John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) was
the author of The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the Rings, his most famous work.
A former pupil of King Edward's School, Birmingham, he 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 through this had a close friendship with C. S. Lewis.
In addition to the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings,
Tolkien's published fiction includes a number of posthumous books about the
history of the imaginary world of Middle-earth,
where his stories take place. The enduring popularity and influence of these
works have established Tolkien as the father of the modern high fantasy genre.
Tolkien's other published fiction includes adaptations of stories originally
told to his children and not directly related to Middle-earth.
Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (today a part of South Africa), to Arthur Tolkien, an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel
Tolkien (maiden name Suffield). As far as is known, most of Tolkien's paternal
ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in Saxony (Germany), but
had been living in
When he was three, Tolkien went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family
visit. His father, however, died in
Mabel tutored her two sons, and Ronald, as he was known in the family,
was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany, and she awoke in her son the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants.
Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees. But his favourite lessons
were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very
early. He could read by the age of four, and could write fluently soon
afterwards. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, St Phillip's School, and Exeter College, Oxford.
His mother converted to 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 was significant in the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Christianity, and
his writings express Christian values and contain much Christian symbolism.
During his subsequent orphanhood he was brought up by Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham
Oratory, in the Edgbaston area
of
He met and fell in love with Edith Bratt
(later to serve as his model for Lúthien), and despite many obstacles he
succeeded in marrying her, the first and truest love of his life.
Naturally, with his childhood love of landscape, after his visit to Cornwall in
1914 it was said that the singular Cornish coastline and sea deeply impressed
him. After graduating from the University of Oxford with a first-class degree in English language in 1915,
Tolkien joined the British Army
effort in World War I and
served as an oficer in the Lancashire Fusiliers. Many of his fellow servicemen, as well as several of his closest
friends, were killed in battles such as Somme, and he himself ended up in military hospital suffering from trench fever.
During his recovery in a cottage in Staffordshire he began to work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales, a series of fairy tales based
upon his love and studies of mythology and folklore.
Tolkien scholars say that the war influenced his writings, in that he saw
fantasy as a way to escape from the harsh reality of the industrialized and
militaristic 20th century,
though one has to remember that Tolkien expressed strong opposition to 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
It may be significant that Tolkien disliked intensely the devouring of
the English countryside by the suburbs, even though, given his profession, he generally found it convenient to live in
them. But for most of his adult life he eschewed automobiles, preferring to
ride a bicycle. Tolkien and Edith had four children: John Francis Reuel (November 17, 1917),
Michael Hilary Reuel (October, 1920), Christopher Reuel (1924) and
Priscilla Anne Reuel (1929). During the 1950s, Tolkien spent many of his long academic holidays at
the home of his son John Francis in Stoke-on-Trent.
Engraved on the stone at
Tolkien's earliest literary ambition was to be a poet, but his primary
creative urge in his younger days was the invention of imaginary languages,
including early versions of what would later evolve into the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin.
Believing that a language implies a people to speak it, and that a people
implies stories that reflect the style and views of their languages, he began
writing (in English, but with many names and terms from his invented languages)
the mythology and
tales of a fictional people he associated with legendary fairies and
later (with some regret, for he came to consider the name misleading) came to
call the Elves. Beginning as The Book of Lost Tales, written while recuperating from illness during World War I,
these tales - which included the love story of Beren and Lúthien - were later re-written as long narrative poems (The Lays of Beleriand) and eventually evolved into The Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien never finished. The story of this
continuous re-drafting is told in the posthumous series The History of Middle-Earth.
In addition to this serious adult work, 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 Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings drew on the mythology of The Silmarillion, and in the process of writing them Tolkien clarified that they take place
long after its events (but still very long ago from our own time).
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
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 was a recognized authority on Beowulf, and published several
important works on the poem. A previously unpublished translation of Beowulf by
Tolkien is being edited by Michael Drout.
Tolkien continued to work on the history of Middle-earth until his
death. His son Christopher, 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.
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 "elfish").
See also Works inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien.
In a 1951
letter to Milton Waldman (Letters 131), Tolkien writes about his
intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend",
of which
The
cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet
leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.
The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by
Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him were Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Farmer Giles of Ham) and Donald Swann (who
set the music to The Road Goes Ever On). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created illustrations to the Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She
sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity to the style of his own
drawings.
But Tolkien was not fond of all artistic representation of his works
that was produced in his lifetime, and sometimes harshly disapproving.
In 1946 (Letters,
107), he rejects suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German
edition of the Hobbit as "too Disnified",
Bilbo
with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think
of.
He was sceptical of the emerging fandom in
the United States, and in 1954 he
returned proposals for the dust-jackets of the American edition of the Lord
of the Rings .
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, though at least John Boorman was
planning a film in the early seventies. It would have been a live-action film,
which apparently would have been much more to Tolkien's liking than an animated
film. In 1976 the
rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first movie adaptation (an animated film) 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, to great acclaim for both their entertainment value and general
faithfulness to the books.