J. R. R. Tolkien

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J. R. R. Tolkien

FRSL
Tolkien in the 1920s
Tolkien in the 1920s
BornJohn Ronald Reuel Tolkien
(1892-01-03)3 January 1892
Bloemfontein, Orange Free State
Died2 September 1973(1973-09-02) (aged 81)
Bournemouth, Hampshire, England
Occupation
NationalityBritish
EducationKing Edward's School, Birmingham
Exeter College, Oxford
Genre
Spouse
(m. 1916; died 1971)
Children
RelativesTolkien family
Signature
Military career
AllegianceUnited Kingdom
BranchBritish Army
Years1915–1920
RankLieutenant
UnitLancashire Fusiliers
Battles

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
.

From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the

Queen Elizabeth II
on 28 March 1972.

After Tolkien's death, his son

Arda and, within it, Middle-earth. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term 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 led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. As a result, he has been popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential authors of all time.

Biography

Ancestry

Tolkien was English, and thought of himself as such.[3][T 1] His immediate paternal ancestors were middle-class craftsmen who made and sold clocks, watches and pianos in London and

German eastward expansion, where his earliest-known paternal ancestor Michel Tolkien was born around 1620. Michel's son Christianus Tolkien (1663–1746) was a wealthy miller in Kreuzburg.[4] His son, Christian Tolkien (1706–1791), moved from Kreuzburg to nearby Danzig, and his two sons Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien (1747–1813) and Johann (later known as John) Benjamin Tolkien (1752–1819) emigrated to London in the 1770s and became the ancestors of the English family; the younger brother was J. R. R. Tolkien's second great-grandfather. In 1792, John Benjamin Tolkien and William Gravell took over the Erdley Norton manufacture in London, which from then on sold clocks and watches under the name Gravell & Tolkien. Daniel Gottlieb obtained British citizenship in 1794, but John Benjamin apparently never became a British citizen. Other German relatives joined the two brothers in London. Several people with the surname Tolkien or similar spelling, some of them members of the same family as J. R. R. Tolkien, live in northern Germany, but most of them are descendants of people who evacuated East Prussia in 1945, at the end of World War II.[5][4][6]

According to Ryszard Derdziński, the surname Tolkien is of Low Prussian origin and probably means "son/descendant of Tolk".[5][4] Tolkien mistakenly believed his surname derived from the German word tollkühn, meaning "foolhardy",[7] and jokingly inserted himself as a "cameo" into The Notion Club Papers under the literally translated name Rashbold.[8] However, Derdziński has demonstrated this to be a false etymology. While J. R. R. Tolkien was aware of his family's German origin, his knowledge of the family's history was limited because he was "early isolated from the family of his prematurely deceased father".[5][4]

Childhood

1892 Christmas card with a coloured photo of the Tolkien family in Bloemfontein, sent to relatives in Birmingham, England

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in

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 for which he worked. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, who was born on 17 February 1894.[9]

As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider in the garden, an event some believe to have been later echoed in his stories, although he admitted no actual memory of the event as an adult. In an earlier incident from Tolkien's infancy, a young family servant took the baby to his homestead, returning him the next morning.[10]

When he was three, he 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.[11] This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Kings Heath,[12] Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham.[13] He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent, Lickey and Malvern Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books, along with nearby towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester, and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt Jane's farm Bag End, the name of which he used in his fiction.[14]

Birmingham Oratory, where Tolkien was a parishioner and altar boy (1902–1911)

Mabel Tolkien taught her two children at home. Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil.[15] She taught him a great deal of botany and awakened in him 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.[16]

Tolkien could read by the age of four and could write fluently soon afterwards. His mother allowed him to read many books. He disliked

The Pied Piper" and thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was "amusing but disturbing". He liked stories about "Red Indians" (the term then used for Native Americans in adventure stories[17]) and works of fantasy by George MacDonald.[18] In addition, the "Fairy Books" of Andrew Lang were particularly important to him and their influence is apparent in some of his later writings.[19]

King Edward's School in Birmingham, where Tolkien was a pupil (1900–1902, 1903–1911)[20]

