J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was a South African born English philologist, writer and university professor, best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon language (Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon) from 1925 to 1945, and Merton Professor of English language and literature from 1945 to 1959. He was a devout Roman Catholic. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis; they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.

In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's son Christopher Tolkien published several works based heavily on his father's notes, these include The Silmarillion and others, which taken together is a connected body of tales, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about an imagined world called Arda, and Middle-earth (derived from the Old English word middangeard, the lands inhabitable by humans) in particular, loosely identified as an "alternative" remote past of our own world. Tolkien applied the word legendarium to the totality of these writings.

While other authors such as William Morris,^[1] George MacDonald,^[1] Robert E. Howard^[1] and E. R. Eddison^[1] published fantasy works before Tolkien, the great success and enduring influence of his works have led to him being popularly identified as the "father of modern fantasy literature",^[2] usually with high fantasy in mind. Some, such as L. Sprague de Camp, opine the title must be specifically shared with Howard, of Conan the Barbarian fame,^[3] as he pioneered a different fantasy subgenre, sword and sorcery.^[4] In any case, Tolkien has had an indisputable and lasting effect on later works, as well as on the genre as a whole.

Tolkien family origins

Most of Tolkien's paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in the German Kingdom of Saxony, but had been living in England since the 18th century, becoming "quickly and intensely English".^[5] The surname Tolkien is Anglicized from Tollkiehn (i.e. German tollkühn, "foolhardy"; the etymological English translation would be dull-keen, a calque and an oxymoron). The surname Rashbold given to two characters in Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers is a pun on this.^[6]

Tolkien's maternal grandparents, John and Edith Jane Suffield, were Baptists who lived in Birmingham and owned a shop in the city centre. The Suffield family had run various businesses out of the same building, called Lamb House, since the early 1800s. Beginning in 1812 Tolkien's great-great grandfather William Suffield owned and operated a book and stationery shop there; Tolkien's great-grandfather, also John Suffield, was there from 1826 with a drapery and hosiery business.^[7]

Childhood

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892, in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (now Free State Province), South Africa, to Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, née Suffield (1870–1904). The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the British bank he worked for. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel, who was born on 17 February 1894.^[8]

As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a baboon spider in the garden, an event which would have later echoes in his stories. Dr. Thornton S. Quimby cared for the ailing child after the rather nasty spider bite, and it is occasionally suggested that Doctor Quimby was an early model for such characters as Gandalf the Grey.^[9] When he was three, Tolkien went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them.^[10] This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Stirling Road, Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham.^[11] He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent Hills and Malvern Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books along with other Worcestershire towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester, and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt's farm of Bag End, the name of which would be used in his fiction.^[12]

Mabel tutored her two sons, and Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil.^[13] She taught him a great deal of botany, and she awakened in her son the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees. But his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early.^[14] He could read by the age of four, and could write fluently soon afterwards. His mother allowed him to read many books. He disliked Treasure Island and The Pied Piper. He thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was amusing, but also thought that Alice's adventures in it were disturbing. But he liked stories about Native Americans and the fantasy works by George MacDonald.^[15] In addition, the "Fairy Books" of Andrew Lang were particularly important to him and to some of his later writings.^[16] He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham and, while a student there, helped "line the route" for the coronation parade of King George V, being posted just outside the gates of Buckingham Palace.^[17] He later attended St. Philip's School and Exeter College, Oxford.

Mabel Tolkien was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1900 despite vehement protests by her Baptist family^[18] who then stopped all financial assistance to her. She died of acute complications of diabetes in 1904. when Tolkien was twelve, at Fern Cottage in Rednal, which they were then renting. Mabel Tolkien was then about 34 years of age, about as long as a person with diabetes mellitus type 1 could live with no treatment – insulin would not be discovered until two decades later. For the rest of his own life Tolkien felt that his mother had become a martyr for her Faith, which had a profound effect on his own Catholic beliefs.^[19] Tolkien's devout faith was significant in the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Christianity, though Tolkien, a firm believer in the doctrine of Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus, was greatly disappointed that Lewis chose to return to the Anglicanism of his upbringing.^[20]

After being orphaned, Tolkien was brought up by Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham. He lived there in the shadow of Perrott's Folly and the Victorian tower of Edgbaston Waterworks, which may have influenced the images of the dark towers within his works. Another strong influence was the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has a large and world-renowned collection of works and had put it on free public display from around 1908.

