Everything about J R R Tolkien totally explained
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien,
CBE (
IPA: /ˈtoʊl.kiːn/) (
3 January 1892 –
2 September 1973) was an
English writer,
poet,
philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the
high fantasy classic works
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien was
Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of
Anglo-Saxon at
Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and
Merton Professor of
English language and literature from 1945 to 1959. He was a close friend of
C. S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the
Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the
Order of the British Empire by Queen
Elizabeth II on
28 March 1972.
After his death, Tolkien's son,
Christopher, published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including
The Silmarillion. These, together with
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about an imagined world called
Arda, and
Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955 Tolkien applied the word
legendarium to the larger part of these writings.
While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings when they were published in paperback in the United States led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or more precisely, high fantasy. Tolkien's writings have
inspired many other works of fantasy and have had a lasting effect on the entire field. In 2008,
The Times ranked him sixth on a list of 'The 50 greatest British writers since 1945'.
Biography
Tolkien family origins
Most of Tolkien's paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in the
German Kingdom of Saxony, but had been living in England since the 18th century, becoming "quickly and intensely English". The surname
Tolkien is Anglicized from
Tollkiehn (for example German
tollkühn, "foolhardy", etymologically corresponding to English
dull-keen, literally
oxymoron), and the surname
Rashbold, given to two characters in Tolkien's
The Notion Club Papers, is a
pun on this.
Tolkien's maternal grandparents, John and Edith Jane Suffield, were
Baptists who lived in
Birmingham and owned a shop in the city centre. The Suffield family had run various businesses out of the same building, called Lamb House, since the early 1800s. Beginning in 1812 Tolkien's great-great grandfather William Suffield owned and operated a book and stationery shop there; Tolkien's great-grandfather, also John Suffield, was there from 1826 with a
drapery and
hosiery business.
Childhood
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on
3 January 1892, in
Bloemfontein in the
Orange Free State (now
Free State Province, part of
South Africa) to
Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel,
née Suffield (1870–1904). The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the British bank he worked for. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel, who was born on
17 February 1894.
As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a
baboon spider (a type of
tarantula) in the garden, an event which would have later echoes in his stories. Dr. Thornton S. Quimby cared for the ailing child after the spider bite, and it's occasionally suggested that Doctor Quimby was an early model for such characters as
Gandalf the Grey.
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
rheumatic fever before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Stirling Road, Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to
Sarehole (now in
Hall Green), then a
Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham. He enjoyed exploring
Sarehole Mill and
Moseley Bog and the
Clent Hills and
Malvern Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books, along with other Worcestershire towns and villages such as
Bromsgrove,
Alcester, and
Alvechurch and places such as his aunt's farm of Bag End, the name of which 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 awakened 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. His mother allowed him to read many books. He disliked
Treasure Island and
The Pied Piper, and thought
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by
Lewis Carroll was amusing but disturbing. He liked stories about
"Red Indians" and the fantasy works by
George MacDonald.
Tolkien attended
King Edward's School, Birmingham and, while a student there, helped "line the route" for the
coronation parade of King
George V, being posted just outside the gates of
Buckingham Palace. He later attended
St. Philip's School.
Mabel Tolkien was received into the
Roman Catholic Church in 1900 despite vehement protests by her Baptist family, who then stopped all financial assistance to her. She died of acute complications of
diabetes in 1904, when Tolkien was 12, at Fern Cottage in
Rednal, which they were then renting. Mabel Tolkien was then about 34 years of age, about as long as a person with
diabetes mellitus type 1 could live with no treatment—
insulin wouldn't be discovered until two decades later. For the rest of his own life Tolkien felt that his mother had become a
martyr for her faith. This feeling had a profound effect on his own Catholic beliefs.
Prior to her death, Mabel Tolkien had assigned the guardianship of her sons to Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan of the
Birmingham Oratory, who was assigned to bring them up as good Catholics. Tolkien grew up 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.
Youth
In 1911, while they were at
King Edward's School, Birmingham, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society which they called "the T.C.B.S.", the initials standing for "Tea Club and Barrovian Society", alluding to their fondness for drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, illicitly, in the school library. After leaving school, the members stayed in touch, and in December 1914, they held a "Council" in London, at Wiseman's home. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong dedication to writing poetry.
In the summer of 1911, Tolkien went on holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter,
In October of the same year, Tolkien began studying at
Exeter College, one of the constituent colleges of the
University of Oxford. He initially studied
Classics but changed to
English Language, graduating in 1915.
