J. R. R. Tolkien

Mabel Tolkien was received into the

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.^[25][26] 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.^[27] Short texts in this notebook are written in Esperanto.^[28]

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

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."^[35]

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,^[36] with one notable early exception, over which Father Morgan threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop.^[37]

On the evening of his 21st birthday Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with a family friend named C. H. Jessop in 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.^[38]

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".^[38] 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."^[39]

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.^[40]

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.^[41] 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]}

In August 1914 Britain entered the

Tolkien arrived at the

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".^[55]

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

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

Mandos.^{[T 5]}

On 16 July 1919, Tolkien was taken off active service, at Fovant, on Salisbury Plain, with a temporary disability pension.[62] On 3 November 1920, Tolkien was demobilized and left the army, retaining his rank of lieutenant.^[63]

After the end of the war in 1918, Tolkien's first civilian job 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.^[64] In mid-1919, he began to tutor Oxford 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 academic (then still not common) was considered suitable, as a bachelor don would not have been.^[65]

In 1920 he took up a post as

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.^[70]

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

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".^[76] 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".^[76]

In the run-up to the

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).^[83][84] Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated letters from Father Christmas when they were young.^[85]

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.^[86] The sales of his books were so profitable that he regretted that he had not chosen early retirement.^[17] In a letter in 1972 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;^{[T 8]} eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, which was then a seaside resort patronized by the British upper middle class. Tolkien's status as a best-selling author gave them easy entry into polite society, but Tolkien deeply missed the company of his fellow 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.^[87]

In his retirement Tolkien was a consultant and translator for

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

Tolkien's

Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy writings have been said to embody outmoded attitudes to race.^[101] However, scholars have noted that he was influenced by Victorian attitudes to race and to a literary tradition of monsters, and that he was anti-racist both in peacetime and during the two World Wars. With the late-19th-century background of eugenics and a fear of moral decline, some critics believed that the mention of race mixing in The Lord of the Rings embodied scientific racism.^[102] Critics have noted, too, that the work embodies a moral geography, with good in the West, evil in the East.^[103] Against this, Tolkien strongly opposed Nazi racial theories, as seen in a 1938 letter he wrote to his publisher, while in the Second World War he vigorously opposed anti-German propaganda.^[104][105] His Middle-earth has been described as definitely polycultural and polylingual, while scholars have noted that attacks on Tolkien based on The Lord of the Rings often omit relevant evidence from the text.^[106][107] A spokesman for HarperCollins, publisher of the trilogy, said: "A number of academics have commented on Tolkien's work and this is the first time anybody has ever seen these issues in it. Of course, if you look hard enough at many great epics, you can extrapolate what you like, particularly if you have academic kudos behind you."^[108]

During most of his own life,

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

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

"On Fairy-Stories"

Main article: 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

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.^[132]

Children's books and other short works

In addition to his mythopoeic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children.^[133] 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).^[134] 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.^[135]

The Hobbit

Main article: 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.^[92] 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.^[136]

The Lord of the Rings

Main article: The Lord of the Rings

The request for a sequel prompted Tolkien to begin what became his most famous work: the epic novel The Lord of the Rings (originally published in three volumes in 1954–1955). 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 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.^[137]

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.^[139]

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.^[144]

The Silmarillion

Main article: 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.^[145] 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.^[146]

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.^[147]

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.^[148]

Works compiled by Christopher Tolkien

Date	Title	Description
2007	The Children of Húrin	Tells the story of Húrin Thalion.[149]
2009	The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún	Retells the legend of Elder Edda.[150]
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.[151]
2014	Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary	A prose translation of Beowulf that Tolkien made in the 1920s, with commentary from Tolkien's lecture notes.[152][153]
2015	The Story of Kullervo	A retelling of a 19th-century Finnish poem that Tolkien wrote in 1915 while studying at Oxford.[154]
2017	Beren and Lúthien	One of the oldest and most often revised in Tolkien's legendarium; a version appeared in The Silmarillion.[155]
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.[156][157]

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.^[159] The Bodleian Library held an exhibition of his work in 2018, including more than 60 items which had never been seen in public before.^[160]