Youth

In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Birmingham, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society which they called "the T.C.B.S.", the initials standing for "Tea Club and Barrovian Society", alluding to their fondness for drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, illicitly, in the school library.^[21] After leaving school, the members stayed in touch, and in December 1914, they held a "Council" in London, at Wiseman's home. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong dedication to writing poetry.

In the summer of 1911, Tolkien went on holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter,^[22] noting that Bilbo's journey across the Misty Mountains ("including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods") is directly based on his adventures as their party of twelve hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen, and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembered his regret at leaving the view of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn ("the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams"). They went across the Kleine Scheidegg on to Grindelwald and across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass and through the upper Valais to Brig, and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.^[23]

Tolkien graduated from the University of Oxford (where he was a member of Exeter College) with a first-class degree in English language in 1915.

Courtship and marriage

Tolkien met and fell in love with Edith Mary Bratt at the age of sixteen, though she was three years older. Father Francis prohibited him from meeting, talking, or even corresponding with her until he was twenty-one. He obeyed this prohibition to the letter.^[24], with one notable early exception which made Father Morgan threaten to cut short his University career if he did not stop.^[25]

On the evening of his twenty-first birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith a declaration of his love and asked her to marry him. Edith replied saying that she had already agreed to marry another man, but that she had done so because she had believed Tolkien had forgotten her. The two met up and beneath a railway viaduct renewed their love; Edith returned her engagement ring and chose to marry Tolkien instead.^[26] Following their engagement Edith converted to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence.^[27] They were engaged in Birmingham, in January 1913, and married in Warwick, England, at Saint Mary Immaculate Catholic Church on 22 March 1916.^[28]

World War I

As the United Kingdom was then engaged in fighting World War I, Tolkien enlisted in the British Army and served as a Second Lieutenant in the eleventh battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers.^[29] His battalion was moved to France in 1916, where Tolkien served as a communications officer during the Battle of the Somme. He came down with trench fever on 27 October 1916 and was evacuated to England on 8 November 1916.^[30] Many of his dearest friends, including Gilson and Smith of the T.C.B.S., were killed in the war. In later years, Tolkien indignantly declared that those who searched his works for World War I parallels were entirely mistaken.

"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."^[31]

Tolkien's Webley .455 service revolver is currently on display as part of a First World War exhibition in the Imperial War Museum, London.^{[citation needed]}

Aftermath

During his recovery in a cottage in Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England, he began to work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps, and was promoted to lieutenant.

When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock: "We walked in a wood where hemlock was growing, a sea of white flowers".^[32] This incident inspired the account of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien, and Tolkien often referred to Edith as his Lúthien.^[33]

Academic and writing career

Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W.^[34] In 1920 he took up a post as Reader in English language at the University of Leeds, and in 1924 was made a professor there, but in 1925 he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College.^[35]

During his time at Pembroke, Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings, largely at 20 Northmoor Road in North Oxford, where a blue plaque was placed in 2002. He also published a philological essay in 1932 on the name 'Nodens', following Sir Mortimer Wheeler's unearthing of a Roman Asclepieion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928.^[36] Of Tolkien's academic publications, the 1936 lecture "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics" had a lasting influence on Beowulf research.^[37] Lewis E. Nicholson said that the article Tolkien wrote about Beowulf is "widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism", noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the work as opposed to the purely linguistic elements.^[38] He also revealed in his famous article how highly he regarded Beowulf; "Beowulf is among my most valued sources…" And indeed, there are many influences of Beowulf in The Lord of the Rings.^[39] When Tolkien wrote, the consensus of scholarship deprecated Beowulf for dealing with childish battles with monsters rather than realistic tribal warfare; Tolkien argued that the author of Beowulf was addressing human destiny in general, not as limited by particular tribal politics, and therefore the monsters were essential to the poem. (Where Beowulf does deal with specific tribal struggles, as at Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements.)^[40]

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 completed The Lord of the Rings in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches. During the 1950s, Tolkien spent many of his long academic holidays at the home of his son John Francis in Stoke-on-Trent. Tolkien had an intense dislike for the side effects of industrialization, which he considered to be devouring the English countryside. For most of his adult life, he was disdainful of automobiles, preferring to ride a bicycle.^[41] This attitude can be seen in his work, most famously in the portrayal of the forced "industrialization" of The Shire in The Lord of the Rings.