Courtship and marriage
At the age of 16, Tolkien met
Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years older, when J.R.R. and Hilary Tolkien moved into the same boarding house. According to Humphrey Carpenter:
His guardian, Father Francis Morgan, viewing Edith as a distraction from Tolkien's school work and horrified that his young charge was seriously involved with a
Protestant girl, prohibited him from meeting, talking, or even corresponding with her until he was twenty-one. He obeyed this prohibition to the letter, with one notable early exception which made Father Morgan threaten to cut short his University career if he didn't stop.
On the evening of his twenty-first birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith a declaration of his love and asked her to marry him. Edith replied saying that she'd already agreed to marry another man, but that she'd done so because she'd believed Tolkien had forgotten her. The two met up and beneath a railway viaduct renewed their love; Edith returned her engagement ring and announced that she was marrying Tolkien instead. Following their engagement Edith converted to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence. They were formally engaged in Birmingham, in January 1913, and married in
Warwick,
England, at Saint Mary Immaculate Catholic Church on
22 March 1916.
World War I
The
United Kingdom was then engaged in fighting World War I, and Tolkien volunteered for military service and was commissioned in the
British Army as a
Second Lieutenant in the
Lancashire Fusiliers. He trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, for eleven months. He was then transferred to the 11th (Service) Battalion with the
British Expeditionary Force, arriving in France on
4 June 1916. He later wrote:
Tolkien served as a signals officer during the
Battle of the Somme, participating in the
Battle of Thiepval Ridge. He came down with
trench fever, a disease carried by the lice which were so very plentiful in
No Man's Land, on
27 October 1916. According to the memoirs of the Reverend Mervyn S. Evers,
Anglican chaplain to the Lancashire Fusilliers:
Tolkien was invalided to England on
8 November 1916. Many of his dearest friends, including Gilson and Smith of the T.C.B.S., were killed in the war. In later years, Tolkien indignantly declared that those who searched his works for parallels to the
Second World War were entirely mistaken:
The weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service. It was at this time Edith bore their first son, John Francis Reuel Tolkien.
Homefront
During his recovery in a cottage in
Great Haywood,
Staffordshire, England, he began to work on what he called
The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with
The Fall of Gondolin. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he'd recovered enough to do home service at various camps, and was promoted to lieutenant.
When he was stationed at
Kingston upon Hull, he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby
Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock:
This incident inspired the account of the meeting of
Beren and Lúthien, and Tolkien often referred to Edith as "my
Lúthien."
Academic and writing career
Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the
Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter
W. In 1920 he took up a post as
Reader in English language at the
University of Leeds, and in 1924 was made a professor there. While at Leeds he produced
A Middle English Vocabulary and, (with
E. V. Gordon), a definitive edition of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, both becoming academic standard works for many decades. In 1925 he returned to Oxford as
Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at
Pembroke College.
During his time at Pembroke, Tolkien wrote
The Hobbit and the first two volumes of
The Lord of the Rings, largely at 20
Northmoor Road in
North Oxford, where a
blue plaque was placed in 2002. He also published a philological essay in 1932 on the name '
Nodens', following Sir
Mortimer Wheeler's unearthing of a
Roman Asclepieion at
Lydney Park,
Gloucestershire, in 1928.
Of Tolkien's academic publications, the 1936 lecture "" had a lasting influence on
Beowulf research. Lewis E. Nicholson said that the article Tolkien wrote about Beowulf is "widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism", noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the work as opposed to the purely linguistic elements. At the time, the consensus of scholarship deprecated
Beowulf for dealing with childish battles with monsters rather than realistic tribal warfare; Tolkien argued that the author of
Beowulf was addressing human destiny in general, not as limited by particular tribal politics, and therefore the monsters were essential to the poem. Where
Beowulf does deal with specific tribal struggles, as at
Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements. In the essay, Tolkien also revealed how highly he regarded Beowulf: "Beowulf is among my most valued sources," and this influence can be seen in
The Lord of the Rings.
In 1945, Tolkien moved to
Merton College, Oxford, becoming the
Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien completed
The Lord of the Rings in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches.
Family
The Tolkiens had four children: John Francis Reuel (
17 November 1917 –
22 January 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel (
22 October 1920 –
27 February 1984),
Christopher John Reuel (born
21 November 1924) and Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel (born
18 June 1929). Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated letters from
Father Christmas when they were young. There were more characters added each year, such as the Polar Bear, Father Christmas' helper, the Snow Man, the gardener, Ilbereth the elf, his secretary, and various other minor characters. The major characters would relate tales of Father Christmas' battles against
goblins who rode on
bats and the various pranks committed by the Polar Bear.
