May 1922 Sir Walter Raleigh dies.
23 May 1922 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Board of the Faculty of Arts at Leeds.
8 June 1922 A Middle English Vocabulary is published in one volume with Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose.
26 June 1922 Tolkien sends a postcard to Henry Bradley, with whom he had worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, hoping that he has recovered from an illness. Tolkien includes a riddle in Old English verse based on a nursery rhyme, ‘Enigma Saxonicum nuper “inventum”’.
1 July 1922 Term ends at Leeds.
Summer 1922 The Tolkien family go on holiday for some weeks at *Filey on the Yorkshire coast. Tolkien spends much of his time marking School Certificate examination papers, an annual chore which he will undertake for many years to earn extra money to support his family. – While at Filey, Tolkien draws in The Book of Ishness a picture of his son John standing on a cliff looking out to sea.
Late July 1922 George S. Gordon resigns his chair at Leeds, having been elected Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford. Tolkien will unsuccessfully apply for the Leeds chair, to which *Lascelles Abercrombie is elected. Michael Sadler, the Vice-Chancellor at Leeds, will inform Tolkien that the University hopes to create a new Professorship of English Language for him.
28 July 1922 By this date Tolkien has agreed to review for G.N. Clark, editor of the English Historical Review, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem by *R.W. Chambers. He will make several pages of notes, but either does not complete the task or his review is not published.
2 October 1922 Term begins at Leeds.
Leeds academic year 1922–1923 In the absence of a University of Leeds Calendar for 1922–3 (not published), one assumes that Tolkien gives many of the same lectures as in earlier years, but he now shares the burden of Language instruction with E.V. Gordon.
?October 1922 Tolkien writes a poem, The Clerke’s Compleinte, playing on the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, about the chaos of registration at the start of the academic year at Leeds.
17 October 1922 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Board of the Faculty of Arts at Leeds. He is appointed to two sub-committees, one to decide what modifications of intermediate courses and examinations should be made for holders of Higher School Certificates, and one to review and report upon degrees in Arts, Commerce, and Law.
25 October 1922 Tolkien gives a talk on ‘Watling Street’ at a meeting of the Language Colloquium at the University, Leeds, held at 12 Beech Grove Terrace at 4.10 p.m.
21 November 1922 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Board of the Faculty of Arts at Leeds.
December 1922 Tolkien’s poem *The Clerke’s [sic] Compleinte is published in The Gryphon, a Leeds University magazine, for December 1922.
14 December 1922 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Board of the Faculty of Arts at Leeds.
20 December 1922 Term ends at Leeds.
Christmas 1922 John and Michael Tolkien attend a party for children of University of Leeds staff. Michael Sadler, the Vice-Chancellor, plays Father Christmas but becomes stuck coming down the chimney; for a while, all those present can see is a pair of waving legs, until Sadler and a pile of parcels crash to the ground. It is probably at this party that both John and Michael catch measles, and in turn infect Edith and their nurse. Tolkien will write on 13 February: ‘By the beginning of January I was the only one in the house left up…. The vacation work lay in ruins; but they (not the work) are all better now and not much the worse. I escaped’ (letter to Elizabeth M. Wright, Letters, p. 11).
?End of 1922 Tolkien writes a poem, Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden (see *The Hoard), inspired by line 3052 in Beowulf (‘the gold of men long ago enmeshed in enchantment’).
1923–1939 During this period Tolkien is inducted into the Catenian Association (*Societies and clubs), an international brotherhood of Roman Catholic business and professional men. He will remain a member until 1956.
?1923 Tolkien translates a prophecy by Gerald of Wales (Giraldus de Barri, Giraldus Cambrensis, c. 1146–1223) into late twelfth-century English of the South-west Midlands for W. Rhys Roberts, Professor of Classics at Leeds (retired 1923) to include in a paper, ‘Gerald of Wales on the Survival of Welsh’ (published 1925). – Tolkien begins work on *‘Qenya Declensions’, extending to c. 1930–1.
1923 Tolkien rewrites his poem May Day (first composed in April 1915) and makes the first of three typescripts of his poem Light as Leaf on Lindentree. – Tolkien first becomes acquainted with a manuscript glossary of the dialect of the Huddersfield District in South Yorkshire, prepared by Walter E. Haigh. Tolkien will urge Haigh to continue to work on it, and will later contribute a foreword; see entry for 12 January 1928. – He inscribes the date ‘1923’ in his copy of Barddas, or A Collection of Original Documents, Illustrative of the Theology, Wisdom, and Usages of the Bardo-Druidic System of the Isle of Britain, vol. 2, translated with notes by John Williams ab Ithel (London, 1874). – Tolkien is named as one of the scholars who will contribute to the Oxford Language and Literature Series. Under the general editorship of C.T. Onions, the series is to consist of small volumes concerned with a variety of languages and associated literatures, intended primarily for students.
January 1923 Tolkien’s poem Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden is published in The Gryphon for January 1923.
10 January 1923 Term begins at Leeds.
13 February 1923 Tolkien writes to Elizabeth Wright, the wife of his former teacher Joseph Wright and herself a scholar (see *Joseph Wright), to thank her for an offprint of an article by her about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (presumably ‘The Word “Abloy” in “Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight”, l. 1174’, in the section ‘Miscellaneous Notes’, Modern Language Review 18, no. 1 (January 1923), pp. 86–7). He notes that ‘Philology is making headway’ at Leeds. ‘The proportion of “language” students is very high, and there is no trace of the press-gang!’ (Letters, p. 11).
20 February 1923 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Board of the Faculty of Arts at Leeds.
20 March 1923 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Board of the Faculty of Arts at Leeds.
21 March 1923 Term ends at Leeds.
Spring 1923 Tolkien’s poem The City of the Gods (composed April 1915 as Kôr) is published in the Leeds magazine The Microcosm for Spring 1923.
19 April 1923 Term begins at Leeds.
20 April 1923 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Board of the Faculty of Arts at Leeds.
26 April 1923 A review by Tolkien of Hali Meidenhad: An Alliterative Prose Homily of the Thirteenth Century, ed. F.J. Furnivall, is published in the Times Literary Supplement for 26 April under the title *Holy Maidenhood. Hali Meidenhad belongs to a group of works (*Katherine Group) to which Tolkien will devote a great deal of attention in his career.
May 1923 Tolkien catches a severe cold, which turns into pneumonia. He is gravely ill, his life in danger; but he will begin to recover by 12 June. His grandfather, John Suffield, aged 90, stays with Tolkien and his family at this time.
23 May 1923 Henry Bradley, Tolkien’s former supervisor on the Oxford