W. H. Auden was a frequent correspondent and long-time friend of Tolkien's, initiated by Auden's fascination with The Lord of the Rings: Auden was among the most prominent early critics to praise the work. Tolkien wrote in a 1971 letter, "I am […] very deeply in Auden's debt in recent years. His support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it."^[42]

Family life

John Ronald and Edith Tolkien had four children: John Francis Reuel (17 November 1917 – 22 January 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel (October 1920–1984), Christopher John Reuel (born 21 November 1924) and Priscilla Anne Reuel (born 1929). Tolkien was a very devoted family man, shown by the fact that he sent his children letters from Father Christmas when they were young. There were more characters added each year, such as the Polar Bear, Father Christmas' helper, the Snow Man, FC's gardener, Ilbereth the elf, his secretary, and various other minor characters. The major characters would relate tales of Father Christmas' battles against goblins who rode on bats and the various pranks committed by the Polar Bear.

Retirement and old age

During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame. The sale of his books was so profitable that he regretted he had not chosen early retirement.^[43] While at first he wrote enthusiastic answers to reader inquiries, he became more and more suspicious of emerging Tolkien fandom, especially among the hippie movement in the United States.^[44] In a 1972 letter he deplores having become a cult-figure, but admits that

... even the nose of a very modest idol (younger than Chu-Bu and not much older than Sheemish) cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!^[45]

Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory^[46] and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth on the south coast. Tolkien was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1972.

Death

Edith Tolkien died on 29 November 1971, at the age of eighty-two, and Tolkien had the name Lúthien engraved on the stone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died twenty-one months later on 2 September 1973, at the age of eighty-one, he was buried in the same grave, with Beren added to his name, so that the engravings now read:

Posthumously named after Tolkien are the Tolkien Road in Eastbourne, East Sussex, and the asteroid 2675 Tolkien discovered in 1982. Tolkien Way in Stoke-on-Trent is named after Tolkien's eldest son, Fr. John Francis Tolkien, who was the priest in charge at the nearby Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Angels and St. Peter in Chains.^[47] There is also a professorship in Tolkien's name at Oxford.

Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and in his religious and political views he was mostly conservative, in the sense of favouring established conventions and orthodoxies over innovation and modernization; in 1943 he wrote "My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy."^[48]

Religion

As already given above, Tolkien's devout faith was significant in the conversion of C. S. Lewis from atheism to Christianity, although Tolkien was greatly disappointed that Lewis chose to return to Anglicanism,^[20] rather than becoming a Catholic like himself.

In the last years of his life, he became greatly disappointed by the reforms and changes implemented after the Second Vatican Council, as his grandson Simon Tolkien recalls,

"I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My grandfather obviously didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but my grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right." ^[49]

He later voiced his support on several occasions for the Pre-Conciliar Tridentine Mass in the Latin language, and spoke at traditionalist meetings - although he died in the early years of the Traditionalist movement. ^[50]

Politics

The question of racist or racialist elements in Tolkien's views and works has been the matter of some scholarly debate.^[51] Christine Chism^[52] distinguishes accusations as falling into three categories: intentional racism,^[53] unconscious Eurocentric bias, and an evolution from latent racism in Tolkien's early work to a conscious rejection of racist tendencies in his late work.

Tolkien is known to have condemned Nazi "race-doctrine" and anti-Semitism as "wholly pernicious and unscientific".^[54] He also said of apartheid in his birthplace South Africa,

the treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain.^[55]

He also spoke out against it in his valedictory address to the University of Oxford in 1959,

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.^[56]

Tolkien had nothing but contempt for Adolf Hitler, whom he accused of "perverting ... and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit" which was so dear to him.^[57] However, he could get more agitated over "lesser evils" that struck nearer home; he denounced Anti-German fanaticism in the British war effort during World War II. In 1944, he wrote in a letter to his son Christopher:

But it is distressing to see the press grovelling in the gutter as low as Goebbels in his prime, shrieking that any German commander who holds out in a desperate situation (when, too, the military needs of his side clearly benefit) is a drunkard, and a besotted fanatic ... There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done.^[58]

