[3]: 230–31 As the head of department, George S. Gordon wrote to D. Nichol Smith on 18 October 1922, "I am overwhelmed here with students, and have now an Honours School of nearly 120 [...] A committee has been appointed to see what an be done to find me Seminar accommodation, and I am urged to an increase of staff".
[citation needed] Gordon worked at Leeds from 1922 to 1931, introducing first Old Norse and later modern Icelandic to the curriculum.
In this club they would read Old Icelandic sagas (and drink beer) with students and faculty, and invent original Anglo-Saxon songs.
[11] 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.
A. Thompson, the translator of Halldór Laxness's classic novel Independent People;[15] Stella Marie Mills, who went on to work at the Oxford English Dictionary;[16] and Ida Lilian Pickles,[17][failed verification] whom he married in 1930.
An extensive bibliography of Gordon's publications can be found in Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance (London: Routledge, 2003), pp.
[21][22] Mackenzie passed Ida and Eric Gordon's books to St Andrews University Library.