Viking Club

The Viking Club was a club for philologists and historians specializing in Germanic and Scandinavian studies. It was founded by E.V. Gordon and J. R. R. Tolkien when the two were professors at Leeds University in the 1920s. At meetings of the club students and faculty would gather to read Old Icelandic sagas and drink together in an informal setting. Members of the club also invented original songs and poems in Old English, Gothic, Old Norse and other extinct Germanic languages. A collection of these works was privately published as Songs for the Philologists, of which most of the printed editions were destroyed in a fire. Only a very few copies are believed to have survived.[1]

For the organization founded in London in 1892, see Viking Society for Northern Research.

Similar groups have continued at Leeds University since the time of Tolkien and Gordon. As of 2015 the successor of the Viking Club was known as the Old Norse Reading Group, and associated with Gordon's distant successor, Alaric Hall.[2][3]

See also

References
  1. TolkienBooks.net - Songs for the Philologists "according to one report 'more than thirteen'".
  2. 'Lord of the Sings as Leeds Hears Lost Tolkien Ballad', The Yorkshire Post (19 March 2015).
  3. Chris Bond, 'Tolkien and Leeds - The Hobbit Author and his Time in Yorkshire', The Yorkshire Post (19 September 2017).
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