Online Encyclopedia

J. R. R. Tolkien

(Redirected from John Ronald Reuel Tolkien)

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

In academia, J. R. R. Tolkien worked as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and as Professor of English Language and Literature, also at Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was an eminently distinguished lexicographer and an expert in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. He belonged to the literary discussion group the Inklings, and had a close friendship with C. S. Lewis.

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

Contents

1 Biography

2 Writing

3 Languages

4 Art based on Tolkien's works

5 Bibliography

5.1 Fiction and Poetry
5.2 Academic Works
5.3 Posthumous Publications

5.3.1 In Journal Articles

6 Books about Tolkien and Tolkien's worlds

7 Named after Tolkien

8 External links

Biography

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

Tolkien moved with his mother, who did not cope well with the African climate, to England when he was three. They originally stayed with relatives at Bag End farm in Worcestershire, which was a likely inspiration for the Bag End in his books. His father, however, died in South Africa of a severe brain haemorrhage before he could join them. Because Arthur, the family's sole source of money, was dead, they went to live with Mabel's parents in Birmingham for a short time, but soon after, in 1896, they moved to Sarehole (then a Warwickshire village, now part of Birmingham). He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog, which would later inspire scenes in the books.

Mabel tutored her two sons, and J.R.R. was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany; but his favourite lessons were those concerning languages — his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early on. He could read by the age of four, and could write fluently before long. He attended King Edward's School, King Phillip's Academy , and Exeter College, Oxford.

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

During his subsequent orphandom he was brought up by Father Francis Xavier Morgan from the Birmingham Oratory , in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham, where he then lived, in the shadow of Perrott's Folly and the Victorian tower of Edgbaston waterworks, which possibly affected the images of the various dark towers within his works.

He met and fell in love with Edith Bratt (later to serve as his model for Lúthien). Despite many obstacles, he succeeded in marrying her, the first and truest love of his life.

Tolkien joined the British Army during World War I. He served in the Lancashire Fusiliers. He saw a number of his fellow servicemen, as well as several of his closest friends, lose their lives in battles like Somme, and he himself ended up in a military hospital suffering from trench fever, but during that time he started to work on his mythology.

During his recovery he began to invent a series of fairy tales, based upon his love and studies of mythology and folklore, which he called 'The Book of Lost Tales'. Tolkien scholars say that the war influenced his writings, in that he saw fantasy as a way to escape from the harsh reality of factories, machines, guns and bombs of the 20th century, though one has to remember that Tolkien strongly opposed allegory in all its forms.

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

Tolkien and Edith had four children: John Francis Reuel (November 17, 1917), Michael Hilary Reuel (October, 1920), Christopher Reuel (1924) and Priscilla Anne Reuel (1929).

Engraved on the stone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford, where he and his wife are buried, are the names Beren and Lúthien, paying homage to one of the great love stories of Middle-earth.

In 2002 Tolkien was voted 92nd in the Greatest Britons and in 2004 he was voted 35rd in the Greatest South Africans ( see 100 Greatest Britons and List of South Africans). He is the only person to appear on both the British and South African Top 100.

Writing

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).

Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become popular. Through the intercession of a former student, he published a book he had written for his own children called The Hobbit in 1937. Though intended for children, the book gained an adult readership as well, and it became popular enough for the publisher, Allen & Unwin, to ask Tolkien to work on a sequel. This prompted him to create his most famous work, what would become the epic three-volume novel The Lord of the Rings (1954–55). Tolkien took almost ten years to write this saga, during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend C. S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia books.

The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular with many students in the 1960s, and has remained highly popular since, ranking as one the most popular works of fiction of the twentieth century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. The Lord of the Rings has been voted the greatest book of the 20th century in a readers' poll conducted by Britain's Channel 4 and the Waterstone's bookstore chain. A 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers found The Lord of the Rings to be the greatest book of the millennium.

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

Tolkien was a professional philologist, and the languages and the mythologies he studied clearly left an imprint on his fiction. In particular, the dwarves' names in the Hobbit, are taken from the Voluspa of the Edda, while certain plot-elements (e. g. the thief stealing a cup from a dragon's hoard) are taken from Beowulf.

Tolkien continued to work on the history of Middle-earth until his death. His son Christopher Tolkien, with assistance from fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay, organised some of this material into one volume, published as The Silmarillion in 1977. Christopher Tolkien continued over subsequent years to publish background material on the creation of Middle-earth. Note that the posthumous works such as The History of Middle-earth and the Unfinished Tales contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative and outright contradictory versions of the stories simply because Tolkien kept working on his mythology for decades, constantly rewriting, re-editing and expanding the stories. Only The Silmarillion attempts to maintain true consistency with The Lord of the Rings, and this only thanks to heavy editing by Christopher Tolkien — and even he states that many inconsistencies remain in The Silmarillion. (Even The Hobbit never became fully synchronised with The Lord of the Rings, although one chapter was substantially revised in the second edition of 1951.)

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

Languages

See also Languages of Middle-earth.

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

In addition to his specialist knowledge of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) and Old Norse, Tolkien had varying fluency in as many as a dozen of European languages, ranging from Welsh and Gaelic to the Romance languages of French, Spanish, and Italian, as well as other Germanic languages (early forms of German and Dutch such as Old Saxon), and Baltic and Slavic languages (Lithuanian and Russian). In his personal correspondence he noted the sound of the Finnish language as the most pleasing to his ears, and it was a source of inspiration for Quenya, the most important of his invented languages.

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

Art based on Tolkien's works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

United Artists never made a film, and 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 only after Tolkien's death (in 1978, directed by Ralph Bakshi). In 2001–03 The Lord of the Rings was filmed as a trilogy of films by Peter Jackson.

Bibliography

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

Fiction and Poetry

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

Academic Works

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

Posthumous Publications

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

In Journal Articles

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

Books about Tolkien and Tolkien's worlds

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

1977 J. R. R. Tolkien - A Biography (Humphrey Carpenter)
1978 The Complete Guide to Middle-earth (Robert Foster — a reference, covers The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion, but not Unfinished Tales)
1981 Journeys of Frodo (Barbara Strachey — an atlas of The Lord of the Rings)
1991 The Atlas of Middle-earth (Karen Wynn Fonstad — an atlas of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and The Unfinished Tales)
2000 J. R. R. Tolkien - Author of the Century (T. A. Shippey)
2000 Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle Earth ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter
2002 The Complete Tolkien Companion , 3rd edition (J. E. A. Tyler — a reference, covers The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales; substantially improved over the previous editions.)
2004 Tolkien studies, Vol 1 ed. Douglas A. Anderson, Michael D. C. Drout and Verlyn Flieger
2004 Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, a Reader ed. Jane Chance

Named after Tolkien

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