He also voiced support for Francisco Franco's Falangist regime during the Spanish Civil War upon learning that Republican death squads were destroying churches and killing large numbers of priests and nuns^[59][60]. He expressed admiration for the South African poet, Fascist and fellow Catholic Roy Campbell in a 1944 letter. Since Campbell had served with Franco's armies in Spain, Tolkien regarded him as a defender of the Catholic faith, while C. S. Lewis was "violently" critical of Campbell's fascist sympathies.^[61]

He was horrified by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, referring to the Bomb's creators as "these lunatic physicists" and "babel-builders".^[62]

Influences

His love of myths and devout faith came together in his assertion that he believed that mythology is the divine echo of "the Truth".^[63] This view was expressed in his poem Mythopoeia,^[64] and his idea that myths held "fundamental truths" became a central theme of the Inklings in general.

Beginning with The Book of Lost Tales, written while recuperating from illnesses contracted during The Battle of the Somme, Tolkien devised several themes that were reused in successive drafts of his legendarium. The two most prominent stories, the tales of Beren and Lúthien and that of Túrin, were carried forward into long narrative poems (published in The Lays of Beleriand).

Influences

Tolkien was strongly influenced by English history and legends, for which he often confessed his love, but he also drew influence from Celtic — Scottish and Welsh — history and legends,^[65][66] as well as from many other European countries such as Scandinavia and Germany. He was also influenced by Anglo-Saxon literature, Germanic and Norse mythologies, Finnish mythology and the Bible.^[67] The works most often cited as sources for Tolkien's stories are Beowulf, the Kalevala, the Poetic Edda, the Volsunga saga and the Hervarar saga.^[68] Tolkien himself acknowledged Homer, Sophocles, and the Kalevala as influences or sources for some of his stories and ideas.^[69] His borrowings also came from numerous Middle English works and poems. A major philosophical influence on his writing is Alfred the Great's Anglo-Saxon translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy known as the Lays of Boethius.^[70] Characters in The Lord of the Rings such as Frodo, Treebeard, and Elrond make noticeably Boethian remarks. Also, Catholic theology and imagery played a part in fashioning his creative imagination, suffused as it was by his deeply religious spirit.^[71]

The Silmarillion

Tolkien wrote a brief summary of the legendarium that the tales of Beren and Lúthien and of Túrin were intended to represent, and that summary eventually evolved into The Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. Tolkien hoped to publish it along with The Lord of the Rings, but publishers (both Allen & Unwin and Collins) got cold feet; moreover printing costs were very high in the post-war years, leading to The Lord of the Rings being published in three books.^[72] The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series The History of Middle-earth, which was edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher Tolkien. From around 1936, he began to extend this framework to include the tale of The Fall of Númenor, which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis.

Children's books

In addition to his mythopoetic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children.^[73] He wrote annual Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them, building up a series of short stories (later compiled and published as The Father Christmas Letters). Other stories included Mr. Bliss, Roverandom, Smith of Wootton Major, Farmer Giles of Ham and Leaf by Niggle. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton Major, like The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from his legendarium. Leaf by Niggle appears to be an autobiographical allegory, in which a "very small man", Niggle, works on a painting of a tree, but is so caught up with painstakingly painting individual leaves or elaborating the background, or so distracted by the demands of his neighbour, that he never manages to complete it.^[74]

The Hobbit

Tolkien never expected his stories to become popular, but he was persuaded by C. S. Lewis to publish a book he had written for his own children called The Hobbit in 1937.^[75] However, the book attracted adult readers as well, and it became popular enough for the publisher, George Allen & Unwin, to ask Tolkien to work on a sequel.

The Lord of the Rings

Even though he felt uninspired on the topic, this request prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: the epic three-volume novel The Lord of the Rings (published 1954–55). Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for The Lord of the Rings, during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set against the background of The Silmarillion, but in a time long after it.

Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings to be a children's tale in the style of The Hobbit, but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing.^[76] Though a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense back story of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in The Silmarillion and other volumes. Tolkien's influence weighs heavily on the fantasy genre that grew up after the success of The Lord of the Rings.