In 2009 a partial draft of Language and Human Nature, which Tolkien had begun co-writing with Lewis but had never completed, was discovered at the Bodleian Library.^[161]

Languages and philology

Linguistic career

Further information: Philology and Middle-earth

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.^[164]

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.^[165] 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

See also:

Languages constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien

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 now 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.^[167]

Artwork

Main article: Tolkien's 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.^[168] 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.^[169]

Legacy

Influence

Further information:

Works inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien

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.^[173] In 2008 The Times ranked him sixth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".^[174] 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;^[175] and to a broad range of games set in Middle-earth.^[176] 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.^[177][178] The scholar Tom Shippey describes Tolkien as the "author of the [20th] century",^[179] 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".^[180] John Clute, writing in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, similarly credits Tolkien with being "the twentieth-century's single most important author of fantasy".^[181] His work has had a massive impact on western pop culture, and remains extremely influential.^[182]

Adaptations

Further information:

Middle-earth in film

In a 1951 letter to the publisher

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.^[184]

In 1977

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.^[185] 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.^[186]

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.^[187][188] The television series was titled The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power; the first season was released in 2022 and the second in 2024. Also in 2024, New Line Cinema and others produced The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an anime fantasy film directed by the Japanese director Kenji Kamiyama.

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.^[189][190] A prayer was written for his cause.^[189]

The religious experience of Tolkien was described by Holly Ordway in the book Tolkien's Faith: A Spiritual Biography (2023).

Memorials

Main article: List of things named after J. R. R. Tolkien and his works

Tolkien and the characters and places from his works have become eponyms of many real-world objects. These include

Shireplitis tolkieni,^[196] 37 new species of Elachista moths^[196][197] and many fossils.^{[198][199][200]}

Since 2003

annual lecture on fantasy literature in Tolkien's honour.^[202] In 2012 Tolkien was among the British cultural icons selected by the 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.^[203][204] A 2019 biographical film, Tolkien, focused on Tolkien's early life and war experiences.^[205] The Tolkien family and estate stated that they did not "approve of, authorise or participate in the making of" the film.^[206]

Several blue plaques in England commemorate places associated with Tolkien, including for his childhood, his workplaces, and places he visited.^{[45][207][208]}

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[209]
1 Duchess Place, Ladywood, Birmingham	Lived near here 1902–1910	Unknown	Birmingham Civic Society[210]
4 Highfield Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham	Lived here 1910–1911	Unknown	Birmingham Civic Society and The Tolkien Society[211]
Plough and Harrow, Hagley Road , Birmingham	Stayed here June 1916	June 1997	The Tolkien Society[212]
2 Darnley Road, West Park, Leeds	First academic appointment, Leeds	1 October 2012	The Tolkien Society and Leeds Civic Trust[213]
20 Northmoor Road, North Oxford	Lived here 1930–1947	3 December 2002	Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board[214]
Hotel Miramar, East Overcliff Drive, Bournemouth	Stayed here regularly from the 1950s until 1972	10 June 1992 by Priscilla Tolkien	Borough of Bournemouth[215]
St Mary Immaculate, 45 West Street, Warwick	Married here 22 March 1916	6 July 2018	Warwick Town Council[216]

The Royal Mint produced a commemorative £2 coin in 2023 to mark the 50th anniversary of Tolkien's death.^[217]

Notes

1. General American, the surname is commonly pronounced /ˈtoʊlkiːn/ ^ⓘ.^[2]

References

Primary

1. ^ Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #190 to Rayner Unwin, 3 July 1956: "After all the book is English, and by an Englishman"
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

Secondary

Sources

• ISBN 978-0-04-928037-3
  .
• ———; Tolkien, Christopher, eds. (1981).
  ISBN 978-0-04-826005-5
  .
• ISBN 978-0-00-711953-0
  .
• Grotta, Daniel (2002). J. R. R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth: A Biography.
  ISBN 978-0-7624-1337-9
  .
• ISBN 978-1-68578-991-6
  .
• ISBN 978-1-119-65602-9
  .
• ISBN 978-0-618-25760-7
  .
• ISBN 978-0-261-10239-2
  .

