made a Knight of the Royal Icelandic Order of the Falcon in 1930. With Tolkien, Gordon also began the Viking Club. In this club they would read Old Icelandic sagas (and drink beer) with students and faculty, and invent original Anglo-Saxon songs. A collection of these was privately published as the book Songs for the Philologists. Most of the printed editions were destroyed in a fire and only 14 or so books are said to exist. Gordon was active in the Yorkshire Dialect Society, and in 1930 he, with Leeds's Professor of French Paul Barbier, was a founder member of the Yorkshire Society for Celtic Studies, joining its executive committee and pledging £10 over ten years towards the endowment of a lectureship in Celtic Studies at Leeds University. On Gordon's departure from Leeds, he was succeeded by Bruce Dickins. Among Gordon's best Leeds students were the scholars Albert Hugh Smith (whom Gordon gave his notes towards an aborted study of East Yorkshire place-names, which Smith went on to complete), J.A. Thompson, the translator of Halldór Laxness's classic novel Independent People, and Ida Lilian Pickles, whom he married in 1930. Together they had four children (the eldest of whom, Bridget Mackenzie, went on to lecture in Old Norse at Glasgow University); Tolkien composed them a long Old English praise-poem in the Old Norse drottkvætt-metre, entitled Brýdleop, as a wedding present. University of Manchester, and death In 1931, Gordon was made Smith Professor of English Language and Germanic Philology at the University of Manchester where his research focused on Old and Middle English. Among his students was A. R. Taylor, who later succeeded Gordon at Leeds. He died unexpectedly in 1938 of complications following an operation to remove gallstones. After his death, Gordon's widow Ida took on a number of his teaching duties at Manchester, finishing and posthumously publishing a number of his works, before retiring in 1968. Select bibliography and archives An extensive bibliography of Gordon's publications can be found in Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 273–74. In 2014, the estate of Gordon's eldest daughter Bridget sold a collection of letters to the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds, written variously to Gordon and his wife Ida by J. R. R. Tolkien. Mackenzie passed Ida and Eric Gordon's books to St Andrews University Library. Books 1925 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, co-edited with