Mabel Tolkien was received into the

diabetes mellitus type 1 could survive without treatment—insulin would not be discovered until 1921, two decades later. Nine years after her death, Tolkien wrote, "My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith."[21]

Before her death, Mabel Tolkien had assigned the guardianship of her sons to her close friend, Father

Mother of Jesus—who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists."[T 2] After his mother's death, Tolkien grew up in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham and attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, and later St Philip's School. In 1903, he won a Foundation Scholarship and returned to King Edward's.[23]

Youth

While in his early teens, Tolkien had his first encounter with a constructed language, Animalic, an invention of his cousins, Mary and Marjorie Incledon. At that time, he was studying Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Their interest in Animalic soon died away, but Mary and others, including Tolkien himself, invented a new and more complex language called Nevbosh. The next constructed language he came to work with, Naffarin, would be his own creation.[24][25] Tolkien learned Esperanto some time before 1909. Around 10 June 1909 he composed "The Book of the Foxrook", a sixteen-page notebook, where the "earliest example of one of his invented alphabets" appears.[26] Short texts in this notebook are written in Esperanto.[27]

In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society they called the T.C.B.S. The initials stood for Tea Club and Barrovian Society, alluding to their fondness for drinking tea in

Barrow's Stores near the school and, secretly, in the school library.[28][29] 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.[30]

In 1911, Tolkien went on a summer holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollected vividly in a 1968 letter,

In October of the same year, Tolkien began studying at

first-class honours.[32] Among his tutors at Oxford was Joseph Wright, whose Primer of the Gothic Language had inspired Tolkien as a schoolboy.[33]

Courtship and marriage

At the age of 16, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years his senior, when he and his brother Hilary moved into the boarding house where she lived in Duchess Road, Edgbaston. According to Humphrey Carpenter, "Edith and Ronald took to frequenting Birmingham teashops, especially one which had a balcony overlooking the pavement. There they would sit and throw sugarlumps into the hats of passers-by, moving to the next table when the sugar bowl was empty. ... With two people of their personalities and in their position, romance was bound to flourish. Both were orphans in need of affection, and they found that they could give it to each other. During the summer of 1909, they decided that they were in love."[34]

His guardian, Father Morgan, considered it "altogether unfortunate"[T 4] that his surrogate son was romantically involved with an older, Protestant woman; Tolkien wrote that the combined tensions contributed to his having "muffed [his] exams".[T 4] Morgan prohibited him from meeting, talking to, or even corresponding with Edith until he was 21. Tolkien obeyed this prohibition to the letter,[35] with one notable early exception, over which Father Morgan threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop.[36]

On the evening of his 21st birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with family friend C. H. Jessop at Cheltenham. He declared that he had never ceased to love her, and asked her to marry him. Edith replied that she had already accepted the proposal of George Field, the brother of one of her closest school friends. But Edith said she had agreed to marry Field only because she felt "on the shelf" and had begun to doubt that Tolkien still cared for her. She explained that, because of Tolkien's letter, everything had changed.[37]

On 8 January 1913, Tolkien travelled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by Edith. The two took a walk into the countryside, sat under a railway viaduct, and talked. By the end of the day, Edith had agreed to accept Tolkien's proposal. She wrote to Field and returned her engagement ring. Field was "dreadfully upset at first", and the Field family was "insulted and angry".[37] Upon learning of Edith's new plans, Jessop wrote to her guardian, "I have nothing to say against Tolkien, he is a cultured gentleman, but his prospects are poor in the extreme, and when he will be in a position to marry I cannot imagine. Had he adopted a profession it would have been different."[38]

Following their engagement, Edith reluctantly announced that she was converting to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence. Jessop, "like many others of his age and class ... strongly anti-Catholic", was infuriated, and he ordered Edith to find other lodgings.[39]

Edith Bratt and Ronald Tolkien were formally engaged at Birmingham in January 1913, and married at St Mary Immaculate Catholic Church at Warwick, on 22 March 1916.[40] In his 1941 letter to Michael, Tolkien expressed admiration for his wife's willingness to marry a man with no job, little money, and no prospects except the likelihood of being killed in the Great War.[T 4]

