Edmund Weiner

I first read The Lord of the Rings in 1962–3, aged 12, and have done so regularly throughout the intervening 60 years, including reading it aloud annually to my wife for about a dozen years. Tolkien’s writings fanned into flame an already existing enthusiasm for philology, medieval literature, and fantastic tales, and strongly influenced me to take the medieval and philological course in the Oxford English School. After graduation I worked on a thesis studying a Medieval English religious text and taught Old English for Mods. Again following in Tolkien’s footsteps, I joined the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1977, but unlike him, I remained there (and am still there at the time of writing; I specialize in grammatical words).

OED colleagues Peter Gilliver and Jeremy Marshall and I wrote A Ring of Words (Tolkien and the OED), published in 2006. We also gave a paper at the Tolkien Studies Conference at Exeter College (2006), subsequently published in Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration (2008). Jeremy and I wrote a chapter, ‘Tolkien’s Invented Languages’, in From Elvish to Klingon (ed. Michael Adams, 2011), which has received some appreciative comments.

I have subsequently given a number of papers, chiefly centring on aspects of Tolkien’s linguistic creativity, which are available as blog posts at https://philoloblog.blogspot.com/ (where they are interspersed among a series of entirely unconnected posts about the language of the 16th–17th century Essex Wills).