(Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unamb...)
Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely traveling any farther than his pantry or cellar. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves arrive on his doorstep one day to whisk him away on an adventure. They have launched a plot to raid the treasure hoard guarded by Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon. Bilbo reluctantly joins their quest, unaware that on his journey to the Lonely Mountain he will encounter both a magic ring and a frightening creature known as Gollum.
('Leaf by Niggle' recounts the strange adventures of the p...)
'Leaf by Niggle' recounts the strange adventures of the painter Niggle, who sets out to paint the perfect tree. But he senses that he will be snatched away from his work long before it is finished - if indeed it could ever be finished in this world. For it is in another and brighter place that Niggle finds his tree is finished and learns that it is indeed a real tree, a true part of creation.
(The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume in The Lord ...)
The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, tells of the fateful power of the One Ring. It begins a magnificent tale of adventure that will plunge the members of the Fellowship of the Ring into a perilous quest and set the stage for the ultimate clash between the powers of good and evil.
(The Two Towers is the second volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's e...)
The Two Towers is the second volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic saga, The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship has been forced to split up. Frodo and Sam must continue alone towards Mount Doom, where the One Ring must be destroyed. Meanwhile, at Helm’s Deep and Isengard, the first great battles of the War of the Ring take shape.
(The Return of the King is the towering climax to J. R. R....)
The Return of the King is the towering climax to J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy that tells the saga of the hobbits of Middle-earth and the great War of the Rings. In this concluding volume, Frodo and Sam make a terrible journey to the heart of the Land of the Shadow in a final reckoning with the power of Sauron.
(A charming edition of one of Tolkien’s major pieces of sh...)
A charming edition of one of Tolkien’s major pieces of short fiction, and his only finished work dating from after publication of The Lord of the Rings.
(Can you imagine writing to Father Christmas and actually ...)
Can you imagine writing to Father Christmas and actually getting a reply? For more than twenty years, the children of J.R.R. Tolkien received letters from the North Pole - from Father Christmas himself! They told wonderful stories of mischief and disaster, adventures and battles: how the reindeer got loose and scattered presents all over the place, how the accident-prone Polar Bear climbed the North Pole and fell through the roof of Father Christmas's house, and many others.
(Set primarily in the First Age of Middle-earth, The Silma...)
Set primarily in the First Age of Middle-earth, The Silmarillion contains the legend of the creation of the world and an account of the Elder Days. It is the ancient drama remembered by Elrond and Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, and the harrowing origin of the adventure that ends ages later with Frodo and the One Ring.
(Bilbo’s Last Song is considered by many to be Tolkien’s e...)
Bilbo’s Last Song is considered by many to be Tolkien’s epilogue to his classic work The Lord of the Rings. As Bilbo Baggins takes his final voyage to the Undying Lands, he must say goodbye to Middle-earth. Poignant and lyrical, the song is both a longing to set forth on his ultimate journey and a tender farewell to friends left behind.
(Tolkien’s four novellas (Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Nig...)
Tolkien’s four novellas (Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle, Smith of Wootton Major, and Roverandom) and one book of poems (The Adventures of Tom Bombadil) are gathered together.
(The Fall of Arthur recounts in verse the last campaign of...)
The Fall of Arthur recounts in verse the last campaign of King Arthur, who, even as he stands at the threshold of Mirkwood, is summoned back to Britain by news of the treachery of Mordred. Already weakened in spirit by Guinevere’s infidelity with the now-exiled Lancelot, Arthur must rouse his knights to battle one last time against Mordred’s rebels and foreign mercenaries.
(In the Tale of The Fall of Gondolin are two of the greate...)
In the Tale of The Fall of Gondolin are two of the greatest powers in the world. There is Morgoth of the uttermost evil, unseen in this story but ruling over a vast military power from his fortress of Angband. Deeply opposed to Morgoth is Ulmo, second in might only to Manwë, chief of the Valar: he is called the Lord of Waters, of all seas, lakes, and rivers under the sky. But he works in secret in Middle-earth to support the Noldor, the kindred of the Elves among whom were numbered Húrin and Túrin Turambar.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a British writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, famous worldwide as the author of such fantasy works as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.
Background
Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, the son of English-born parents in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State of South Africa, where his father worked as a bank manager.
To escape the heat and dust of southern Africa and to better guard the delicate health of Ronald (as he was called), Tolkien's mother moved back to England with him and his younger brother when they were very young boys. Within a year of this move their father, Arthur Tolkien, died in Bloemfontein, and a few years later the boys' mother died as well. The boys lodged at several homes from 1905 until 1911.
