The Viking Club was a Club (organization), club for philologists and historians specializing in Germanic philology, 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 Icelandic sagas, sagas and drink together in an informal setting. Members of the club also invented original songs and poems in Anglo-Saxon language, Old English, Gothic language, 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. Following Gordon's departure, the student magazine ''The Gryphon'' remarked that 'old students will note with pleasure that Dr. A. H. Smith is now President of the Viking Club’, indicating that the student society that Tolkien and Gordon had established had in some sense survived Gordon’s departure and was in the hands of Albert Hugh Smith (1903–67), a Leeds graduate who in 1930 had taken up a lectureship at University College London.
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.
[Chris Bond,]
Tolkien and Leeds - The Hobbit Author and his Time in Yorkshire
, ''The Yorkshire Post'' (19 September 2017).
See also
* Inklings
References
{{Authority control
Germanic studies
Old Norse literature
J. R. R. Tolkien
English philologists
University of Leeds