Legacy

After the publication of the final volume of The Lord of the Rings in 1955, Tolkien continued to work both on the earlier stories and the later stories and material concerning Middle-earth. He continued such work right up until his death 18 years later in 1973. Tolkien had appointed his son Christopher to be his literary executor, and he (with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay, later a well-known fantasy author in his own right) organized some of the unpublished material into a single coherent volume, published as The Silmarillion in 1977—his father had previously attempted to get a collection of 'Silmarillion' material published together with The Lord of the Rings. In 1980 Christopher Tolkien followed The Silmarillion with a collection of more fragmentary material under the title Unfinished Tales. In subsequent years (1983–1996) he published a large amount of the remaining unpublished materials together with notes and extensive commentary in a series of twelve volumes called The History of Middle-earth. They contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress, and Tolkien only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not even complete consistency between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, the two most closely related works, because Tolkien was never able to fully integrate all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing The Hobbit for a third edition, that he would have preferred to completely rewrite the entire book.^[77]

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.^[78] In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the "Nation's Best-loved Book". Australians voted The Lord of the Rings "My Favourite Book" in a 2004 survey conducted by the Australian ABC.^[79] In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium".^[80] In 2002 Tolkien was voted the ninety-second "greatest Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted thirty-fifth in the 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.^[81]

The Children of Húrin

In September 2006, Christopher Tolkien, who had spent 30 years working on his father's unpublished manuscripts, announced that The Children of Húrin has been edited into a completed work for publication in 2007; it was released on April 17 2007. J. R. R. Tolkien had first written what he called the Húrin's saga (and later the Narn) in 1918, and rewritten it several times, including as an epic poem, but never completed his mature, novelistic version. Extracts from the latter had been published before by Christopher Tolkien in Unfinished Tales, with other texts appearing in The Silmarillion and his later literary investigations of The History of Middle-earth.

It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father's long version of the legend of The Children of Hurin as an independent work, between its own covers.^[82]

Manuscript locations

The John P. Raynor, S.J., Library at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin preserves many of Tolkien's manuscripts, notes and letters; other original material is in Oxford University's Bodleian Library. Marquette has the manuscripts and proofs of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and other works, including Farmer Giles of Ham, while the Bodleian holds the Silmarillion papers and Tolkien's academic work.^[83]

See also: Languages of Middle-earth

Linguistic career

Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialized in Ancient Greek philology in college, and in 1915 graduated with Old Norse as special subject. He worked for the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918, and is credited with having worked on a number of W words, including walrus, over which he struggled mightily.^[84] In 1920, he went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of linguistics from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club".^[85]

Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and he entertained notions of an inherited taste of language, which he termed the "native tongue" as opposed to "cradle tongue" in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, which is crucial to his understanding of race and language. He considered West Midlands dialect of Middle English to be his own "native tongue", and, as he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955,^[86] "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)".

Language builder

Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for the construction of artificial languages. The best developed of these are Quenya and Sindarin, the etymological connection between which formed the core of much of Tolkien's legendarium. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter of aesthetics and euphony, and Quenya in particular was designed from "phonaesthetic" considerations; it was intended as an "Elvenlatin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish and Greek.^[87] A notable addition came in late 1945 with Adûnaic or Númenórean, a language of a "faintly Semitic flavour", connected with Tolkien's Atlantis legend, which by The Notion Club Papers ties directly into his ideas about inheritability of language, and via the "Second Age" and the story of Eärendil was grounded in the legendarium, thereby providing a link of Tolkien's twentieth-century "real primary world" with the legendary past of his Middle-earth.

Views

Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages: in 1930 a congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his lecture A Secret Vice, "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c, &c, are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends".^[88]

Legacy

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 revival of the spellings dwarves and elvish (instead of dwarfs and elfish), which had not been in use since the mid-1800s and earlier. Other terms he has coined such as eucatastrophe are mainly used in connection with Tolkien's work.