Friendships
C.S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis, whom Tolkien first met at Oxford, was perhaps his closest friend and colleague, although their relationship cooled later in their lives. They had a shared affection for good talk, laughter and beer, and in May 1927 Tolkien enrolled Lewis in the Coalbiters club, which read Icelandic sagas in the original
Old Norse, and, as Carpenter notes, 'a long and complex friendship had begun.' It was Tolkien (and Hugh Dyson) who helped C.S. Lewis return to Christianity, and Tolkien was accustomed to read aloud passages from
The Silmarillion,
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings to Lewis' strong approval and encouragement at the Inklings—often meeting in Lewis' big Magdalen sitting-room—and in private.
It was the arrival of
Charles Williams, who worked for the Oxford University Press, that changed the relationship between Tolkien and Lewis. Lewis' enthusiasm shifted almost imperceptibly from Tolkien to Williams, especially during the writing of Lewis' third novel
That Hideous Strength.
Tolkien had for a long time been extremely bothered by what he perceived as Lewis's
Anti-Catholicism. In a letter to his son Christopher, he declared:
Lewis' growing reputation as a Christian apologist and his return to the Anglican fold also annoyed Tolkien, who had a deep resentment of the Church of England. By the mid-forties, Tolkien felt that Lewis was receiving a good deal "too much publicity for his or any of our tastes".
Tolkien and Lewis might have grown closer during their days at Headington, but this was prevented by Lewis' marriage to
Joy Davidman. Tolkien felt that Lewis expected his friends to pay court to her, even though as a bachelor in the thirties, he'd often ignored the fact that his friends had wives to go home to. Tolkien also may have felt jealous about a woman's intrusion into their close friendship, just as Edith Tolkien had felt jealous of Lewis' intrusion into her marriage. It didn't help matters that Lewis didn't initially tell Tolkien about his marriage to Davidman or that when Tolkien finally did find out, he also discovered that Lewis had married a divorcee, which was offensive to Tolkien's Catholic beliefs. Tolkien described the marriage as "very strange".
The cessation of Tolkien's frequent meetings with Lewis in the 1950s marked the end of the 'clubbable' chapter in Tolkien's life, which started with the T.C.B.S. at school and ended with the Inklings at Oxford.
His friendship with Lewis was nevertheless renewed to some degree in later years. As Tolkien was to comment in a letter to Priscilla after Lewis' death in November, 1963:
W.H. Auden
W. H. Auden was also a frequent correspondent and long-time friend of Tolkien's, initiated by Auden's fascination with
The Lord of the Rings: Auden was among the most prominent early critics to praise the work. Tolkien wrote in a 1971 letter:
Retirement and old age
During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame. The sale of his books was so profitable that he regretted he hadn't chosen early retirement. In a 1972 letter he deplores having become a
cult-figure, but admits that:
Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory and eventually he and Edith moved to
Bournemouth on the south coast.
Tolkien was awarded the
Order of the British Empire by Queen
Elizabeth II at
Buckingham Palace on
28 March 1972.
Death
Edith Tolkien died on
29 November 1971, at the age of 82. Tolkien had the name
Lúthien engraved on the stone at
Wolvercote Cemetery,
Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on
2 September 1973, at the age of 81, he was buried in the same grave, with
Beren added to his name. The engravings read:
Views
Tolkien was a devout
Roman Catholic, and in his religious and political views he was mostly conservative, in the sense of favouring established conventions and orthodoxies over innovation and modernization; in 1943 he wrote, "My political opinions lean more and more to
Anarchy (
philosophically understood to mean abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs)—or to 'unconstitutional'
Monarchy."
Tolkien had an intense dislike for the side effects of
industrialization, which he considered to be devouring the English countryside. For most of his adult life, he was disdainful of
automobiles, preferring to ride a bicycle. This attitude can be seen in his work, most famously in the portrayal of the forced "industrialization" of
The Shire in
The Lord of the Rings.
Many have commented on a number of potential parallels between the Middle-earth saga and events in Tolkien's lifetime.
The Lord of the Rings is often thought to represent England during and immediately after World War II. Tolkien ardently rejects this opinion in the foreword to the second edition of the novel, stating he prefers applicability to allegory. This view was expressed in his poem
Mythopoeia, and his idea that myths held "fundamental truths" became a central theme of the
Inklings in general.
