/p>\n *Thanks to Chris Hale for the heads-up on the History Channel program.\u00a0<\/p>\n If one judged by recent posts, it might be hard to tell that The Cimmerian is a “website and shieldwall” for Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien. The Man From Cross Plains has dominated our\u00a0recent blog activity, but\u00a0never think we’ve forgotten Tollers. The Cimmerian will be giving the\u00a0Loremaster of Middle-earth his due in the coming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-authors","category-tolkien"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7124"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16742,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7124\/revisions\/16742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"tolkien_1916\"](\"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/tolkien_1916-207x300.jpg\" "\\"tolkien_1916\\"")
no indication of that from what\u00a0the Telegraph<\/em> reported. In case the bureaucratic card-puncher\/museum-keeper at GCHQ is unaware of the fact, Tolkien spent the horrific Battle of the Somme<\/a> in the trenches. Mr. Tolkien also had a son in the RAF during the Second World War. Yet,\u00a0“Mr. Anonymous” (who has probably never heard a shot fired in anger)\u00a0felt qualified to\u00a0posthumously\u00a0impugn JRRT’s motivations and patriotism.<\/p>\n![\"jrrt-logo\"](\"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/jrrt-logo.jpg\" "\\"jrrt-logo\\""){kind=logo}
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