Edith and Tolkien were married in March 1916, and in June, he joined the war in France. He was engaged in active combat at the front, and several of his school friends were among the catastrophic losses the British suffered. In November, he was sent back to England to recover from trench fever; he suffered a relapse and was never sent back to France. During his convalescence, Tolkien — who had been writing poetry in imitation of Old and Middle English verse for some time — began writing the work that was eventually published in 1977 as The Silmarillion. He called it The Book of Lost Tales and conceived it on an epic scale as a mythology for England.
The Tolkiens' first child, John, was born in November 1917. A year later, Tolkien took a job as a researcher for the ambitious Oxford English Dictionary project, and the Tolkiens moved to Oxford. In the course of that work, he was recognized as being highly knowledgeable in linguistics. At this time, he also did private tutoring to earn extra money.
In 1920, Tolkien was hired as a Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds, where he became friendly with a young Canadian, E. V. Gordon, with whom he collaborated on an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (published 1925). The Tolkiens' second child, Michael, was born 1920 and their third, Christopher, in 1924. In 1925, Tolkien was appointed Professor of the English Language at Leeds, although he was considered very young for the position. In the same year, he was hired as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. The Tolkiens moved back to Oxford, where their youngest child, Priscilla, was born in 1929.
