Tolkien...a British spy?

Yesterevening, Jonathan presented me with an article published in The Telegraph last Thursday entitled: ''Spy chiefs earmarked Tolkien as code breaker.'' The article, written by ''Daily Telegraph Reporter,'' reports that Tolkien trained as a code-breaker in March 1939, in the immediate run-up to the Second World War. I initially said that this was contrary to what his Biography (Humphrey Carpenter, 1977) said; that Tolkien did not enter the War Office, nor was he required (as most other academics were) to undertake work for some government department (instead, he did night work as an Air Raid Warden - which mostly entailed wandering the streets of Oxford at night and in the cold with a helmet and a rifle to check whether neighbours had prevented all interior lighting from escaping their windows); also, I remembered that sometime in March of that year, Tolkien had delivered his famous (DPhil material!) lecture On Fairy Stories to the University of St Andrews.

However, although the Biography makes no mention of it (indeed, it fails to mention a great many things), the Scull/Hammond Chronology that I own tells us that on 27th March 1939, Tolkien began a four day course (the article in The Telegraph says three days) in cryptography at the Foreign Office. The article says that he was given training in Scandinavian languages and Spanish - I can't quite understand why he would have needed training in any Scandinavian language, since as an Undergraduate at Oxford he had often amused himself by reading the Finnish Kalevala in the original, and by 1939, Tolkien had been giving lectures in the Old Norse language and Sagas (the Elder Edda etc) for at least 13 years! He also knew Swedish and Russian. I am unsure how well-versed Tolkien was in Spanish (he had often begged Fr Francis Morgan of the Oratory, his guardian, to teach him Spanish, but he refused) but he later remarked that he found Spanish the most aesthetically pleasing of the Romance languages, which indicates that he knew at least some of it.

The article says that documents relating to the course indicate that Tolkien was ''keen'' but declined the offer of a job paying £500 per annum. This is all relatively new to me, but I'd like to know who wrote the article since there are some errors in it, among them an assertion that Tolkien was a ''respected linguist'' - he was in no ordinary sense a ''linguist'' (he himself said so!), he was a philologist; and if this whole material was previously unseen, then it fails to account for its (confessedly) brief mention in the Chronology. I was simply unaware of it.