Education
Tolkien attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, and later St. Philip's School. In 1903, he won a Foundation Scholarship and returned to King Edward's. While a pupil there, Tolkien was one of the cadets from the school's Officers Training Corps. Ronald then entered Exeter College, Oxford. He received his B. A. from Oxford in 1915 and an M. A. in 1919.
In 1954 Tolkien received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland (of which U.C.D. was a constituent college).
During World War I Tolkien saw action in the Somme. On 27 October 1916, as his battalion attacked Regina Trench, Tolkien came down with trench fever, a disease carried by the lice. He was invalided to England on 8 November 1916. While in England recovering from "trench fever" in 1917, Tolkien began writing "The Book of Lost Tales," which eventually became The Silmarillion (1977) and laid the groundwork for his stories about Middle-earth. After the Armistice he returned to Oxford, where he joined the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary and began work as a freelance tutor.
In 1920 he was appointed Reader in English Language at Leeds University, where he collaborated with E. V. Gordon on an acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was completed and published in 1925. (Some years later, Tolkien completed a second translation of this poem, which was published posthumously).
The same year, having returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, Tolkien became friends with a fellow of Magdalen College, C. S. Lewis. They shared an intense enthusiasm for the myths, sagas, and languages of northern Europe; and to better enhance those interests, both attended meetings of "The Coalbiters," an Oxford club, founded by Tolkien, at which Icelandic sagas were read aloud.
During the rest of his years at Oxford - twenty as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, fourteen as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature - Tolkien published several esteemed short studies and translations. Notable among these are his essays "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (1936), "Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale" (1934), and "On Fairy-Stories" (1947); his scholarly edition of Ancrene Wisse (1962); and his translations of three medieval poems: "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "Pearl," and "Sir Orfeo" (1975).
As a writer of imaginative literature, though, Tolkien is best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, tales which were formed during his years attending meetings of "The Inklings, " an informal gathering of like-minded friends and fellow dons, initiated after the demise of The Coalbiters.
The Inklings, which was formed during the late 1930 and lasted until the late 1940, was a weekly meeting held in Lewis's sitting-room at Magdalen, at which works-in-progress were read aloud and discussed and critiqued by the attendees, all interspersed with free-flowing conversation about literature and other topics. The nucleus of the group was Tolkien, Lewis, and Lewis's friend, novelist Charles Williams; other participants, who attended irregularly, included Lewis's brother Warren, Nevill Coghill, H. V. D. Dyson, Owen Barfield, and others. The common thread which bound them was that they were all adherents of Christianity and all had a love of story. Having heard Tolkien's first hobbit story read aloud at a meeting of the Inklings, Lewis urged Tolkien to publish The Hobbit, which appeared in 1937. A major portion of The Fellowship of the Ring was also read to The Inklings before the group disbanded in the late 1940's.
Tolkien retired from his professorship in 1959. While the unauthorized publication of an American edition of The Lord of the Rings in 1965 angered him, it also made him a widely admired cult figure in the United States, especially among high school and college students. Uncomfortable with this status, he and his wife lived quietly in Bournemouth for several years, until Edith's death in 1971.
In the remaining two years of his life, Tolkien returned to Oxford, where he was made an honorary fellow of Merton College. He was at the height of his fame as a scholarly and imaginative writer when he died in 1973, though critical study of his fiction continues and has increased in the years since.
In his books The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which consists of the novels The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955), Tolkien rejects such traditional heroic attributes as strength and size, stressing instead the capacity of even the humblest creatures to prevail against evil.
The initial critical reception to The Lord of the Rings varied. While some reviewers expressed dissatisfaction with the story's great length and one-dimensional characters, the majority enjoyed Tolkien's enchanting descriptions and lively sense of adventure.
Throughout his career Tolkien also composed histories, genealogies, maps, glossaries, poems, and songs to supplement his vision of Middle-earth. Among the many works published during his lifetime were a volume of poems, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962), and a fantasy novel, Smith of Wootton Major (1967). Though many of his stories about Middle-earth remained incomplete at the time of Tolkien's death, his son, Christopher, rescued the manuscripts from his father's collections, edited them, and published them.
One of these works, The Silmarillion, takes place before the time of The Hobbit and, in a heroic manner which recalls the Christian myths of Creation and the Fall, tells the tale of the first age of Holy Ones and their offspring. Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth (1980) is a similar collection of incomplete stories and fragments written during World War I. The Book of Lost Tales, Part I (1984) and The Book of Lost Tales, Part II (1984) deal respectively with the beginnings of Middle-earth and the point at which humans enter the saga.