First World War

Tolkien in his military uniform

In August 1914, Britain entered the

First World War. Tolkien's relatives were shocked when he elected not to volunteer immediately for the British Army. In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled: "In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage."[T 4] Instead, Tolkien, "endured the obloquy",[T 4] and entered a programme by which he delayed enlistment until completing his degree. By the time he passed his finals in July 1915, Tolkien recalled that the hints were "becoming outspoken from relatives".[T 4] He was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers on 15 July 1915.[41][42] He trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on Cannock Chase, Rugeley Camp near to Rugeley, Staffordshire, for 11 months. In a letter to Edith, Tolkien complained: "Gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed."[43] Following their wedding, Lieutenant and Mrs. Tolkien took up lodgings near the training camp.[41] On 2 June 1916, Tolkien received a telegram summoning him to Folkestone for posting to France. The Tolkiens spent the night before his departure in a room at the Plough & Harrow Hotel in Edgbaston, Birmingham.[44] He later wrote: "Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then... it was like a death."[45]

France

On 5 June 1916, Tolkien boarded a troop transport for an overnight voyage to Calais. Like other soldiers arriving for the first time, he was sent to the British Expeditionary Force's base depot at Étaples. On 7 June, he was informed that he had been assigned as a signals officer to the 11th (Service) Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers. The battalion was part of the 74th Brigade, 25th Division. While waiting to be summoned to his unit, Tolkien sank into boredom. To pass the time, he composed a poem titled The Lonely Isle, which was inspired by his feelings during the sea crossing to Calais. To evade the British Army's postal censorship, he developed a code of dots by which Edith could track his movements.[46] He left Étaples on 27 June 1916 and joined his battalion at Rubempré, near Amiens.[47] He found himself commanding enlisted men who were drawn mainly from the mining, milling, and weaving towns of Lancashire.[48] According to John Garth, he "felt an affinity for these working class men", but military protocol prohibited friendships with "other ranks". Instead, he was required to "take charge of them, discipline them, train them, and probably censor their letters ... If possible, he was supposed to inspire their love and loyalty."[49] Tolkien later lamented, "The most improper job of any man ... is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity."[49]

Battle of the Somme

The Schwaben Redoubt, painting by William Orpen. Imperial War Museum, London

Tolkien arrived at the

lice. He was invalided to England on 8 November 1916.[51]

According to his children

Priscilla Tolkien, "In later years, he would occasionally talk of being at the front: of the horrors of the first German gas attack, of the utter exhaustion and ominous quiet after a bombardment, of the whining scream of the shells, and the endless marching, always on foot, through a devastated landscape, sometimes carrying the men's equipment as well as his own to encourage them to keep going. ... Some remarkable relics survive from that time: a trench map he drew himself; pencil-written orders to carry bombs to the 'fighting line.'"[52]

Many of his dearest school friends were killed in the war. Among their number were Rob Gilson of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, who was killed on the

Beaumont Hamel. Fellow T.C.B.S. member Geoffrey Smith was killed during the battle, when a German artillery shell landed on a first-aid post. Tolkien's battalion was almost completely wiped out following his return to England.[53]

According to John Garth, Kitchener's Army, in which Tolkien served, at once marked existing social boundaries and counteracted the class system by throwing everyone into a desperate situation together. Tolkien was grateful, writing that it had taught him "a deep sympathy and feeling for the Tommy; especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties".[54]

Home front

A weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service.

U-boat campaign) round about the Battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far off as it does now".[T 4] Tolkien was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant on 6 January 1918.[59] 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. After his wife's death in 1971, Tolkien remembered:[T 5]

I never called Edith Luthien—but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks

On 16 July 1919, Tolkien was taken off active service, at Fovant, on Salisbury Plain, with a temporary disability pension.[61]

Academic and writing career

2 Darnley Road, the former home of Tolkien in West Park, Leeds
20 Northmoor Road, one of Tolkien's former homes in Oxford