Works inspired by Tolkien

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

The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.^[89]

The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him were Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Farmer Giles of Ham) and Donald Swann (who set the music to The Road Goes Ever On). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created illustrations to The Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity they bore in style to his own drawings.^[90]

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

In 1946, he rejected suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition of The Hobbit as "too Disnified",

Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of.^[91]

He was sceptical of the emerging Tolkien fandom in the United States, and in 1954 he returned proposals for the dust jackets of the American edition of The Lord of the Rings:

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.^[92]

In Film

In 1958, after receiving a screenplay for a proposed movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings by Morton Grady Zimmerman he wrote

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.^[93]

He went on to criticize the script scene by scene ("yet one more scene of screams and rather meaningless slashings"). But Tolkien was in principle open to the idea of a movie adaptation. He sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1968. However, guided by an intense hatred of their past work, Tolkien expressly forbade that The Walt Disney Company should ever become involved in any future productions.Template:ME-fact

United Artists never made a film, although director John Boorman was planning a live-action film in the early 1970s. Apparently it would have been more to Tolkien's liking than the animated film which followed. In 1976 the rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings appeared in 1978, an animated rotoscoping film directed by Ralph Bakshi with screenplay by the fantasy writer Peter S. Beagle. It however only contained the first half of the story of The Lord of the Rings.^[94] In 1977 an animated TV production of The Hobbit was made by Rankin-Bass, and in 1980 they produced an animated The Return of the King, which covered some of the portions of The Lord of the Rings that Bakshi was unable to complete.

In 2001–3, New Line Cinema released The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of live-action films filmed in New Zealand by director Peter Jackson. Among veteran fans reviews were mixed. Casting and characterizations were praised while alterations to central story concepts provoked passionate arguments from hardcore fans. The series was extremely successful, however - performing well commercially and winning numerous Oscars. A third accomplishment was also attained, in an interview for the film Ringers: Lord of the Fans, Peter Jackson had expressed hope that his three films would draw more people towards the "real masterpiece" - namely Tolkien's novel.

Blue plaques

There are five blue plaques that commemorate places associated with Tolkien, one in Oxford and four in Birmingham. The Birmingham plaques commemorate three of his childhood homes right up to the time he left to attend Oxford University. The Oxford plaque commemorates the residence where Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and most of The Lord of the Rings.

Fiction and poetry

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

• 1936 Songs for the Philologists, with E.V. Gordon et al.
• 1937 The Hobbit or There and Back Again, ISBN 0-618-00221-9 (HM).
• 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 (a play written in alliterative verse), published with the accompanying essays Beorhtnoth's Death and Ofermod, in Essays and Studies by members of the English Association, volume 6.
• The Lord of the Rings
  • 1954 The Fellowship of the Ring: being the first part of The Lord of the Rings, ISBN 0-618-00222-7 (HM).
  • 1954 The Two Towers: being the second part of The Lord of the Rings, ISBN 0-618-00223-5 (HM).
  • 1955 The Return of the King: being the third part of The Lord of the Rings, ISBN 0-618-00224-3 (HM).
• 1962 The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book
• 1964 Tree and Leaf (On Fairy-Stories and Leaf by Niggle in book form)
• 1966 The Tolkien Reader (The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, On Fairy-Stories, Leaf by Niggle, Farmer Giles of Ham, and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil)
• 1967 The Road Goes Ever On, with Donald Swann
• 1967 Smith of Wootton Major