In addition to these posthumous works, Christopher Tolkien also collected his father's correspondence to friends, family, and colleagues in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981). From 1914 until his death in 1973, he drew on his familiarity with Northern and other ancient literatures and his own invented languages to create not just his own story, but his own world: Middle-earth, complete with its own history, myths, legends, epics, and heroes.
J. R. R. Tolkien is best known to most readers as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which have pleased countless readers and fascinated critics who recognize their literary depth. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature. Both the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings were adapted to films, having a great succes and performing extremely well commercially and winning numerous Oscars.
His essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" - a plea to study the Old English poem "Beowulf" as a poem, and not just as a historical curiosity - is regarded as a classic critical statement on the subject, and his renditions of the Middle English poems "Sir Orfeo", "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", and "Pearl" into Modern English are used as texts in some literature classes.
Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II and received the insignia of the Order at Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1972. In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". There are seven blue plaques in England that commemorate places associated with Tolkien: one in Oxford, one in Bournemouth, four in Birmingham and one in Leeds.
Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic throughout his life.
Politics
Tolkien's political views were mostly a traditionalist moderate, with libertarian, Distributist, and monarchist leanings. In 1943 he wrote, "My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy - or to unconstitutional' Monarchy."
Tolkien advocated the dismantling of the British Empire and even of the United Kingdom. Tolkien voiced support for the Nationalists (eventually led by Franco during the Spanish Civil War) upon hearing that communist Republicans were destroying churches and killing priests and nuns.
Tolkien was contemptuous of Joseph Stalin and opposed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party prior to the Second World War, and was known to especially despise Nazi racist and anti-Semitic ideology. He criticized Allied use of total-war tactics against civilians of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Views
Tolkien had an intense hatred for the side effects of industrialization, which he considered to be devouring the English countryside and simpler life. For most of his adult life, he was disdainful of cars, preferring to ride a bicycle.
Quotations:
"There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after."
"Most men teach, and few men learn."
"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost."
"It is useless to meet revenge with revenge; it will heal nothing."
"False hopes are more dangerous than fears."
"All have their worth and each contributes to the worth of the others."
"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."
"Middle-earth is not an imaginary world. .. . The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live. The stories were made . .. to provide a world for the languages rather than the reverse."
"I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effects because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth. It perceives .. that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story - and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one. Of course, I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story."
"The tale is after all in the ultimate analysis a tale, a piece of literature, intended to have literary effect, and not real history. That the device adopted, that of giving its setting an historical air or feeling, and (an illusion of ?) three dimensions, is successful, seems shown by the fact that several correspondents have treated it in the same way . .. as if it were a report of 'real' times and places, which my ignorance or carelessness had misrepresented in places or failed to describe properly in others. Having set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own: it is a wonderful thing to be told that I have succeeded, at least with those who have still the undarkened heart and mind."
Personality
Tolkien was a philologist in the literal sense of the word: a lover of language. It was a passion he developed early and kept throughout his life, exploring tongues that were no longer spoken and creating languages of his own. After learning Latin and Greek, Tolkien taught himself some Welsh, Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Gothic, a language with no modern descendant - he wrote the only poem known to exist in that speech. Later he added Finnish to his list of beloved tongues; the Finnish epic The Kalevala had a great impact on his Silmarillion, and the language itself, says Carpenter, formed the basis for "Quenya, " the High-elven tongue of his stories.
Throughout his fiction, from the early tales of The Silmarillion to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien exercised his philological talents and training to create an "asterisk-epic" - an inferred history - that revealed elements of the Northern (and especially the English) literature he loved, and of which so little remains.
Names in Tolkien's fiction are not merely identifying sounds, Shippey points out; they are also descriptions of the people, places and creatures that bear them. The name Gandalf, for instance, is made up of two Norse words: gandr, a magical implement (probably a staff), and alfr, an elf. Tolkien's Gandalf, therefore, is an elf with a staff, or a wizard. Shippey explains, "Accordingly when Gandalf first appears [in The Hobbit], 'All that the unsuspecting Bilbo saw that morning was an old man with a staff... He turns out not to be an elf, but by the end of The Lord of the Rings it is clear he comes from Elvenhome." The character Gollum continually refers to himself and to the Ring throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Ring as "my precious"; Douglas A. Anderson, in his notes to The Annotated Hobbit, cites Constance B. Hieatt, who declares that "Old Norse gull/goll, of which one inflected form would be gollum, means 'gold, treasure, something precious' and can also mean 'ring,' a point which may have occurred to Tolkien."
