John Ronald Reuel Tolkien . Better known by his pen name JRR Tolkien was a South African writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known for being the author of the high fantasy classics ” The Hobbit ” and ” The Lord of the Rings .” He also worked as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Rawlinson and Bosworth at Oxford University and Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton .
Popularly identified as the “father” of modern fantasy literature, or more specifically, high fantasy. Tolkien’s works have inspired many other fantasy works and have had a lasting effect across the field.
Biographical data
Family origins
From the known data, most of Tolkien’s paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in the Saxon duchies that now form the state of Lower Saxony in Germany , although they had been settled in England since the 18th century , adapting rapidly and intensively to English culture.
The surname Tolkien is the anglicized form of the German Tollkiehn, whose origin lies in tollkühn (“reckless”). In a letter that Christopher , son of Tolkien, wrote to the author and critic William Ready, he points out that “the name is of German origin, composed of” tol “, which means” mad “, and” kühn “,” brave “; his Global meaning would be “risky”. The etymological translation of this term in English would be dull-keen, a literal translation or oxymoron. The surname Rashbold that appears in The Notion Club Papers is a play on words that alludes to the etymology of his surname .
Tolkien’s maternal grandparents, John and Edith Jane Suffield , lived in Birmingham and owned a store in the city center. The Suffield family had a business in a building called the Lamb House since 1812 . From 1812 William Suffield ran a book store there; Tolkien’s great-great-grandfather, also named John Suffield , was there from 1826 with a shoe and clothing store.
Childhood
John Ronald Reuel was born in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State (South Africa), on the night of Sunday , January 3 , 1892 . His parents were Arthur Reuel Tolkien and Mabel Suffield , both from Great Britain . He received the same name as his paternal grandfather, John, because in his family it was customary to call the eldest son of the eldest son that way.
His uncle John who was the eldest of John Benjamin Tolkien’s sons , had only daughters, so Arthur decided to name his son according to custom. His middle name, Ronald, was given at the wish of Mabel, since she believed that the baby was going to be a girl and had planned to call her Rosalind, ending up with Ronald as a substitute. Reuel, which comes from ancient Hebrew and means “close to God,” was his father’s middle name. The boy was baptized on January 31 at Bloemfontein Cathedral.
Later, when the boy began to walk, he was bitten by a tarantula in the garden of his house, an event that would have parallels in their stories.
The 17 of February of 1894 was born Ronald’s younger brother, Hilary Arthur Tolkien .
Although Arthur wanted to remain in Africa , the climate of the place was damaging John’s health, so in 1895 , when he was three years old, he moved with his mother Mabel and his brother Hilary to England, in what must have been a prolonged family visit, while his father remained in South Africa, in charge of the sale of diamonds and other precious stones for the Bank of England .
Arthur Tolkien’s intention was to reunite with his family in England, although he died on February 15 , 1896 of rheumatic fever. Arthur’s surprise death left her family without income, so Mabel had to take her children to live with her own family in Birmingham.
That same year they moved back to Sarehole (now Hall Green ), then a small Worcestershire village , later taken over by Birmingham. Ronald loved exploring the nearby Moseley Swamp and Sarehole Mill, as well as the Clent and Lickey Hills, which would later inspire passages in his works, along with other Worcestershire locations such as Bromsgrove, Alcester and Alvechurch, and his aunt’s farm, Bag End (“Closed Bag”), a name he would use in his fiction.
Mabel took care of the education of her two children, Ronald (as he was known to his family) being a very diligent student. His great interest in botany came from the teachings of Mabel, who aroused in her son the pleasure of looking at and feeling plants. Ronald enjoyed drawing landscapes and trees, but his favorite lessons were those related to languages, since his mother began teaching him the basics of Latin at such an early age.
In this way, he could already read at the age of four, and write fluently soon after. In the same way, he entertained himself by inventing his own languages, such as “animalic”, created jointly with a cousin of hers; the “nevbosh” (“new nonsense”); or the «naffarin», based on Spanish.
Tolkien attended the School of the King Edward (King Edward’s School) and Birmingham while studying there, helped form the row of the parade coronation of George V , being located just outside the gates of Buckingham Palace . Later it was enrolled in the School of San Felipe]] (St. Philip’s School) and the College of Exeter (Exeter College), in Oxford .
