Tolkien's Honorary Membership in the Icelandic Literary Society

 Last week -- September 1st, to be exact -- saw a very successful conference completed, "New Perspectives on Alliteration in Poetry and Cultural History." Many of the Forgotten Ground Regained crew were there, including Paul Deane, who reviewed his recent researches into the Modern Revival, plus Joe Hoffman, a digital humanities guy who also studies Tolkien. As an example of his work, he just posted his conference paper, "The Hunt for Alliterative Melody" (it's very readable!), plus a nice, more general conference report.

For yours truly, in honor of my book, Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, which came out in paperback last week, I presented my new discovery: i.e, we've been reading one of Tolkien's alliterative poems wrongly for the last 70 years. Since my article itself is still out for review, mum's the word, but keep your eyes peeled.

But before getting to Tolkien's honorary membership in the Icelandic Literary Society (ILS), as promised by my title, let me shout out my prior entries on Tolkien's alliterative verse. Those are, respectively:

1. Tolkien's Norse Connection (Parts 1 and 2): The Career
2. Tolkien's Norse Connection (Part 3): The Skald
3. Tolkien's Norse Connection (Part 4): Hitches

So, anyway. The Icelandic Literary Society (or Hið Íslenzka Bókmenntafélag, if you wanna be fancy). When I was researching the above posts, I came across this ILS membership factoid in Scull & Hammond's Chronology. Apparently, on June 11, 1933, Tolkien was nominated as an honorary member, and his membership was "confirm[ed] with applause" a week later on June 17.

So I immediately started pondering. As a literary historian, you track down coincidences ... and what struck me was that Tolkien's honorary membership came so close to him composing his near entire corpus of Old Norse-style poetry. That corpus he began in the early 1930s, soon after abandoning The Lay of Leithian in September 1931.

Alas ... coincidence is all this seems to be. Regardless, the story's interesting as hell. But my problem, you see, is that I have a bad case of Americana. As such, I'm not quite up to snuff on modern Icelandic. Nevertheless, after some digging, I noticed that the current president of ILS, Ármann Jakobsson from the University of Iceland, is another Tolkien scholar -- so, hat in hand, I sent a message.

As it happens, Professor Jakobsson couldn't have been more courteous. He consulted their fundargerðabók (i.e., meeting minutes) from 1912-2022. Turns out, Tolkien was elected an honorary member alongside three other notable Old Norse scholars: Ejnar Munksgaard (Denmark), Walter Henreich Vogt (Germany), and A. G. van Hamel (Netherlands).

Originally, it seems, their idea was to honor only Munksgaard and Hamel. At the midnight hour, however, Prof. Sigurður Nordal then suggested Tolkien and Vogt.

So who was this Sigurður Nordal? He's not mentioned in Tolkien's published Letters, nor, except for the 1933 nomination, anywhere else in Scull & Hammond's Chronology. A connection definitely existed, though. Jakobsson relates that there's apparently some letters between Nordal and Tolkien at the Landsbókasafn (Icelandic National Library); during his youth, Nordal lived in England, and may have encountered  Tolkien there. They could merely have been scholarly colleagues as well. Prof. Jakobsson linked me two letters in Icelandic, one suggesting that Tolkien was well-known by Icelandic intellectuals for his academic skills, and another that mentions Tolkien's excellent command of Icelandic.

To me, Prof. Jakobsson's suggestion about an old friendship between Nordal and Tolkien rings true. Since Tolkien never published any scholarship on Old Norse subjects, my natural question had been how Tolkien came to the ILS's attention. Originally, part of me wondered if the connection wasn't related to E.O.G. Turville-Petre, whom Tolkien accepted as a student in 1931; Turville-Petre eventually became an Old Norse scholar of great significance. Still, an old personal connection between Tolkien and Nordal makes more sense.

They kept up their connection, too. In 1951, Tolkien was apparently involved in a plan by Nordal and Turville-Petre to make a new English translation for the Sagas of Icelanders. This would have been Nelson's Icelandic Texts, a short-lived series that published four volumes overall, including The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise by Christopher Tolkien. The elder Tolkien had another good connection through his friend E. V. Gordon; in fact, that second article I linked above (dated April 5, 1929) mentions Tolkien in connection to Gordon, who would have been a guest of Nordal's.

So there we have it. Given this dating, it's pretty unlikely Tolkien's connection with ILS had anything to do with his Old Norse-style alliterative poetry, or that Sigurður Nordal ever saw it. That professor most likely nominated Tolkien due to his vast erudition in Norse subjects -- and, of course, his teaching such subjects at Oxford.

Yet here's a stretch for you. (Stay with me a moment.) We know, right, that E. V. Gordon was one of the people to whom Tolkien showed his unfinished poem in Old English meter, The Fall of Arthur ... and that  Gordon praised it highly. It's possible --  just barely possible, mind you -- that Professor Gordon, had he been feeling chatty in later years, might have had an idle conversation with Nordal, or some other Icelandic colleague, and mentioned Tolkien's alliterative revivalism in passing.

Tenuous? Sure .... but it's fun to think about. In any event, we can now declare this minutiae of Tolkienian biography solved!**

* It's also barely possible that E. O. G. Turville-Petre could have held such conversations with his Icelandic colleagues. That, however, is even more unlikely. Apparently, young Gabriel considered The Lord of the Rings perhaps a misuse of Tolkien's talents, so probably wouldn't have heralded Tolkien's unscholarly poetic pursuits to random strangers.