Academic and other works

• 1922 A Middle English Vocabulary, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 168 pp.
• 1925 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, co-edited with E.V. Gordon, Oxford University Press, 211 pp.; Revised edition 1967, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 232 pp.
• 1925 Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography, published in The Review of English Studies, volume 1, no. 2, pp. 210–215.
• 1925 The Devil's Coach Horses, published in The Review of English Studies, volume 1, no. 3, pp. 331–336.
• 1929 Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad, published in Essays and Studies by members of the English Association, Oxford, volume 14, pp. 104–126.
• 1932 The Name 'Nodens', concerning the name Nodens, published in Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, Oxford, University Press for The Society of Antiquaries.
• 1932–34 Sigelwara Land parts I and II, in Medium Aevum, Oxford, volume 1, no. 3 (December 1932), pp. 183–196 and volume 3, no. 2 (June 1934), pp. 95–111.
• 1934 Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale, in Transactions of the Philological Society, London, pp. 1–70 (rediscovery of dialect humour, introducing the Hengwrt manuscript into textual criticism of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales)
• 1937 Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, London, Humphrey Milford, 56 pp. (publication of his 1936 lecture on Beowulf criticism)
• 1939 The Reeve's Tale: version prepared for recitation at the 'summer diversions', Oxford, 14 pp.
• 1939 On Fairy-Stories (1939 Andrew Lang lecture) - concerning Tolkien's philosophy on fantasy, this lecture was a shortened version of an essay later published in full in 1947.
• 1944 Sir Orfeo, Oxford, The Academic Copying Office, 18 pp. (an edition of the medieval poem)
• 1947 On Fairy-Stories (essay - published in Essays presented to Charles Williams, Oxford University Press) - first full publication of an essay concerning Tolkien's philosophy on fantasy, and which had been presented in shortened form as the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture.
• 1953 Ofermod and Beorhtnoth's Death, two essays published with the poem The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son in Essays and Studies by members of the English Association, volume 6.
• 1953 Middle English "Losenger": Sketch of an etymological and semantic enquiry, published in Essais de philologie moderne: Communications présentées au Congrès International de Philologie Moderne (1951), Les Belles Lettres.
• 1962 Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, Early English Text Society, Oxford University Press.
• 1963 English and Welsh, in Angles and Britons: O'Donnell Lectures, University of Cardiff Press.
• 1964 Introduction to Tree and Leaf, with details of the composition and history of Leaf by Niggle and On Fairy-Stories.
• 1966 Contributions to the Jerusalem Bible (as translator and lexicographer)
• 1966 Foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings, with Tolkien's comments on the varied reaction to his work, his motivation for writing the work, and his opinion of allegory.
• 1966 Tolkien on Tolkien (autobiographical)

Posthumous publications

See Tolkien research for essays and text fragments by Tolkien published posthumously in academic publications and forums.

• 1975 Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings (edited version) - published in A Tolkien Compass by Jared Lobdell. Written by Tolkien for use by translators of The Lord of the Rings, a full version, re-titled "Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings," was published in 2005 in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull ISBN 0-618-64267-6.
• 1975 Translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl (poem) and Sir Orfeo
• 1976 The Father Christmas Letters
• 1977 The Silmarillion ISBN 0-618-12698-8 (HM).
• 1979 Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien
• 1980 Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth ISBN 0-618-15405-1 (HM).
• 1980 Poems and Stories (a compilation of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, On Fairy-Stories, Leaf by Niggle, Farmer Giles of Ham and Smith of Wootton Major)
• 1981 The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (eds. Christopher Tolkien and Humphrey Carpenter)
• 1981 The Old English "Exodus" Text translation and commentary by J. R. R. Tolkien; edited by Joan Turville-Petre. Clarendon Press, Oxford
• 1982 Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode
• 1982 Mr. Bliss
• 1983 The Monsters and the Critics (an essay collection)
  • Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics (1936)
  • On Translating Beowulf (1940)
  • On Fairy-Stories (1947)
  • A Secret Vice (1930)
  • English and Welsh (1955)
• 1983–1996 The History of Middle-earth:
  1. The Book of Lost Tales 1 (1983)
  2. The Book of Lost Tales 2 (1984)
  3. The Lays of Beleriand (1985)
  4. The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986)
  5. The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987)
  6. The Return of the Shadow (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 1) (1988)
  7. The Treason of Isengard (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 2) (1989)
  8. The War of the Ring (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 3) (1990)
  9. Sauron Defeated (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 4, including The Notion Club Papers) (1992)
  10. Morgoth's Ring (The Later Silmarillion vol. 1) (1993)
  11. The War of the Jewels (The Later Silmarillion vol. 2) (1994)
  12. The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996)
  • Index (2002)
• 1995 J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator (a compilation of Tolkien's art)
• 1998 Roverandom
• 2002 A Tolkien Miscellany - a collection of previously published material
• 2002 Beowulf and the Critics ed. Michael D.C. Drout (Beowulf: the monsters and the critics together with editions of two drafts of the longer essay from which it was condensed.)
• 2005 Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings (full version) - published in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull ISBN 0-618-64267-6. Re-titled to "Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings" in this book. Written by Tolkien for use by translators of The Lord of the Rings, an edited version had been published in 1975 in A Tolkien Compass by Jared Lobdell.
• 2007 The Children of Húrin
• 2007 The History of The Hobbit

Audio recordings

• 1967 Poems and Songs of Middle-earth, Caedmon TC 1231
• 1975 JRR Tolkien Reads and Sings his The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings, Caedmon TC 1477, TC 1478 (based on an August, 1952 recording by George Sayer)