In 1900 Mabel converted, along with her two children, to Roman Catholicism, despite strong opposition from her Baptist family. In 1904 , when Ronald was twelve years old, Mabel passed away due to complications from diabetes – a very dangerous disease before insulin – at Fern Cottage (Rednal), where the family was rented. Throughout his life, Ronald lived convinced that his mother had been a true martyr for her faith, which made a deep impression on his own Catholic beliefs.
During their subsequent orphanage, Ronald and Hilary were educated by Father Francis Xavier Morgan , a Catholic priest of the Birmingham Oratory, located in the Edgbaston area . Father Francis was a priest of Jerez origin who had supported his mother morally and financially after her conversion to Catholicism, and who had taught young Ronald the basics of the Spanish language that he used in creating his “naffarin.” The Oratory was almost in the shadow of the towers of Perrott’s Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks, which would inspire the images of the dark towers of Orthanc and Minas Morgul from The Lord of the Rings.
Another notable influence at this stage were the medievalist Romantic paintings by Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, many of whose works are now in a renowned collection of the Birmingham Museums Art Gallery, which He exhibited them openly to the public from 1908 .
Youth
In 1908 , at the age of sixteen, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt at the orphanage, falling in love with her despite being three years younger. Father Xavier forbade Tolkien to meet, speak and even correspond with her until he was twenty-one, which the young man obeyed to the letter.
In 1911 , while at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, Tolkien formed together with three friends ( Rob Wilson , Geoffrey Smith and Cristopher Wiseman ) a semi-secret society known as the TC, BS, the initials of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society ( “Barrovian Tea and Society Club”), alluding to his hobby of having tea at Barrow’s Stores, near the school, as well as in the school’s own library (illegally).
After leaving school, the members kept in touch, holding a “council” in London in December 1914 at Wiseman’s home. For Tolkien, the outcome of this encounter was a strong impulse to write poetry.
In the summer of 1911 Tolkien took a vacation to Switzerland , a trip that he recalled in a letter in 1968 still very vividly, where he noted that Bilbo’s journey through the Misty Mountains (including the “slipping on the slippery the pine forest “) is directly based on his adventures with his group of twelve fellow hikers from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen, and on their camping in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien recalled his deep sorrow at leaving the sights of the perpetual snows of Jungfrau and Silverhorn, “the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams.”
After many obstacles and impediments from Father Francis (who wanted Tolkien to focus on finishing his English Philology studies at Oxford with honors), at last on the same afternoon of his twenty-first birthday Tolkien wrote a letter to Edith declaring his love and asking her if she wanted to marry him. She replied that she was already engaged, as she believed Tolkien had forgotten her. Meeting under a railway viaduct, they renewed their love, after which Edith returned her engagement ring and decided to marry Tolkien. After getting engaged in Birmingham in January 1913 , Edith converted to Catholicism at Tolkien’s insistence, finally marrying on March 22 , 1916 in Warwick.
Before his marriage, his travels took him to Cornwall, where, due to his love of landscapes from his childhood days, he was impressed by the vision of the unique Cornish coastline and the sea. Tolkien graduated with honors in 1915 from Exeter College, Oxford University, with a first-class degree in English, in English Linguistics and Literature until Chaucer.
Upon graduation, Tolkien joined the British Army then fighting in the First World War . He enlisted with the rank of second lieutenant, specializing in sign language, in the 11th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers (Lancashire Fusiliers), which was sent to France in 1916 . Tolkien served as a communications officer in the Battle of the Somme until he fell ill due to the so-called “trench fever” on October 27 , and was transferred to England on November 8 . Many of his colleagues in his unit, as well as many of his closest friends, died in the war.
During his convalescence in a cabin in Great Haywood, Staffordshire, he began work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin . During the years 1917 and 1918 he continued to relapse into his illness, although he had recovered enough to do maintenance work in various camps, thus ascending to the rank of lieutenant. When he was posted to Kingston upon Hull one day he and Edith were walking through the woods of nearby Roos, when Edith began to dance for him in a dense grove of hemlock, surrounded by white flowers.
