J. R. R. Tolkien Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements. In the essay, Tolkien also revealed how highly he regarded Beowulf: "Beowulf is among my most valued sources", and this influence may be seen throughout his Middle-earth legendarium. According to Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien had an ingenious means of beginning his series of lectures on "Beowulf": Decades later, W.H. Auden wrote to his former professor, In the run-up to the Second World War, Tolkien was earmarked as a codebreaker. In January 1939, he was asked whether he would be prepared to serve in the cryptographic department of the Foreign Office in the
U. S. R. Murty U. S. R. Murty Uppaluri Siva Ramachandra Murty, or U. S. R. Murty (as he prefers to write his name), is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo. U. S. R. Murty received his Ph.D. in 1967 from the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, with a thesis on extremal graph theory; his advisor was C. R. Rao. Murty is well known for his work in matroid theory and graph theory, and mainly for being a co-author with J. A. Bondy of a textbook on graph theory. Murty has served as a managing editor and co-editor-in-chief