Religion
Tolkien's devout faith was a significant factor in the conversion of
C. S. Lewis from
atheism to
Christianity, although Tolkien was greatly disappointed that Lewis chose to join the
Church of England, which Tolkien objected to as "a pathetic and shadowing medley of half remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs", instead of the Roman Catholic Church.
In the last years of his life, Tolkien became greatly disappointed by the reforms and changes implemented after the
Second Vatican Council, as his grandson
Simon Tolkien recalls:
I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My grandfather obviously didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but my grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right.
According to a recent article:
Politics
Tolkien's views were guided by his strict Catholicism. He voiced support for
Francisco Franco's
Falangist regime during the
Spanish Civil War upon learning that
Republican death squads were destroying churches and
killing large numbers of priests and nuns. He also expressed admiration for the South African poet and fellow Catholic
Roy Campbell after a 1944 meeting. Since Campbell had served with Franco's armies in Spain, Tolkien regarded him as a defender of the Catholic faith, while C. S. Lewis composed poetry openly satirising Campbell's "mixture of Catholicism and
Fascism".
The question of
racist or
racialist elements in Tolkien's views and works has been the matter of some scholarly debate.
Christine Chism distinguishes accusations as falling into three categories: intentional racism, unconscious
Eurocentric bias, and an evolution from latent racism in Tolkien's early work to a conscious rejection of racist tendencies in his late work.
Tolkien is known to have condemned
Nazi "race-doctrine" and
anti-Semitism as "wholly pernicious and unscientific". He also said of
racial segregation in
South Africa,
The treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain.
In 1968, he objected to a description of Middle-earth as "Nordic", a term he said he disliked due to its association with
racialist theories. Tolkien had nothing but contempt for
Adolf Hitler, whom he accused of "perverting ... and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit" which was so dear to him. However, he could get just as agitated over "lesser evils" that struck nearer home; he denounced
anti-German fanaticism in the British war effort during World War II. In 1944, he wrote in a letter to his son Christopher:
He was horrified by the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, referring to the
Bomb's creators as "these lunatic physicists" and "
Babel-builders".
Writing
Beginning with
The Book of Lost Tales, written while recuperating from illnesses contracted during
The Battle of the Somme, Tolkien devised several themes that were reused in successive drafts of his
legendarium. The two most prominent stories, the tales of
Beren and Lúthien and that of
Túrin, were carried forward into long narrative poems (published in
The Lays of Beleriand).
Influences
One of the greatest influences on Tolkien was the
Arts and Crafts polymath
William Morris. Tolkien wished to imitate Morris's prose and poetry romances, along with the general style and approach, he took elements such as the Dead Marshes in
The Lord of the Rings and Mirkwood.
Edward Wyke-Smith's
Marvellous Land of the Snergs, with its 'table-high' title characters, strongly influenced the incidents, themes, and depiction of Frodo's race in
The Hobbit.
Tolkien also cited
H. Rider Haggard's novel
She in a telephone interview: 'I suppose as a boy
She interested me as much as anything—like the Greek shard of Amyntas [Amenartas], which was the kind of machine by which everything got moving.' A supposed facsimile of this
potsherd appeared in Haggard's first edition, and the ancient inscription it bore, once translated, led the English characters to She's ancient kingdom. Critics have compared this device to the Testament of Isildur in
The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's efforts to produce as an illustration a realistic page from the
Book of Mazarbul. Critics starting with
Edwin Muir have found resemblances between Haggard's romances and Tolkien's.
It is also worth mentioning that Tolkien wrote of being impressed as a boy by
S. R. Crockett's historical novel
The Black Douglas and of basing the Necromancer (
Sauron) on its villain,
Gilles de Retz. Incidents in both
The Hobbit and
Lord of the Rings are similar in narrative and style to the novel, and its overall style and imagery have been suggested as an influence on Tolkien.
Tolkien was much inspired by early
Germanic, especially
Anglo-Saxon literature,
poetry and
mythology, which were his chosen and much-loved areas of expertise. These sources of inspiration included
Anglo-Saxon literature such as
Beowulf,
Norse sagas such as the
Volsunga saga and the
Hervarar saga, the
Poetic Edda, the
Prose Edda, the
Nibelungenlied and numerous other culturally related works.
Despite the similarities of his work to the
Volsunga saga and the
Nibelungenlied, which were the basis for
Richard Wagner's opera series
Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tolkien dismissed critics' direct comparisons to Wagner, telling his publisher, 'Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases.'