This scene inspired the passage of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien, and Tolkien used to refer to Edith as his Lúthien. Tolkien and Edith would have four children: The priest John Francis Reuel ( 17 of November of 1917 – 22 of January of 2003 ), Michael Hilary Reuel ( October of 1920 – 1984 ), Christopher Tolkien ( 1924 ) and Priscilla Anne Reuel ( 1929 ).
Maturity
Tolkien’s first civilian job after the war was as an assistant lexicographer in the writing of the famous Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked for two years mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W, tracing their origin in High German, Middle German, and even Old Norse.
In 1920 he held the position of non-tenured professor of English Language at the University of Leeds , where he reached the position of professor, reforming the teaching of this discipline with his teaching. In Leeds he met Eric Valentine Gordon , with whom he published what is considered the best edition to date of the anonymous work of the “Alliterative Revival” Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written in Middle English in the late 14th century .
In 1925 he returned to Oxford University as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College. It would be during his stay in Pembroke that Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become so popular, but it was CS Lewis who persuaded him to publish a book he had written for his children called The Hobbit in 1937 . However, the book in turn attracted adult readers, and became popular enough for the publisher, George Allen Unwin, that they asked Tolkien to write a sequel to the work.
Regarding scholarly publications, his lecture in 1936 Beowulf: monsters and critics had a decisive influence on studies of the Beowulf myth. In 1928 Tolkien assisted Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the excavation of a Roman asclepeion in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire.
It was at Oxford that Tolkien befriended the professor and writer CS Lewis, (future author of The Chronicles of Narnia), with whom he disagreed at first because of his religious convictions (Lewis was an agnostic, and later became a Protestant), but who He ended up being one of their main proofreaders, along with the other members of the literary club they formed, the Inklings. Its members met on Fridays before lunch at The Eagle and Child pub, and on Thursday nights in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College to recite the works they each composed, as well as romances and excerpts from the great works. epics of Northern Europe.
In 1924 his third son was born, Christopher, who would be in charge of publishing posthumously all the manuscripts that his father had left scattered around the study at his house on Northmoor Road (and from which the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales of Númenor and The History of Middle Earth).
Four years later, in 1929 , his daughter Priscilla was born (with whom he traveled to Venice , whom he compared in charm with the now mythical Minas Tirith, the capital city of the Kingdom of Gondor).
Since his teens, Tolkien had begun to write a series of myths and legends about Middle-earth, which would later give rise to the Silmarillion – previously called The Book of Lost Tales (he was missing a mythology of the character of the Greek , for example, and set out to invent ‘a mythology for England’). It is assumed that these stories were inspired by a story published in 1927 by Edward Wyke-Smith entitled The Wonderful Country of the Snergs (also the Finnish Kalevala, the Scandinavian sagas and, in general, a bit of all European mythology of any origin) .
In 1957 Tolkien was traveling to the United States to receive honorary degrees from the main universities, such as Marquette (where today the original manuscripts of his works are preserved), Harvard …, but the trip had to be suspended, because Edith fell ill. Tolkien retired two years later, in 1959, from his position at Oxford.
In 1965 the first edition of The Lord of the Rings came out in the United States. In 1968 , the Tolkien family moved to Poole, near Bournemouth, after Edith’s death. On 29 November as as 1971 Tolkien returned to Oxford.
Doctor honoris causa from various universities (Irish National, Oxford …); vice president of the Philological Society; member of the Royal Society of Literature. Four years before his death, at 81 years of age, in 1969 , Queen Elizabeth II would award him the Cross of the British Empire. In his honor, the North American Mythopoeic Society, and the British Tolkien Society, and dozens of Tolkien Societies around the world were founded in the first place.
The grave of Tolkien and Edith, located in the Wolvercote cemetery in Oxford, bears the names “Beren” and “Lúthien”, taken from the famous legend included in The Silmarillion about the love between these two beings of different natures and the theft, by the elven maiden Lúthien and the brave mortal Beren, of one of the Silmarils (the precious stones forged by the proud and arrogant as well as gifted nold Fëanor with the light of Laurelin and Telperion, the Trees of Aman created by Yavanna ); it was drawn from the iron crown of Morgoth (or Melkor), the renegade vala who defied Eru, the One, during the Ainulindalë, the Music of the Ainur, and the entire First Age of the Sun.
He was close friends with fellow writer CS Lewis and they were both members of an informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on March 28 , 1972 .
