I never in a million years would have seen this revelation coming, much less coming out of the general media. If Tolkien's work for the British government has been documented by his biographers, I have either forgotten about that or never read the book.

JRR Tolkien trained as British spy
The novelist JRR Tolkien secretly trained as a Government spy in the run up to the Second World War, new documents have disclosed.

Tolkien, one of his generation's most respected linguists, was ''earmarked'' to crack Nazi codes in the event that Germany declared war.

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

Its staff - which included Alan Turing, the gay codebreaker - would later decipher the 'impenetrable' Enigma machines.

This saved Britain from German conquest by allowing the Navy to intercept and destroy Hitler's U-Boats.

According to previously unseen records, Tolkien trained with the top-secret Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS).

Read the full article at The Telegraph.

That should give the Tolkien community something to mull over for the next few days at least.

You're welcome to comment here but I've also started a thread over in the Tolkien Forum on SF-Fandom.