Amid all the publicity surrounding the release of the film of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, it has occasionally been mentioned that Tolkien was an English professor. What is rather less well known is that in 1919 and 1920, at the very start of his career, Tolkien worked on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary; he later said of this time that he ‘learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life’.