7. Despite his fame, Tolkien was a lecturer at Oxford University for most of his life
If you’d written something as successful as The Lord of the Rings, were famous around the world, and pretty wealthy, you’d probably retire, right? Not Tolkien. He stuck to his laborious day job of teaching students at Oxford until he retired in 1959, aged 67. Oxford has a reputation for exacting standards amongst both students and staff, and Merton College in particular, where he taught between 1945 and 1959, is renowned even at Oxford for demanding a lot from its members. Merton’s common nickname, ‘where fun goes to die’, is certainly hard-won.
Tolkien was a much-loved lecturer. According to his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, his lectures on Beowulf were legendary. ‘He would come silently into the room, fix the audience with his gaze, and suddenly begin to declaim in a resounding voice the opening lines of the poem in the original Anglo-Saxon, commencing with a great cry of Hwæt! (the first word)’. Alas, though, even amongst his entranced students, his extracurricular activities were not forgotten. W.H. Auden once described to Tolkien ‘what an unforgettable experience it was for me as an undergraduate, hearing you recite Beowulf. The voice was the voice of Gandalf.’