Further reading

A small selection of books about Tolkien and his works:

• ISBN 978-0-937058-87-9
  .
• ISBN 978-0-395-27628-0
  .
• ISBN 978-0-415-28944-3
  .
• ———, ed. (2004). Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, a Reader. Louisville: University Press of Kentucky.
  ISBN 978-0-8131-2301-1
  .
• Cilli, Oronzo;
  OCLC 1099568978
  .
• Cilli, Oronzo;
  OCLC 1020852373
  .
• Costabile, Giovanni Carmine (2018). "Bilbo Baggins and the Forty Thieves The Reworking of Folktale Motifs in The Hobbit (and The Lord of the Rings)".
  OCLC 8513422873
  .
• ISBN 0-313-32592-8
  .
• ISBN 978-0-618-47885-9
  .
• ISBN 978-0-415-96942-0
  .
• ISBN 978-1-58768-026-7
  .
• ISBN 978-1-902694-13-9
  .
• ISBN 978-0-87338-744-6
  .
• ISBN 978-0-313-30530-6
  . DDC 823.912 LC PR6039.
• ISBN 978-0-618-12699-6
  .
• ISBN 978-0-345-44976-4
  .
• Fredrick, Candice; McBride, Sam (2001). Woman among the Inklings: Gender, C.S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Greenwood Press.
  ISBN 978-0-313-31245-8
  .
• ISBN 978-0-19-861069-4
  .
• Glyer, Diana Pavlac (2007). The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-87338-890-0
  .
• Grant, Patrick (1979). "Belief in Fantasy: J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings". Six Modern Authors and Problems of Belief. MacMillan.
  ISBN 978-0-333-26340-2
  .
• Haber, Karen (2001). Meditations on Middle-earth: New Writing on the Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien. St. Martin's Press.
  ISBN 978-0-312-27536-5
  .
• Harrington, Patrick, ed. (2003). Tolkien and Politics. London, England: Third Way Publications.
  ISBN 978-0-9544788-2-7
  .
• ISBN 978-1-4039-4671-3
  .
• ISBN 978-0-00-274018-0
  .
• Perry, Michael (2006). Untangling Tolkien: A Chronology and Commentary for The Lord of the Rings. Seattle: Inkling Books.
  ISBN 978-1-58742-019-1
  .
• Ready, William (1968). Understanding Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings. New York: Paperback Library.
• Rorabeck, Robert (2008). Tolkien's Heroic Quest. Crescent Moon.
  ISBN 978-1-86171-239-4
  .
• ISBN 978-0-00-821454-8
  .
• ISBN 978-0-618-12764-1
  .
• Strachey, Barbara (1981).
  ISBN 978-0-04-912016-7
  .
• ISBN 978-0-517-14648-4
  .
• White, Michael (2003). Tolkien: A Biography. New American Library.
  ISBN 978-0-451-21242-9
  .
• Zaleski, Philip; Zaleski, Carol (2016). The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  ISBN 978-0-374-53625-1
  .

External links

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• HarperCollins Tolkien Website
• Additional Resources for J. R. R. Tolkien compiled by the Marion E. Wade Center
• "Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel".
  doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31766. (Subscription or UK public library membership
  required.)
• J. R. R. Tolkien at
  IMDb
• J. R. R. Tolkien at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Archival material at Leeds University Library
• Audio recording of Tolkien from 1929 on a language learning gramophone disc
• BBC film (1968) featuring Tolkien
• Biography at the Tolkien Society
• J. R. R. Tolkien at The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
• J. R. R. Tolkien at the Internet Book List
• J. R. R. Tolkien at The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
• J. R. R. Tolkien at Tolkien Gateway
• Journal of Inklings Studies—Peer-reviewed journal on Tolkien's literary circle, based at Oxford
• The Tolkien Estate Website
• Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
• Works by J. R. R. Tolkien at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Works by J. R. R. Tolkien at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about J. R. R. Tolkien at the Internet Archive