In the last appendix to The Lord of the Rings, Shippey points out, Tolkien derives the word hobbit itself from an Old English asterisk-word- hol-bytla, meaning "hole-dweller" or "- builder"- although he worked out the meaning long after he first used the word. Tolkien also drew on ancient words for inspiration. Shippey traces the origins of the Balrog - the evil creature Gandalf faces on the bridge in Moria - to an article Tolkien published in two parts in the journal Medium Aevum on the Anglo-Saxon word Sigelhearwan, used to translate Latin biblical references to natives of Ethiopia. Tolkien suggested that the element sigel meant both 'sun' and 'jewel, ' and that the element hearwa was related to the Latin carbo, meaning soot. He further conjectured that when an Anglo-Saxon used the word, he did not picture a dark-skinned man but a creature like the fire-giants of Northern myth.
Tolkien's ability to use ancient tongues - "tending, " according to Shippey, "to focus on names and words and the things and realities which lie behind them" - helps create a sense of history within Middle-earth, a feeling many reviewers have noticed.
Quotes from others about the person
Kolich: "He was in fact one of the leading philologists of his day."
Kopff: "Tolkien takes a brief and fragmentary tale sung by a bard in Beowulf and a fragment of a separate version of the same story that survives on a single manuscript page and tries to reconstruct the history that lies behind the two sources."
Shippey: "Like Walter Scott or William Morris before him, he felt the perilous charm of the archaic world of the North, recovered from bits and scraps by generations of inquiry. He wanted to tell a story about it simply, one feels, because there were hardly any complete ones left."
Jessica Yates, British Book News: "J. R. R. Tolkien began to write The Book of Lost Tales in 1916-17, as his first attempt on 'a mythology for England.' He felt that the English people, as opposed to the Greeks or the Celts for example, had no 'body of . .. connected legend' of their own. All we had was Beowulf (imported from Denmark) and our native fairy stories. So partly with the sense of mission and partly as an escape from the horrors of the First World War, he wrote a series of tales about the creation of the world and the coming of the Elves, of evil Melko and the wars of Elves and Men against him."
Janet Adam Smith, the New York Review of Books: "Tolkien's attitude to language is part of his attitude to history ... to recapture and reanimate the words of the past is to recapture something of ourselves; for we carry the past in us, and our existence, like Frodo's quest, is only an episode in an age - long and continuing drama."
Joseph McLellan, the Washington Post Book World: "Tolkien's stories take place against a background of measureless depth. ... That background is ever-present in the creator's mind and it gives Frodo and company a three-dimensional reality that is seldom found in this kind of writing."
Connections
At the age of 16, J. R. R. Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years his senior. Edith Bratt and Ronald Tolkien were formally engaged at Birmingham in January 1913, and married at St. Mary Immaculate Roman Catholic Church, Warwick, on 22 March 1916. The Tolkiens had four children.
Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated letters from Father Christmas when they were young. Each year more characters were added, such as the North Polar Bear (Father Christmas's helper), the Snow Man (his gardener), Ilbereth the elf (his secretary), and various other, minor characters.
Father:
Arthur Reuel Tolkien
Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896) was an English bank manager.
Mother:
Mabel Suffield Tolkien
(1870–1904)
Spouse:
Edith Mary Bratt
Edith Mary Tolkien (January 21, 1889 – November 29, 1971; née Bratt) was the wife and muse of novelist J. R. R. Tolkien, and the inspiration for his fictional characters Lúthien Tinúviel and Arwen Evenstar.
child:
Michael Hilary Tolkien
Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien (October 22, 1920 – February 27, 1984) was a British teacher. He was J. R. R. Tolkien's second son and was named after J. R. R. Tolkien's brother Hilary.
child:
Christopher John Tolkien
Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (born November 21, 1924) is the third son of the author J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), and the editor of much of his father's posthumously published work.
child:
Priscilla Anne
Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel Tolkien (born June 18, 1929) is the fourth and youngest child of J. R. R. Tolkien, and his only daughter.
child:
John Francis Tolkien
John Francis Reuel Tolkien (1917–2003) was the eldest son of J. R. R. Tolkien.
colleague:
E. V. Gordon
Eric Valentine Gordon (1896–1938) was a philologist, known as an editor of medieval Germanic texts and a teacher of medieval Germanic languages at the University of Leeds and the University of Manchester.