On 3 November 1920, Tolkien was demobilized and left the army, retaining his rank of lieutenant.[62] His 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.[63] In 1920, he took up a post as reader in English language at the University of Leeds, becoming the youngest member of the academic staff there.[64] While at Leeds, he produced A Middle English Vocabulary and a definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E. V. Gordon; both became academic standard works for several decades. He translated Sir Gawain, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. In 1925, he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College.[65]

In mid-1919, he began to tutor undergraduates privately, most importantly those of Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh's College, given that the women's colleges were in great need of good teachers in their early years, and Tolkien as a married professor (then still not common) was considered suitable, as a bachelor don would not have been.[66]

During his time at Pembroke College Tolkien wrote

Asclepeion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928.[67]

Beowulf

In the 1920s, Tolkien undertook a translation of Beowulf, which he finished in 1926, but did not publish. It was later edited by his son Christopher and published in 2014.[68]

Ten years after finishing his translation, Tolkien gave a highly acclaimed lecture on the work, "

Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements.[72] In the essay, Tolkien revealed how highly he regarded Beowulf: "Beowulf is among my most valued sources"; this influence may be seen throughout his Middle-earth legendarium.[73]

According to Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien began his series of lectures on Beowulf in a most striking way, entering the room silently, fixing the audience with a look, and suddenly declaiming in Old English the opening lines of the poem, starting "with a great cry of Hwæt!" It was a dramatic impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it made the students realize that Beowulf was not just a set text but "a powerful piece of dramatic poetry".[74] Decades later, W. H. Auden wrote to his former professor, thanking him for the "unforgettable experience" of hearing him recite Beowulf, and stating: "The voice was the voice of Gandalf".[74]

Second World War

Merton College
, where Tolkien was Professor of English Language and Literature (1945–1959)

In the run-up to the

Government Code and Cypher School. He was informed in October that his services would not be required.[75][T 6][76]

In 1945, Tolkien moved to

University College, Galway (now NUI Galway), for many years.[78] In 1954 Tolkien received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland (of which University College, Galway, was a constituent college).[79] Tolkien completed The Lord of the Rings in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches.[80]

Family

The Tolkiens had four children: John Francis Reuel Tolkien (17 November 1917 – 22 January 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien (22 October 1920 – 27 February 1984), Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 16 January 2020) and Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel Tolkien (18 June 1929 – 28 February 2022).[81][82] Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated letters from Father Christmas when they were young.[83]

Retirement

Bust of Tolkien in the chapel of Exeter College, Oxford

During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame. In 1961, his friend C. S. Lewis even nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[84] The sales of his books were so profitable that he regretted that he had not chosen early retirement.[16] In a 1972 letter, he deplored having become a cult figure, but admitted that "even the nose of a very modest idol ... cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!"[T 7]

Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory,

Inklings. Edith, however, was overjoyed to step into the role of a society hostess, which had been the reason that Tolkien selected Bournemouth in the first place. The genuine and deep affection between Ronald and Edith was demonstrated by their care about the other's health, in details like wrapping presents, in the generous way he gave up his life at Oxford so she could retire to Bournemouth, and in her pride in his becoming a famous author. They were tied together, too, by love for their children and grandchildren.[85]

In his retirement Tolkien was a consultant and translator for

The Jerusalem Bible, published in 1966. He was initially assigned a larger portion to translate, but, due to other commitments, only managed to offer some criticisms of other contributors and a translation of the Book of Jonah.[T 9]

Final years

The grave of J. R. R. and Edith Tolkien, Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford

Edith died on 29 November 1971, at the age of 82. Ronald returned to Oxford, where

Merton College gave him convenient rooms near the High Street. He missed Edith, but enjoyed being back in the city.[86]

Tolkien was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1972 New Year Honours[87] and received the insignia of the Order at Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1972.[T 10] In the same year Oxford University gave him an honorary Doctorate of Letters.[32][88]

He had the name

Beren" added to his name. Tolkien's will was proven on 20 December 1973, with his estate valued at £190,577 (equivalent to £2,452,000 in 2021).[91][92]

Views

Inklings
met (1930–1950)

Religion

Tolkien's

Holy Communion, again writing to his son Michael that "the only cure for sagging of fainting faith is Communion." He believed the Catholic Church to be true most of all because of the pride of place and the honour in which it holds the Blessed Sacrament.[T 11] In the last years of his life, Tolkien resisted the liturgical changes implemented after the Second Vatican Council, especially the use of English for the liturgy; he continued to make the responses in Latin, loudly, ignoring the rest of the congregation.[86]

Race

Tolkien's fantasy writings have often been accused of embodying a racist attitude.

