J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (January 3, 1892 – September 2, 1973) was the author of The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the Rings.

He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham and Oxford University; he worked as reader in English language at Leeds from 1920 to 1925, as professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and of English Language and Literature, also at Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was an eminently distinguished lexicographer and an expert in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. He was a strongly committed Catholic, and admitted in letters that his faith had a profound effect on his writings. He belonged to a literary discussion group called the Inklings, through which he enjoyed a close friendship with C. S. Lewis.

In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's published fiction includes a number of posthumous books about the history of the imaginary world of Middle-earth, where his stories take place. The enduring popularity and influence of these works have established Tolkien as the father of the modern high fantasy genre. Tolkien's other published fiction includes adaptations of stories originally told to his children and not directly related to Middle-earth.

Biography

Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892 in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (now Free State), South Africa, to Arthur Tolkien, an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel Tolkien (maiden name Suffield). As far as is known, most of Tolkien's paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in Saxony (Germany), but had been living in England since the 18th century. The surname Tolkien is anglicised from Tollkiehn (i.e. German tollkühn, "foolhardy"). The character of Professor Rashbold in The Notion Club Papers is a pun on the name. Tolkien only had one sibling, his brother Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, who was born on February 17, 1894.

When he was three, Tolkien went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of a severe brain haemorrhage before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Birmingham for a short time. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to Sarehole, then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham. He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent and Lickey Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books along with other Worcestershire towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester and Alvechurch, as would areas in Worcestershire particularly his aunt's farm of Bag End, whose name would be used in his fiction.

Mabel tutored her two sons, and Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany, and she awoke in her son the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees. But his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early. He could read by the age of four, and could write fluently soon afterwards. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, St Phillip's School, and Exeter College, Oxford.

His mother converted to Catholicism in 1900, despite vehement protests by her Baptist family. She died of diabetes in 1904, when Tolkien was 12, and he felt for the rest of his life that she had become a martyr for her faith; this had a profound effect on his own Catholic beliefs. Tolkien's devout faith was significant in the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Christianity, and his writings express Christian values and contain much Christian symbolism.

During his subsequent orphanhood he was brought up by Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham. He lived there in the shadow of Perrott's Folly and the Victorian tower of Edgbaston waterworks, which may have influenced the images of the dark towers within his works. Another strong influence was the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has a large and world-renowned collection of works and had put it on free public display from around 1908.

He met and fell in love with Edith Bratt (later to serve as his model for Lúthien), and despite many obstacles he succeeded in marrying her, on March 22, 1916.

Tolkien in 1916, wearing his British Army uniform in a photograph from the middle years of WW1 (from Carpenter's Biography)

With his childhood love of landscape, he visited Cornwall in 1914 and he was said to be deeply impressed by the singular Cornish coastline and sea. After graduating from the University of Oxford with a first-class degree in English language in 1915, Tolkien joined the British Army effort in World War I and served as a second lieutenant in the 11th battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. His battalion was moved to France in 1916, where Tolkien served as a communications officer during the Battle of the Somme, until he came down with trench fever on 27 October, and was moved back to England on 8 November. Many of his fellow servicemen, as well as several of his closest friends, were killed in the war. During his recovery in a cottage in Great Haywood, Staffordshire he began to work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin.

Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary (among others, he initiated the entries wasp and walrus). In 1920 he took up a post as Reader in English language at the University of Leeds, but in 1925 he returned to Oxford as a Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College. In 1945 he moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959.

It may be significant that Tolkien disliked intensely the devouring of the English countryside by the suburbs, even though, given his profession, he generally found it convenient to live in them. But for most of his adult life he eschewed automobiles, preferring to ride a bicycle. Tolkien and Edith had four children: John Francis Reuel (November 17, 1917), Michael Hilary Reuel (October, 1920), Christopher John Reuel (1924) and Priscilla Anne Reuel (1929). During the 1950s, Tolkien spent many of his long academic holidays at the home of his son John Francis in Stoke-on-Trent.

Engraved on the stone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford, where he and his wife are buried, are the names Beren and Lúthien, paying homage to one of the great love stories of his fictional Middle-earth, which has been certainly inspired in the real history of love between Tolkien and his beloved wife.

Posthumously named after Tolkien are the Tolkien Road in Eastbourne, East Sussex, and the asteroid 2675 Tolkien. Tolkien Way in Stoke-On-Trent is named after J.R.R.'s son, Father John Francis Tolkien, who was the priest in charge at nearby Church of Our Lady of the Angels and St Peter in Chains.

Writing

Tolkien's earliest literary ambition was to be a poet, but his primary creative urge in his younger days was the invention of imaginary languages, including early versions of what would later evolve into the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin. Feeling that a language required a people to speak it, and that a people would tell stories which influenced and reflected their languages, he began writing (in English, but with many names and terms from his invented languages) the mythology and tales of a fictional people he associated with legendary fairies. In later works, Tolkien's fairy-folk were replaced by Elves -- a name he adapted from English folklore (with some regret, for he came to consider the name misleading).