Tolkien himself also acknowledged
Homer,
Sophocles, and the
Finnish and
Karelian Kalevala as influences or sources for some of his stories and ideas.
Dimitra Fimi, along with Douglas Anderson, John Garth and many other prominent Tolkien Scholars show that Tolkien also drew influence from a variety of
Celtic (
Scottish,
Welsh and
Gaelic) history and legends, though after having the Silmarillion manuscript rejected, in part for it's 'eye-splitting' Celtic names, Tolkien rejected their Celtic origin:
A major philosophical influence on his writing is
Alfred the Great's Anglo-Saxon translation of
Boethius'
Consolation of Philosophy, known as the
Lays of Boethius. Characters in
The Lord of the Rings such as
Frodo,
Treebeard, and
Elrond make noticeably Boethian remarks. Also,
Catholic theology and imagery played a part in fashioning Tolkien's creative imagination, suffused as it was by his deeply religious spirit. The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series
The History of Middle-earth, which was edited by Tolkien's son,
Christopher Tolkien. From around 1936, he began to extend this framework to include the tale of
The Fall of Númenor, which was inspired by the legend of
Atlantis.
Children's books
In addition to his
mythopoetic 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,
Smith of Wootton Major and
Farmer Giles of Ham.
Roverandom and
Smith of Wootton Major, like
The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from his
legendarium.
The Hobbit
Tolkien never expected his stories to become popular, but by sheer accident a book he'd written some years before for his own children, called
The Hobbit, came in 1936 to the attention of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the London publishing firm George Allen & Unwin, who persuaded him to submit it for publication. However, the book attracted adult readers as well, and it became popular enough for the publisher to ask Tolkien to work on a sequel.
The Lord of the Rings
Even though he felt 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 (published 1954–55). Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for
The Lord of the Rings, during which time he received the constant support of the
Inklings, in particular his closest friend Lewis, the author of
The Chronicles of Narnia. Both
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings are set against the background of
The Silmarillion, but in a time long after it.
Tolkien at first intended
The Lord of the Rings to be a children's tale in the style of
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.
The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular in the 1960s and has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the 20th century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. In the 2003 "
Big Read" survey conducted by the
BBC,
The Lord of the Rings was found to be the "Nation's Best-loved Book". Australians voted
The Lord of the Rings "
My Favourite Book" in a 2004 survey conducted by the
Australian ABC. In a 1999 poll of
Amazon.com customers,
The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium". In 2002 Tolkien was voted the 92nd "
greatest Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted 35th in the
SABC3's Great South Africans, the only person to appear in both lists. His popularity isn't limited to the English-speaking world: in a 2004 poll inspired by the UK’s "Big Read" survey, about 250,000 Germans found
The Lord of the Rings to be their favourite work of literature.
Posthumous publications
Tolkien had appointed his son
Christopher to be his
literary executor, and he (with assistance from
Guy Gavriel Kay, later a well-known fantasy author in his own right) organized some of the unpublished material into a single coherent volume, published as
The Silmarillion in 1977—his father had previously attempted to get a collection of 'Silmarillion' material published together with
The Lord of the Rings.
In 1980 Christopher Tolkien followed
The Silmarillion with a collection of more fragmentary material under the title
Unfinished Tales. In subsequent years (1983–1996) he published a large amount of the remaining unpublished materials together with notes and extensive commentary in a series of twelve volumes called
The History of Middle-earth. They contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress, and Tolkien only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There isn't complete consistency between
The Lord of the Rings and
The Hobbit, the two most closely related works, because Tolkien never fully integrated all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing
The Hobbit for a third edition, that he'd have preferred to completely rewrite the entire book due to the style of its prose.
More recently, in 2007, the collection was completed with the publication of
The Children of Húrin by
HarperCollins (in the UK and Canada) and
Houghton Mifflin in the USA. The novel tells the story of
Túrin Turambar and his sister
Nienor, children of
Húrin Thalion. The material was compiled by Christopher Tolkien from
The Silmarillion,
Unfinished Tales,
The History of Middle-earth and unpublished works.
The Department of Special Collections and University Archives of John P. Raynor,S.J., Library at
Marquette University in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin preserves many of Tolkien's manuscripts; other original material is in
Oxford University's
Bodleian Library. Marquette has the manuscripts and proofs of
The Lord of the Rings,
The Hobbit and other works, including
Farmer Giles of Ham, while the Bodleian holds the
Silmarillion papers and Tolkien's academic work.