Second World War he was equally disgusted by anti-German racial propaganda.[100][101] Other scholars have stated that Tolkien's Middle-earth is definitely polycultural and polylingual, and that attacks on Tolkien based on The Lord of the Rings often omit evidence from the text.[102][103]

Nature

During most of his own life,

conservationism was not yet on the political agenda, and Tolkien himself did not directly express conservationist views—except in some private letters, in which he tells about his fondness for forests and sadness at tree-felling. In later years, a number of authors of biographies or literary analyses of Tolkien conclude that during his writing of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien gained increased interest in the value of wild and untamed nature, and in protecting what wild nature was left in the industrialized world.[104][105][106]

Writing

Influences

Tolkien's fantasy books on Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, drew on a wide array of influences, including his

First World War affected his depiction of Mordor.[124]

Publications

"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"

In addition to writing fiction, Tolkien was an author of academic literary criticism. His seminal 1936 lecture, later published as an article, revolutionized the treatment of the Anglo-Saxon epic

most significant influences upon Tolkien's later fiction, with major details of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings being adapted from the poem.[126]

"On Fairy-Stories"

This essay discusses the fairy-story as a literary form. It was initially written as the 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Tolkien focuses on Andrew Lang's work as a folklorist and collector of fairy tales. He disagreed with Lang's broad inclusion, in his Fairy Book collections, of traveller's tales, beast fables, and other types of stories. Tolkien held a narrower perspective, viewing fairy stories as those that took place in Faerie, an enchanted realm, with or without fairies as characters. He viewed them as the natural development of the interaction of human imagination and human language.[127]

Children's books and other short works

In addition to his mythopoeic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children.[128] 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).[129] Other works included Mr. Bliss and Roverandom (for children), and Leaf by Niggle (part of Tree and Leaf), The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton Major, like The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from his legendarium.[130]

The Hobbit

Tolkien never expected his stories to become popular, but by sheer accident a book called

George Allen & Unwin, who persuaded Tolkien to submit it for publication.[90] When it was published a year later, the book attracted adult readers as well as children, and it became popular enough for the publishers to ask Tolkien to produce a sequel.[131]

The Lord of the Rings

The request for a sequel prompted Tolkien to begin what became his most famous work: the epic novel

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 against the background of The Silmarillion, but in a time long after it.[132]

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.

fantasy genre that grew up after the book's success.[134]

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.

SABC3's Great South Africans, the only person to appear in both lists. His popularity is not 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.[139]

The Silmarillion

Tolkien wrote a brief "Sketch of the Mythology", which included the tales of Beren and Lúthien and of Túrin; and that sketch eventually evolved into the

Quenta Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. Tolkien desperately hoped to publish it along with The Lord of the Rings, but publishers (both Allen & Unwin and Collins) declined. Moreover, printing costs were very high in 1950s Britain, requiring The Lord of the Rings to be published in three volumes.[140] The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series The History of Middle-earth, edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher Tolkien. From around 1936, Tolkien began to extend this framework to include the tale of The Fall of Númenor, which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis.[141]

Tolkien 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 this material into a single coherent volume, published as The Silmarillion in 1977. It received the Locus Award for Best Fantasy novel in 1978.[142]

Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-earth

In 1980, Christopher Tolkien published a collection of more fragmentary material, under the title

Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. 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 for Tolkien and he only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not 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 would have preferred to rewrite the book completely because of the style of its prose.[143]