Beginning with The Book of Lost Tales, written while recuperating from illness during World War I, Tolkien devised several themes - including the love story of Beren and Lúthien - that were reused in successive mythologies. The two most prominent stories, the tales of Beren/Luthien and of Turin, were carried forward into long narrative poems (published in The Lays of Beleriand). Tolkien wrote a brief summary of the mythology these poems were intended to represent, and that summary eventually evolved into The Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never finished. The story of this continuous re-drafting is told in the posthumous series The History of Middle-Earth. Another story he devised was the tale of The Fall of Numenor, which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis.

Tolkien was strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon literature, Germanic and Norse mythologies, Finnish folklore, the Bible, and Greek mythology. Other inspirations included Babylon and Egypt. The works most often cited as sources for Tolkien's stories include Beowulf, Kalevala, the Poetic Edda, Plato's Atlantis, Volsunga saga and the Hervarar saga [1] (http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/bibl4.html). Tolkien himself acknowledged Homer and Oedipus as influences or sources for some of his stories and ideas. His borrowings also came from numerous Middle English works and poems.

In addition to his mythological compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. He wrote annual Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them, building up a series of short stories (later compiled and published as The Father Christmas Letters). Other stories included Mr. Bliss, Roverandom, and Smith of Wootton Major. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton Major, like The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from the mythological compositions.

Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become popular but he was persuaded by a former student to publish a book he had written for his own children called The Hobbit in 1937. However, the book attracted adult readers as well, and it became popular enough for the publisher, George Allen & Unwin, to ask Tolkien to work on a sequel.

Despite feeling uninspired on the topic, this request prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: the epic three-volume novel The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955). (Note that while the Lord of the Rings is often described as a "trilogy" and sold as three separate books, it was written as a single story and it was Tolkien's editors, not Tolkien himself, who made the division into three parts.) Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for Lord of the Rings, during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set long after The Silmarillion but Tolkien infused the Silmarillion and Numenor myths into a new mythology which is properly called The Middle-earth Mythology.

The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular with students in the 1960s, and has remained popular ever since, ranking as one the most popular works of fiction of the twentieth century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. It was voted the greatest book of the 20th century in a readers' poll conducted by the BBC, and the Waterstone's bookstore chain and in 1999 a poll of Amazon.com customers judged The Lord of the Rings to be the greatest book of the millennium. In 2002 Tolkien was voted 92nd of a "Greatest Britons" poll conducted by the BBC and in 2004 he was voted 35th in the Greatest South Africans. He is the only person to appear in both the British and South African Top 100. His popularity is not limited just to the English-speaking world: in 2004 a poll of more than one million Germans found The Lord of the Rings (Herr der Ringe) to be their favourite work of literature by a wide margin.

Tolkien at first thought that The Lord of the Rings would tell another children's tale like The Hobbit, but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Though a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense back-story of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in The Silmarillion and other volumes. Tolkien's influence weighs heavily on the fantasy genre that grew up after the success of The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien was a professional philologist, and the languages and the mythologies he studied clearly left an imprint on his fiction. In particular, the dwarves' names in the Hobbit, are taken from the Völuspá of the Edda, while certain plot-elements (for example: the thief stealing a cup from a dragon's hoard) are taken from Beowulf. Tolkien was a recognised authority on Beowulf, and published several important works on the poem. A previously unpublished translation of Beowulf by Tolkien was found in 2004 and is being edited for publication by Michael Drout. Many of the names Tolkien used in The Lord of the Rings may be found in Middle English poems, The Bible, and other sources.

Tolkien continued to work on the history of Middle-earth until his death. His son Christopher, with some assistance from fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay, organised some of this material into one volume, published as The Silmarillion in 1977. Christopher Tolkien continued over subsequent years to publish background material on the creation of Middle-earth. Note that the posthumous works such as The History of Middle-earth and the Unfinished Tales contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative and outright contradictory versions of the stories simply because Tolkien kept inventing new mythologies which reused older ideas over the course of decades.

There is no true consistency to be found between the various works, not even between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, the two most closely related works, because Tolkien was never able to fully integrate all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing The Hobbit for a third edition, that he would have preferred to rewrite the entire book completely.

The library of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin preserves many of Tolkien's original manuscripts, notes and letters; other original material survives at Oxford's Bodleian Library. Marquette has the manuscripts and proofs of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, manuscripts of many "lesser" books like the Farmer Giles of Ham, and Tolkien fan material, while the Bodleian holds the Silmarillion papers and Tolkien's academic work.

Languages

See also Languages of Middle-earth.