General references

• Biography: Carpenter, Humphrey (1977). Tolkien: A Biography. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-04-928037-6.
• Letters: Carpenter, Humphrey and Tolkien, Christopher (eds.) (1981). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-04-826005-3. CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

A small selection of books about Tolkien and his works:

• Anderson, Douglas A., Michael D. C. Drout and Verlyn Flieger, ed. (2004). Tolkien Studies, An Annual Scholarly Review Vol. I. West Virginia University Press. ISBN 0-937058-87-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
• Carpenter, Humphrey (1979). The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends. ISBN 0-395-27628-4.
• Chance, Jane, ed. (2003). Tolkien the Medievalist. London, New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-28944-0.
• Chance, Jane, ed. (2004). Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, a Reader. Louisville: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2301-1.
• Curry, Patrick (2004). Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity. ISBN 0-618-47885-X.
• Drout, Michael D. C., ed. (2006). J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. New York City: Routledge. ISBN 0-415969425.
• Duriez, Colin (2001). The Inklings Handbook: The Lives, Thought and Writings of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Their Friends. ISBN 1-902694-13-9.
• Duriez, Colin (2003). Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship. ISBN 1-58768-026-2.
• Flieger, Verlyn and Carl F. Hostetter, ed. (2000). Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30530-7. DDC 823.912. LC PR6039.
• Fonstad, Linda Wynn (1991). The Atlas of Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-618-126996.
• Garth, John (2003). Tolkien and the Great War. Harper-Collins. ISBN 0-00-711953-4.
• Gilliver, Peter (2006). The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-861069-6.
• Diana Pavlac Glyer The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Kent State University Press. Kent Ohio. 2007. ISBN 978-0-87338-890-0
• Haber, Karen (2001). Meditations on Middle-earth: New Writing on the Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-27536-6.
• Harrington, Patrick, ed. (2003). Tolkien and Politics. London, England: Third Way Publications Ltd. ISBN 0-9544788-2-7.
• Lee, S. D., and E. Solopova, ed. (2005). The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-4671-X.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
• O'Neill, Timothy R. (1979). The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes of Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-395-28208-X.
• Pearce, Joseph (1998). Tolkien: Man and Myth. London: HarperCollinsPublishers. ISBN 0-00-274018-4.
• Perry, Michael (2006). Untangling Tolkien: A Chronology and Commentary for The Lord of the Rings. Seattle: Inkling Books. ISBN 1-58742-019-8.
• Pytrell, Ariel, ed. (2003). El Señor de los Anillos. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Mondragón Argentina. ISBN 987-20607-0-3.
• Tom Shippey (2000). J. R. R. Tolkien — Author of the Century. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-618-12764-X, ISBN 0-618-25759-4 (pbk).
• Strachey, Barbara (1981). Journeys of Frodo: an Atlas of The Lord of the Rings. London, Boston: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-04-912016-6.
• Tolkien, John & Priscilla (1992). The Tolkien Family Album. London: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-261-10239-7.
• White, Michael (2003). Tolkien: A Biography. New American Library. ISBN 0-451-21242-8.

• HarperCollins Tolkien Website
• Tolkien Biography (The Tolkien Society)
• The Lord of the Rings Wiki
• Tolkien Gateway Wiki
• Tolkien and Iceland: the Philology of Envy. Tom Shippey's lecture at the University of Iceland. Last accessed 17 October, 2005.
• 1952 audio recording of Tolkien reciting a poem in Quenya (Galadriel's lament from The Fellowship of the Ring)
• 1952 audio recording of Tolkien reading an excerpt from The Two Towers (from "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit")
• The Tolkien Library - Tolkien news, articles, resource, bibliography, biography, collectors guide
• The Tolkien Collector's Guide
• Tolkien Biography, Studies, Bibliography, etc...
• WorldCat Identities page for 'Tolkien, J. R. R. 1892–1973 (John Ronald Reuel)'
• J.R.R. Tolkien biography, news, articles and book reviews
• J.R.R. Tolkien at the Internet Book List
• J.R.R. Tolkien at IMDb
• J. R. R. Tolkien at Curlie
• Wall Street Journal: Tolkien, Christianity, and Paganism

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