Works compiled by Christopher Tolkien

Date Title Description
2007 The Children of Húrin tells the story of
Húrin Thalion.[144]
2009 The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún retells the legend of
Elder Edda.[145]
2013 The Fall of Arthur a narrative poem that Tolkien composed in the early 1930s, inspired by high medieval Arthurian fiction but set in the Post-Roman
Saxon invasion.[146]
2014 Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary a prose translation of Beowulf that Tolkien made in the 1920s, with commentary from Tolkien's lecture notes.[147][148]
2015 The Story of Kullervo a retelling of a 19th-century Finnish poem that Tolkien wrote in 1915 while studying at Oxford.[149]
2017 Beren and Lúthien one of the oldest and most often revised in Tolkien's legendarium; a version appeared in The Silmarillion.[150]
2018 The Fall of Gondolin tells of a beautiful, mysterious city destroyed by dark forces; Tolkien called it "the first real story" of Middle-earth.[151][152]

Manuscript locations

Before his death, Tolkien negotiated the sale of the manuscripts, drafts, proofs and other materials related to his then-published works—including The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham—to the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at

Oxford University.[154] The Bodleian Library held an exhibition of his work in 2018, including more than 60 items which had never been seen in public before.[155]

In 2009, a partial draft of Language and Human Nature, which Tolkien had begun co-writing with C. S. Lewis but had never completed, was discovered at the Bodleian Library.[156]

Languages and philology

Linguistic career

Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and

Medieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club".[T 12] He had a certain, if imperfect, knowledge of Finnish.[159]

Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of

racial and linguistic significance", and in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, which is crucial to his understanding of race and language, he entertained notions of "inherent linguistic predilections", which he termed the "native language" as opposed to the "cradle-tongue" which a person first learns to speak.[160] He considered the West Midlands dialect of Middle English to be his own "native language", 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)."[T 13]

Language construction

Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees!, the beginning of the Quenya poem Namárië written in Tengwar and in Latin script

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

euphony, and Quenya in particular was designed from "phonaesthetic" considerations; it was intended as an "Elven-latin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish, Welsh, English, and Greek.[T 14]

Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of

Ido, Novial, &c, &c, are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends".[T 15]

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-19th century and earlier. (In fact, according to Tolkien, had the Old English plural survived, it would have been dwarrows or dwerrows.) He coined the term eucatastrophe, used mainly in connection with his own work.[162]

Artwork

Tolkien learnt to paint and draw as a child and continued to do so all his adult life. From early in his writing career, the development of his stories was accompanied by drawings and paintings, especially of landscapes, and by maps of the lands in which the tales were set. He produced pictures to accompany the stories told to his own children, including those later published in Mr Bliss and Roverandom, and sent them elaborately illustrated letters purporting to come from Father Christmas. Although he regarded himself as an amateur, the publisher used the author's own cover art,

Doors of Durin. Much of his artwork was collected and published in 1995 as a book: J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. The book discusses Tolkien's paintings, drawings, and sketches, and reproduces approximately 200 examples of his work.[163] Catherine McIlwaine curated a major exhibition of Tolkien's artwork at the Bodleian Library, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, accompanied by a book of the same name that analyses Tolkien's achievement and illustrates the full range of the types of artwork that he created.[164]

Legacy

Influence

While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to

Ursula Le Guin and her Earthsea series.[168] In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[169] His influence has extended to music, including the Danish group the Tolkien Ensemble's setting of all the poetry in The Lord of the Rings to their vocal music;[170] and to a broad range of games set in Middle-earth.[171]
Among literary allusions to Tolkien, he appears as the elderly "Professor J. B. Timbermill" in all five novels in J. I. M. Stewart's series A Staircase in Surrey.[172][173] The scholar Tom Shippey refers to Tolkien as one of the authors of the 20th century and one of the most influential authors of all time,[174] and states that "I do not think any modern writer of epic fantasy has managed to escape the mark of Tolkien, no matter how hard many of them have tried".[175] His work has had a massive impact on western pop culture, and remains extremely influential.[176]

Adaptations

In a 1951 letter to publisher Milton Waldman (1895–1976), Tolkien wrote about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which "[t]he cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama".

Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was released in 1978 as 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.[178]

In 1977, an animated

Rankin-Bass, and in 1980, they produced the animated musical television film 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 extremely well commercially and winning numerous Oscars.[179]
From 2012 to 2014, Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema released The Hobbit, a series of three films based on The Hobbit, with Peter Jackson serving as executive producer, director, and co-writer.[180] The first instalment, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, was released in December 2012;[181] the second, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, in December 2013;[182] and the last instalment, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, in December 2014.[183] In 2017, Amazon acquired the global television rights to The Lord of the Rings, for a series of new stories set before The Fellowship of the Ring.[184][185]

Possible sainthood

On 2 September 2017, the Oxford Oratory, Tolkien's parish church during his time in Oxford, offered its first Mass for the intention of Tolkien's cause for beatification to be opened.[186][187] A prayer was written for his cause.[186]

Memorials

Tolkien and the characters and places from his works have become eponyms of many real-world objects. These include geographical features on Titan (Saturn's largest moon),[188] street names such as There and Back Again Lane, inspired by The Hobbit,[189] mountains such as Mount Shadowfax, Mount Gandalf and Mount Aragorn in Canada,[190][191] companies such as Palantir Technologies,[192] and species including the wasp Shireplitis tolkieni,[193] 37 new species of Elachista moths,[193][194] and many fossils.[195][196][197]

Since 2003,

Pembroke College, Oxford University, established an annual lecture on fantasy literature in Tolkien's honour.[199] In 2012, Tolkien was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork—the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover—to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admired.[200][201] A 2019 biographical film, Tolkien, focused on Tolkien's early life and war experiences.[202] The Tolkien family and estate stated that they did not "approve of, authorise or participate in the making of" the film.[203]

Sarehole Mill's blue plaque

Several blue plaques in England commemorate places associated with Tolkien, including for his childhood, his workplaces, and places he visited.[44][204][205]

Address Commemoration Date unveiled Issued by
Sarehole Mill, Hall Green, Birmingham "Inspired" 1896–1900 (i.e. lived nearby) 15 August 2002 Birmingham Civic Society and The Tolkien Society[206]
1 Duchess Place, Ladywood, Birmingham Lived near here 1902–1910 Unknown Birmingham Civic Society[207]
4 Highfield Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham Lived here 1910–1911 Unknown Birmingham Civic Society and The Tolkien Society[208]
Plough and Harrow,
Hagley Road
, Birmingham
Stayed here June 1916 June 1997 The Tolkien Society[209]
2 Darnley Road, West Park, Leeds First academic appointment, Leeds 1 October 2012 The Tolkien Society and Leeds Civic Trust[210]
20 Northmoor Road, North Oxford Lived here 1930–1947 3 December 2002 Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board[211]
Hotel Miramar, East Overcliff Drive, Bournemouth Stayed here regularly from the 1950s until 1972 10 June 1992 by
Priscilla Tolkien
Borough of Bournemouth[212]
St Mary Immaculate, 45 West Street, Warwick Married here 22 March 1916 6 July 2018 Warwick Town Council[213]

The Royal Mint produced a commemorative £2 coin in 2023 to mark the 50th anniversary of Tolkien's death.[214]

Notes

  1. General American, the surname is commonly pronounced /ˈtlkn/ TOHL-keen.[2]

References

Primary

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  2. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #267 to Michael Tolkien, 9–10 January 1965.
  3. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #306 to Michael Tolkien, 1967 or 1968
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #43 to Michael Tolkien, 6–8 March 1941
  5. ^ a b Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #340 to Christopher Tolkien, 11 July 1972.
  6. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #35 to C. A. Furth, Allen & Unwin, 2 February 1939 (see also editorial note).
  7. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #336 to Sir Patrick Browne, 23 May 1972
  8. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #332 to Michael Tolkien, 24 January 1972
  9. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #294 to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, 8 February 1967
  10. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #334 to Rayner Unwin, 30 March 1972 (editorial note).
  11. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #250 to Michael Tolkien, 1 November 1963
  12. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #7, to the Electors of the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford, 27 June 1925
  13. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #163 to W. H. Auden, 7 June 1955.
  14. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #144 to Naomi Mitchison, 25 April 1954.
  15. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #180 to 'Mr Thompson' (draft), 14 January 1956.
  16. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #131 to Milton Walden, late 1951

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Sources

Further reading

A small selection of books about Tolkien and his works:

External links

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