Cyril Jackson (broadcaster)

Jackson took a bachelor's degree in English at the University of Leeds from 1926-29, where his studies included Old Norse, in a class of five or six, under E. V. Gordon.^[1] He was a member of the University's Viking Club, and a letter by Jackson, auctioned in 2003 into private ownership along with Jackon's copy of the rare volume Songs for the Philologists, recalls "boozy evenings in the Senior Staff Common Room, where [...] we sang those songs to nursery rhyme tunes". J. R. R. Tolkien, who at that time had recently left Leeds for Oxford, would sometimes return, "when we naturally had a 'party'. After an unreasonable amount of ale [Tolkien's] declamation of bits of Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon was magnificent".^[2][3]

These studies inspired Jackson to visit Iceland following his degree. Through his friend Sigurður Nordal, Gordon learned that the head teacher of Menntaskólinn á Akureyri, Sigurður Guðmundsson, was in need of an Englishman to teach at the school, and accordingly dispatched Jackson. In July 1929, aged twenty-one, Jackson arrived in Iceland, staying first with the education minister Ásgeir Ásgeirsson. Jackson then proceeded to Munkaþverá í Eyjafirði to improve his Icelandic over the summer. Then, lodging in Akureyri with the geologist Steinþór Sigurðsson, he began teaching that October. Many of his students were older than he was.^[1]

In 1930^[1] or 1931^[4] Jackson returned to England. In 1931 he took a master's degree at Leeds; his two-volume thesis was "A Collected Edition of the Hitherto Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Matthías Jochumsson".^[5] He proceeded to a doctoral degree at the University of Manchester, where Gordon then worked, on Matthías Jochumsson's poetry, a topic suggested by Sigurður Nordal.^[1] He completed his thesis in 1934.^[6] Jackson was noted for his own facility with Icelandic verse, both for the quantity he knew by heart, and for his ability to compose it.^[7]