Languages and philology
Linguistic career
Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of
language and
philology. He specialized in
Ancient Greek philology in college, and in 1915 graduated with
Old Norse as special subject. He worked for the
Oxford English Dictionary from 1918, and is credited with having worked on a number of W words, including
walrus, over which he struggled mightily. In 1920, he went to
Leeds as Reader in English language, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of
linguistics from five to twenty. He gave courses in
Old English heroic verse,
history of English, various
Old English and
Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory
Germanic philology,
Gothic,
Old Icelandic, and
Medieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "
Viking Club". He also had a certain, if imperfect, knowledge of
Finnish.
Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of
racial and linguistic significance", and he entertained notions of an inherited taste of language, which he termed the "native tongue" as opposed to "cradle tongue" in his 1955 lecture
English and Welsh, which is crucial to his understanding of race and language. He considered
West Midlands dialect of
Middle English to be his own "native tongue", and, as he wrote to
W. H. Auden in 1955, "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)".
Language construction
» See also: Languages of Middle-earth
Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for the construction of
artificial languages. The best developed of these are
Quenya and
Sindarin, the etymological connection between which formed the core of much of Tolkien's
legendarium. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter of
aesthetics and
euphony, and Quenya in particular was designed from "phonaesthetic" considerations; it was intended as an "Elvenlatin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from
Finnish, Welsh, English, and Greek. A notable addition came in late 1945 with
Adûnaic or
Númenórean, a language of a "faintly
Semitic flavour", connected with Tolkien's
Atlantis legend, which by
The Notion Club Papers ties directly into his ideas about inability of language to be inherited, and via the "
Second Age" and the story of
Eärendil was grounded in the legendarium, thereby providing a link of Tolkien's twentieth-century "real primary world" with the legendary past of his Middle-earth.
Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of
auxiliary languages: in 1930 a congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his lecture
A Secret Vice, "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he'd concluded that "
Volapük,
Esperanto,
Ido,
Novial, &c, &c, are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends".
The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's idiosyncratic spellings
dwarves and
dwarvish (alongside
dwarfs and
dwarfish), which had been little used since the mid-1800s and earlier. He also coined the term
eucatastrophe, though it remains mainly used in connection with his own work.
Legacy
Adaptations
In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien writes about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which
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 they bore in style to his own drawings.
However, Tolkien wasn't fond of all the artistic representation of his works that were produced in his lifetime, and was sometimes harshly disapproving. In 1946, he rejected suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition of
The Hobbit as "too
Disnified",
Tolkien was sceptical of the emerging
Tolkien 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:
Tolkien 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. However, guided by an intense hatred of their past work, Tolkien expressly forbade that
The Walt Disney Company should ever become involved in any future productions.
United Artists never made a film, although director
John Boorman was planning a live-action film in the early 1970s. In 1976 the rights were sold to
Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the
Saul Zaentz Company, and the
first movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings appeared in 1978, an animated
rotoscoping film directed by
Ralph Bakshi with screenplay by the fantasy writer
Peter S. Beagle. It covered only the first half of the story of
The Lord of the Rings. In 1977 an
animated TV production of The Hobbit was made by
Rankin-Bass, and in 1980 they produced an animated
The Return of the King, which covered some of the portions of
The Lord of the Rings that Bakshi was unable to complete.
From 2001 to 2003,
New Line Cinema released
The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of live-action films that were filmed in
New Zealand and directed by
Peter Jackson. The series was successful, performing well commercially and winning numerous
Oscars.
Memorials
Posthumously named after Tolkien are the Tolkien Road in
Eastbourne,
East Sussex, and the
asteroid 2675 Tolkien discovered in 1982. Tolkien Way in
Stoke-on-Trent is named after Tolkien's eldest son, Fr. John Francis Tolkien, who was the priest in charge at the nearby Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Angels and St. Peter in Chains. There is also a
professorship in Tolkien's name at Oxford, the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language.
Blue plaques
There are six
blue plaques that commemorate places associated with Tolkien, one in
Oxford, one in
Harrogate, and four in
Birmingham. The Birmingham plaques commemorate three of his childhood homes right up to the time he left to attend
Oxford University. The Oxford plaque commemorates the residence where Tolkien wrote
The Hobbit and most of
The Lord of the Rings. The Harrogate plaque commemorates the residence where Tolkien convalesced from
trench fever.
Bibliography
Please see Bibliography of J. R. R. Tolkien
Notes and references
General references
Further Information
Get more info on 'J R R Tolkien'.
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