Philology, the study of languages, was Tolkien's first academic love, and his interest in linguistics inspired him to invent some fifteen artificial languages (most famously the two Elvish languages in The Lord of the Rings: Quenya and Sindarin). He later elaborated an entire cosmogony and history of Middle-earth as background.

Through his work as a lexicographer he was familiar with several languages, current and extinct, but in his personal correspondence he noted the sound of the Finnish language as the most pleasing to his ears, and it was a source of inspiration for Quenya, the most important of his invented languages.

The popularity of his books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature, especially the use of his non-standard forms "dwarves" and "elvish" (instead of "dwarfs" and "elfish").

Art based on Tolkien's works

See also Works inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien.

In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman (Letters 131), Tolkien writes about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which

The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.

The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him were Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Farmer Giles of Ham) and Donald Swann (who set the music to The Road Goes Ever On). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created illustrations to the Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity to the style of his own drawings.

But Tolkien was not fond of all artistic representation of his works that was produced in his lifetime, and sometimes harshly disapproving.

In 1946 (Letters, 107), he rejects suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition of the Hobbit as "too Disnified",

Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of.

He was sceptical of the emerging fandom in the United States, and in 1954 he returned proposals for the dust-jackets of the American edition of the Lord of the Rings (Letters, 144):

Thank you for sending me the projected 'blurbs', which I return. The Americans are not as a rule at all amenable to criticism or correction; but I think their effort is so poor that I feel constrained to make some effort to improve it.

And in 1958, in an irritated reaction to a proposed movie adaptation of the Lord of the Rings by Morton Grady Zimmerman (Letters, 207) he writes

I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.

He went on to criticize the script scene by scene ("yet one more scene of screams and rather meaningless slashings"). But Tolkien was in principle open to the idea of a movie adaptation. He sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1968, while, guided by scepticism towards future productions, he forbade that Disney should ever be involved (Letters, 13, 1937):

It might be advisable […] to let the Americans do what seems good to them – as long as it was possible […] to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).

United Artists never made a film, though at least John Boorman was planning a film in the early seventies. It would have been a live-action film, which apparently would have been much more to Tolkien's liking than an animated film. In 1976 the rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first movie adaptation (an animated rotoscoping film) of The Lord of the Rings appeared only after Tolkien's death (in 1978, directed by Ralph Bakshi). This first adaptation, however, only contained the first half of the story that is The Lord of the Rings. In 2001–2003 The Lord of the Rings was filmed in full as a trilogy of films by Peter Jackson.

Bibliography

See also Poems by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Fiction and poetry

• 1936 Songs for the Philologists, with E.V. Gordon et al.
• 1937 The Hobbit or There and Back Again
• 1945 Leaf by Niggle (short story)
• 1945 The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, published in Welsh Review
• 1949 Farmer Giles of Ham (medieval fable)
• 1953 The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son published with the essay Ofermod
• The Lord of the Rings
  • 1954 The Fellowship of the Ring: being the first part of The Lord of the Rings
  • 1954 The Two Towers: being the second part of The Lord of the Rings
  • 1955 The Return of the King: being the third part of The Lord of the Rings
• 1962 The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book
• 1967 The Road Goes Ever On, with Donald Swann
• 1964 Tree and Leaf (On Fairy-Stories and Leaf by Niggle in book form)
• 1966 The Tolkien Reader (The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm's Son, On Fairy Stories, Leaf by Niggle, Farmer Giles of Ham' and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil)
• 1966 Tolkien on Tolkien (autobiographical)
• 1967 Smith of Wootton Major

Academic works

• 1922 A Middle English Vocabulary
• 1924 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (with E. V. Gordon)
• 1925 Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography
• 1925 The Devil's Coach Horses
• 1929 Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiohad
• 1932 The Name 'Nodens' (in: Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire.)
• 1932/1935 Sigelwara Land parts I and II
• 1934 The Reeve's Tale (rediscovery of dialect humour, introducing the Hengwrt manuscript into textual criticism of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales)
• 1936 The Monsters and the Critics (lecture on Beowulf criticism)
• 1939 On Fairy-Stories (lecture on Tolkien's philosophy on fantasy)
• 1944 Sir Orfeo (an edition of the medieval poem)
• 1947 On Fairy-Stories (essay, very central for understanding Tolkien's views on fantasy)
• 1953 Ofermod, published with the poem The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son
• 1953 Middle English "Losenger"
• 1962 Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle
• 1963 English and Welsh
• 1966 Jerusalem Bible (contributing translator and lexicographer)

