for his later research on Norse mythology. Throughout his later career, Turville-Petre would make frequent visits to Wales to study Celtic material. Other languages in which Turville-Petre would eventually become proficient include Latin, Old English and Gothic. Early career Turville-Petre was Honorary Lecturer in Modern Icelandic at the University of Leeds from 1935 to 1950. He joined the Viking Society for Northern Research in 1935, and was elected to its Council in 1936. He would be closely associated with the Society for the rest of his life, publishing numerous papers, reviews, translations and editions for it. From 1936 to 1938 Turville-Petre was Lektor in English at the University of Iceland, during which he served as the British pro-consul in Reykjavik. For a time he also lectured at the University of Turku. In 1939, Turville-Petre became Joint Honorary Secretary and Joint Editor of the Saga-Book, which is published by the Viking Society for Northern Research. He resigned as an editor in 1963, but continued to hold the position of Joint Honorary Secretary until his death. In 1940, Turville-Petre's graduate work on the Víga-Glúms saga was published as the first of the Oxford English Monographs series. It was influenced by the research of Björn M. Ólsen and Sigurður Nordal. By this time, he had already published several influential papers on Old Norse literature and religion, and had established himself as a major authority in these fields. Vigfússon Reader at the University of Oxford Turville-Petre was appointed the first Vigfússon Reader in Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities at University of Oxford in 1941. At the time he was serving as a cryptoanalyst at Bletchley Park. He spent much of World War II in the Foreign Office, and was not able to take up his position at Oxford until 1946. In August 1942 he was dispatched by the Foreign Office to the Faroe Islands "in order to study the inhabitants, their politics and conditions of life", staying there for two months. In 1941–1942 Turville-Petre entered into a notable dispute with Charles Leslie Wrenn over the date of composition of the sagas of Icelanders. In his notable Notes on the intellectual history of Icelanders (1942), Turville-Petre provided a summary of early Icelandic literary history which is still considered authoritative, and argued that these sagas were composed in from the 13th century. This view has since become generally accepted. Apart from the dispute with Wrenn, Turville-Petre