Tolkien applied the word legendarium to most of his writing.
While writers such as William Morris , George RR Martin , Robert E. Howard, and ER Eddison preceded Tolkien in the fantasy literary genre with such famous and influential works as Conan the Barbarian, the blockbuster The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. when they were released in the United States it led directly to the popular revival of the genre.
Death
He died in Bournemouth, UK on September 2, 1973). After his death, Tolkien’s third son Christopher published a series of works based on his father’s extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin. These, along with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional stories, invented languages, and literary essays about an imagined world called Arda, and more widely about the continent known as Middle Earth.
Plays
Novels and short novels
- The Hobbit
- Leaf by Niggle
- Egidio, the farmer from Ham
- The Lord of the Rings , published in four volumes:
- The Fellowship of the Ring
- The two Towers
- The return of the King
- Appendices to The Lord of the Rings
- The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and other poems from The Red Book
- Tree and Leaf, and the poem Mitopoeia
- The Greater Wootton Blacksmith
- Mr bliss
- Roverandom
Novels and short novels compiled by Christopher Tolkien
- The Silmarillion
- Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth
- The history of Middle Earth:
- The Book of Lost Tales I
- The Book of Lost Tales II
- The ballads of Beleriand
- The formation of Middle Earth
- The lost road and other writings
- Return of the Shadow
- Isengard’s betrayal
- The War of the Ring
- Sauron Defeated.
- Morgoth’s Ring
- The War of the Jewels
- The peoples of Middle Earth
- The History of Middle-earth Index
- The sons of Húrin
- The legend of Sigurd and Gudrún
Poems
- “King Sheave”, published in 1987 as part of “The Lost Road”, in The Lost Road and Other Writings.
- “The Battle of the Campo del Este”
- “From the willow-filled banks of the immemorial Thames”
- “The journey of Eärendel, the evening star”
- «The call of the craftsman»
- “Tinfang Warble”
- Goblin Feet
- “You and Me / and the Cottage of Lost Play”,
- “Kôr”
- “Kortirion among the trees”
- “Over Old Hills and Far Away.”
- “The Song of Aryador”
- “The Shores of Elfland”.
- “The Happy Sailors”
- “Narqelion”
- They were talking under the stars
- “The Sorrowful City”.
- “The Song of Eriol”
- “The Horns of Ulmo”.
- “The ballad of the sons of Húrin”
- “The Ballad of the Fall of Gondolin”
- “An employee’s complaint”
- “Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden”
- «Enigmata Saxonica Nuper Inventa Duo»
- Why did the Man in the Moon come down in haste?
- “Henry Bradley: December 3, 1845 – May 23, 1923”
- “An afternoon at Tavrobel”
- “The lonely island”
- “Princess Ni”
- “Light as linden leaves”
- “The Flight of the Noldor from Valinor”
- “The Ballad of Leithian”
- “The Ballad of Eärendel”
- “The land without a name”
- «Fastitocalón»
- «Iumbo».
- “The Ballad of Aotrou and Itroun”
- “Mitopoeia”
- “Progress in Bimble Town”.
- “Lunatic”
- “Wandering”
- «Firiel».
- Songs for the Philologists,
- “From One to Five”.
- Syx mynet.
- Ruddoc Hana.
- “Ides Ælfscýne”.
- “Bagmē Blōma”.
- «Éadig béo þu!».
- “Ofer wídne gársecg”.
- «La Húru».
- “I Sat upon a Bench.”
- «Natura Apis»
- “The Root of the Boot”.
- “Frenchmen Froth”.
- “Lit ‘and Lang'”
- “The Dragon’s Visit”.
- “Knocking at the Door: Lines induced by sensations when waiting for an answer at the door of an Exalted Academic Person.”
- “The Return of Beorhtnoth, Son of Beorhthelm”
- “Imram”, subtitled
- “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil”
- “Tom Bombadil’s Boat Ride”
- “Wandering”
- “Princess Mee”
- “The Man in the Moon was a little late”
- “The Man in the Moon descended in haste”
- “The stone troll”
- “Perry Winks”
- Meowers
- Olifant
- «Fastitocalón»
- “Cat”
- «The bride-shadow»
- “The treasure”
- “The sea bell”
- “The last ship”
- “Habia una vez”.
- Bilbo’s last song