Posthumous publications

• 1975 Translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl (poem) and Sir Orfeo
• 1976 The Father Christmas Letters
• 1977 The Silmarillion
• 1979 Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien
• 1980 Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth
• 1980 Poems and Stories (a compilation of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, On Fairy-Stories, Leaf by Niggle, Farmer Giles of Ham and Smith of Wootton Major)
• 1981 The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (eds. Christopher Tolkien and Humphrey Carpenter)
• 1981 The Old English Exodus Text
• 1982 Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode
• 1982 Mr. Bliss
• 1983 The Monsters and the Critics (an essay collection)
• 1983–1996 The History of Middle-Earth:
  • I. The Book of Lost Tales 1 (1983)
  • II. The Book of Lost Tales 2 (1984)
  • III. The Lays of Beleriand (1985)
  • IV. The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986)
  • V. The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987)
  • VI. The Return of the Shadow (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 1) (1988)
  • VII. The Treason of Isengard (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 2) (1989)
  • VIII. The War of the Ring (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 3) (1990)
  • IX. Sauron Defeated (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 4, including an edition of The Notion Club Papers) (1992)
  • X. Morgoth's Ring (The Later Silmarillion vol. 1) (1993)
  • XI. The War of the Jewels (The Later Silmarillion vol. 2) (1994)
  • XII. The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996)
  • Index (2002)
• 1995 J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator (a compilation of Tolkien's art)
• 1998 Roverandom

Audio recordings

• 1967 Poems and Songs of Middle-Earth, Caedmon TC 1231
• 1975 JRR Tolkien Reads and Sings his The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings, Caedmon TC 1477, TC 1478 (based on an August, 1952 recording by George Sayer)

In journal articles

Tolkien himself and his works have become subjects of academic research and many of his essays and text fragments, otherwise unpublished, have been studied in academic publications and forums.

Books about Tolkien

A small selection of the dozens of books about Tolkien and his works:

• 1977 J. R. R. Tolkien - A Biography (Humphrey Carpenter)
• 1981 Journeys of Frodo (Barbara Strachey — an atlas of The Lord of the Rings)
• 1992 John & Priscilla Tolkien, The Tolkien Family Album. London: HarperCollins.
• 2000 J. R. R. Tolkien - Author of the Century (T. A. Shippey)
• 2000 Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle Earth ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter
• 2002 The Complete Tolkien Companion, 3rd edition (J. E. A. Tyler — a reference, covers The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales; substantially improved over the previous editions.)
• 2003 Tolkien the Medievalist, (ed. Jane Chance, Routledge, London, New York)
• 2004 Tolkien studies, Vol 1 ed. Douglas A. Anderson, Michael D. C. Drout and Verlyn Flieger
• 2004 Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, a Reader ed. Jane Chance
• 2005 The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind The Lord of the Rings by Stratford Caldecott

See also

• Middle-Earth
• Languages of Middle-Earth
• Lord of the Rings
• The Hobbit
• The Silmarillion
• Tolkien research
• Tolkien fandom
• Old English

External links

Template:Commons Template:Wikiquote

For story-internal references, see the links sections on Middle-Earth and Lord of the Rings.

Biographical:

• Tolkien Biography (http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/biography.html) (The Tolkien Society)
• J. R. R. Tolkien — In Oxford (http://www.jrrtolkien.org.uk/homepage.htm)
• J. R. R. Tolkien's Oxford - 360º Photographic Tour (http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/oxfordtour/tolkientour/index.html)
• Tolkien in Birmingham (http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/tolkien)
• Tolkien Trail — In Birmingham (http://www.virtualbrum.co.uk/tolkien.htm)

Bibliographical:

• An Illustrated Tolkien Bibliography (http://www.tolkienbooks.net/)
• The Lord of the Rings Fanatics Library (http://www.lotrlibrary.com/) Tolkienian Information
• The Tolkien Library (http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/) Tolkien literature essays, reviews, articles
• 1952 Audio recording of Tolkien reciting a poem in Quenya (http://archive.salon.com/audio/2000/10/05/tolkien_elvish/)
• A Philologist on Esperanto (http://donh.best.vwh.net/Languages/tolkien1.html) by J. R. R. Tolkien

Databases/Directories:

• One Ring: The Complete Guide to Tolkien Online (http://onering.virbius.com/)
• J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle-earth Articles and Links (http://www.xenite.org/talk/tolkien.html) (xenite.org)
• The Tolkien Meta-FAQ (http://tolkien.slimy.com/) (slimy.com)
• The Tolkien Wiki Community (http://www.thetolkienwiki.org/)
• Tolkien Gateway (http://tolkiengateway.net) Information on Tolkien, the books, the movies, the music, the languages, etc
• illustrations by Tolkien (http://draax.free.fr/JRRT_01.htm)

Societies:

• The Tolkien Society (http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/)

Derivative art (see also main article):

• music inspired by Tolkien (http://www.tolkien-music.com/)
• stories inspired by Tolkien (http://www.henneth-annun.net/)af:J.R.R. Tolkien

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