[NYer]

Tolkien: Intelligence chiefs singled him and a 'cadre' of other intellectuals to work at Bletchley Park, the codebreaking centre in Buckinghamshire.

[Mamzelle]

Yes, the Nazis were big on Old Norse. Don’t code-crackers have to be good at math?

[SolidWood]

Alan Turing, the gay codebreaker

His sexuality had to do what with his work? The newsrag couldn't help itself to add this.

[Cicero]

As an academic, Tolkien was primarily a linguist, with a good working knowledge of Old English, Old High German, Old Norse, and the rest of it. In those days, there was also considerable interest in the relations among the various Indo-European languages and the ways that they changed over time. So it was a kind of science.

I imagine Tolkien turned it down because he thought he was not needed and that he had better things to do, such as endlessly working on the Silmarilion and its various component stories.

[freedumb2003]

If you have not read The Book of Lost Tales and The Silmarillion you really haven't read Tolkien.

The man was a genius.

[IrishCatholic]

Nah, by that time Gollum had escaped and they went with him instead to find a way through the swamps.

Besides, Tolkein had been to Bree too many times and was known at the Prancing Pony. He used to summer in Frogmorton.
There was a concern in early ‘36 that Saruman had infiltrated into the shire and also had paid informants among the Bucklanders. (This proved false after the fall of the third Reich, although several extended members of the Cotton family that worked at the Green Dragon with Rosie ended up disappearing behind the Iron Curtain in the post war era.)

[cardinal4]

which included Alan Turing, the gay codebreaker

And?

[Maine Mariner]

JRR Tolkien was also a veteran of WWI and saw action in France.

[Polynikes]

The wartime Brits were quite resourceful and amazing. One of their operatives was Aleister Crowley the occultist. He was in contact with German occult groups such as the Thule Society and assorted German astrologers through his Golden Dawn Society, during the war. The strange flight of Rudolph Hess (a member of the Thule Society) to England was supposedly provoked by disinformation fed to German astrologers by Crowley. That explained Hitlers rage and consequent arrest of every astrologer in Germany after Hess flew to England. Crowleys handler in British intelligence, Ian Fleming the future author of James Bond.

[gandalftb]

Tolkien was one of the greatest experts in the origin of germanic, norse, and anglo-saxon words. However, Tolkien lacked the patience for the rote work of codebreaking. By the mid 30's Tolkien was consumed by the travails of Middle Earth, saw it as his life's work.

Likely, he cared little for war having lost all of his close friends in WW1.

[tlb]

Training as a technician/cryptographer is not training as a spy. Sensationalized headline trying to pump up interest in the story, and the story doesn’t really need it.

[BikerJoe]

So Tolkien was “Lord of the Decoder Rings”?

[BikerJoe]

So Tolkien was “Lord of the Decoder Ring”?